Transmitters & RF
Forward and reflected power against your licensed power, VSWR, RF on or off, modulation, PA current, voltage and temperature module by module, fans and airflow, the active exciter and the interlocks.
Transmitter sites lose power all the time. When it comes back, the transmitter doesn't always come with it — and nothing at the site is going to tell you. Stations have been off the air for days before anyone noticed. BNM watches every box at every site around the clock, knows on from off, and calls your phone the moment it changes — not the moment a listener does.
Lost commercials and revenue, a furious GM, and an EAS log the FCC can ask to see at any time. The damage starts the moment the carrier drops — not when somebody finally happens to notice. BNM is built so that somebody is always you, first.
Every minute off the air is lost revenue and make-goods. Here’s two hours of it, one log line at a time.
Illustration: a sample station log. The station goes off the air at 11:03 AM and comes back at 1:03 PM. 24 commercials are missed at $20 each: $480 lost. A stop set of four spots is $80; BNM is $50 a month.
Sample log with invented names: two hours off the air, 12 commercials an hour at $20 a spot, before make-goods.
3 a.m.
Broadcasting is a 24-hour-a-day business, and faults don’t keep business hours. BNM watches every site around the clock while the building’s dark — and reaches you on your phone, not a dashboard nobody’s looking at.
FCC
The records an inspector asks for, kept by the same system that watches your air chain.
Every family below is read by a driver written for that box — the readings it actually reports, not just whether it answers a ping. Open any one for the whole story.
Forward and reflected power against your licensed power, VSWR, RF on or off, modulation, PA current, voltage and temperature module by module, fans and airflow, the active exciter and the interlocks.
Shoutcast, Icecast and HLS, heard the way your listeners hear them — checked from inside your market, so a regional block never fakes an outage. Dead air or a dropped stream calls you.
Both ends of the link: send and receive levels, path delay, WAN in and out, errors and ping on IP codecs; forward and reflected power and VSWR on RF STLs; link state and audio on remote codecs.
Whether the stream is actually playing — not just whether the box answers ping. Stream up or down, buffer, the source upstream, audio left and right, and every dropout.
Importer sync and run state, DTAC confidence, silence on every HD channel, and HD1 on-air status from the importer itself.
RadioText to the encoder and title and artist to the HD exporter, delivered on site through any firewall — and an alarm the moment the encoder stops answering.
Silence on the AoIP destinations feeding air, live meters off the audio processor, and AES67 and Livewire counted apart from everything else on every switch port.
The EAS box’s own log, scored against Part 11: weekly and monthly tests, relays inside the hour, the Chief Operator’s sign-off and a printable record for the inspector.
Every channel on a schedule — metering, temperatures and status channels like tower lights, AC power and generator — including the remote on a bare phone line.
Transmitters, STLs and streams are just the start. BNM also watches your networks and firewalls, your power and generators, your towers and their lights — and it comes with the Air Chain View, alerting that calls you, site documentation and work orders. New gear and new checks land every day.
When something breaks, BNM goes and finds a person. Everyone on your list picks how they’re reached — a phone call, a text, an email, or all three — and you decide how loud each alarm gets. Email comes with every plan; calls and texts are one add-on, $25 a month.
Three animations: a man answers a ringing phone and hears BNM read a critical alarm; text-message alerts scroll up a phone screen; alert and resolved emails arrive in an inbox in pairs.
Critical alarms — off the air, dead air, a box gone dark — ring a real phone and say what broke. No answer? BNM moves down your call-down list, two full rounds, until a human picks up. It knows an answering machine when it hears one.
Warnings and critical alarms land as a text: which station, what tripped, and when — short enough to take in at a glance, on every phone that wants it.
One email when an alarm trips and another when it clears. Alert, resolved. Alert, resolved. Nothing gets left hanging, and your inbox doubles as the record.
What can trip one: off the air, dead air, high VSWR, an STL link down, a Barix buffer running low, a stream gone silent, the UPS on battery, EAS activity — you pick the checks, the levels and the tier.
What it costs: email alerts come with every station and translator plan. Phone calls, texts and dial-up remotes are one add-on — $25 a month on either plan. See pricing
Open any device and see exactly what it’s doing right now — power, levels, link health, status, and a running history of every alert it’s ever thrown.
Pick a demo and it opens full screen. The transmitter, Barix, STL and switch pages work the way your own will: pick a range, click a reading or a port to graph it, and open an alert’s repeat count to see every time it fired.
| 2026-09-13 23:44 | Modulation low on WPKR Main Transmitter: 0% (confirmed over 3 polls)back to 2026-05-30 | lasted 5m | |
2026-09-13 23:44→2026-09-13 23:495mvalue 0% 2026-09-09 17:28→2026-09-09 17:2817svalue 0% 2026-09-09 17:13→2026-09-09 17:185mvalue 0% 2026-09-04 06:15→2026-09-04 06:2510mvalue 0% 2026-08-28 08:53→2026-08-28 08:585mvalue 0% 2026-08-07 17:02→2026-08-07 17:075mvalue 0% 2026-08-05 17:03→2026-08-05 17:1310mvalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:20→2026-08-03 12:205svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:20→2026-08-03 12:206svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:20→2026-08-03 12:205svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:207svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:195svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:195svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:196svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:196svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:196svalue 0% 2026-08-03 12:19→2026-08-03 12:197svalue 0% 2026-07-14 18:57→2026-07-14 22:543.9hvalue 0% 2026-05-30 08:48→2026-05-30 09:0921mvalue 0% 2026-05-30 08:26→2026-05-30 08:4822mvalue 0% | |||
| 2026-08-24 19:24 | Power low on WPKR Main Transmitter: 1 W | lasted 5m | |
| 2026-08-24 19:24 | RF OFF on WPKR Main Transmitter | lasted 5m | |
| 2026-05-28 16:04 | Modulation low on WPKR Main Transmitter: 0% | lasted 10m | |
| 2026-05-24 17:58 | Modulation low on WPKR Main Transmitter: 6.7% | lasted 5m | |
Forward and reflected power, modulation, PA temperature and ping, with thirty days of history and every alert it raised. Recorded from a live transmitter — 2,291 polls — with the station, serial, IP and site renamed.
| 2026-09-24 19:08 | Buffer high on WPKR Barix TX Site: 65476 bytes (threshold: 25000) | lasted 70s | |
| 2026-09-21 09:58 | Buffer high on WPKR Barix TX Site: 65336 bytes (threshold: 25000) | lasted 3.2d | |
| 2026-09-21 04:42 | Buffer high on WPKR Barix TX Site: 65532 bytes (threshold: 25000)back to 2026-09-15 | lasted 58m | |
| 2026-09-16 08:54 | Stream changed on WPKR Barix TX Site: expected brtp://10.20.14.60:8888, got http://stream.northridge.example:8028/streamback to 2026-08-14 | lasted 4.8d | |
| 2026-09-13 04:34 | Buffer high on WPKR Barix TX Site: 13028 bytes (threshold: 10000) | lasted 76s | |
Recorded telemetry from a live Barix Exstreamer 500 decoder — decoder buffer and reachability. Station, IP and site name replaced with a demo tenant. Not a live feed.
Left and right audio levels, buffer and ping on the stream decoder at the transmitter site, with its alert history.
Recorded telemetry from a live Intraplex IPLink 200 STL — jitter buffer, WAN throughput both ways, WAN errors and ping. Station, IP and site name replaced with a demo tenant. Not a live feed.
Send and receive levels on both channels, path delay, WAN in and out, errors and ping on the link to the transmitter.
WAN status and throughput, sessions, latency, CPU and the site UPS on the studio’s edge firewall.
| 2026-09-22 10:29 | Port down on North Ridge Core: Gi1/0/20×3back to 2026-06-23 | lasted 5m |
Live capture from a Cisco IOS core switch — port states, speeds and interface counters exactly as the device reported them. Trimmed to the first 16 access ports. Hostname, IP and site renamed to a demo tenant. Not a live feed.
CPU, memory, temperatures, fans and power supplies, plus the faceplate of 16 ports — click a port for its counters.
| Time | Called | Number | For | Status | Acknowledged |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-21 02:14:41 | Matt A. | +1 615 ··· 0114 | Main Transmitter | ACKNOWLEDGED | 2026-06-21 02:14:41 |
| 2026-06-21 02:14:12 | Matt A. | +1 615 ··· 0114 | Main Transmitter | ANSWERED | — |
| 2026-06-20 23:41:05 | On-Call 2 | +1 615 ··· 0199 | Studio STL Decoder | NO_ANSWER | — |
| 2026-06-20 23:42:18 | Matt A. | +1 615 ··· 0114 | Studio STL Decoder | ACKNOWLEDGED | 2026-06-20 23:42:33 |
| 2026-06-19 14:08:11 | Day Op | +1 615 ··· 0150 | Edge Firewall | VOICEMAIL | — |
Every call BNM places: who it dialed, who answered, and when they acknowledged — newest first, kept for the record.
Want to see it pointed at your own gear?
See a live demoNo per-feature nickel-and-diming. A station covers a dozen devices — the whole air chain — and a translator covers eight. Phone calls, texts and dial-up remotes are one add-on, the same $25 on either plan.
Turnkey means turnkey. We host on our infrastructure, build your install, load your gear, and wire your call-down list.
You get a login and a dashboard — not a server to babysit. Secure. Safe. Reliable.
The first time BNM called me at 3 a.m., I had the transmitter back up before morning drive. It kept going down the call-down list until somebody answered, and that somebody was me. Before, we’d have found out from the morning show.
Our transmitter didn’t go off. It went silent. Nobody calls you about dead air until it’s already cost you a stop set, and by then the client has noticed. BNM called us while it was still happening.
Our translators are the sites nobody drives past. We didn’t always know when they were off the air, sometimes for days. BNM watches them the same as the main stations, and now my team is the first to know instead of the last.
Every outside stream checker we tried got blocked by our stream’s regional lock and kept telling us a healthy stream was dead. BNM checks the stream from inside our own building, so when it says the stream is down, it’s down. No more chasing ghosts.
Our Barix boxes would answer a ping all day while playing nothing. BNM checks that audio is actually coming out, not just that the box is alive. It’s the first thing that’s ever told me when one actually stopped playing.
Inspection day used to mean a weekend in the EAS logs. Now every weekly and monthly test is already in BNM, checked against Part 11 and signed off. I pull up Inspector Mode right on the screen, and if the inspector wants paper, it prints to one PDF.
A tower light out used to mean somebody driving by at night to look. Now BNM tells us when one’s out, and the Part 17 log keeps itself. That’s one less thing keeping me up at night.
Our oldest site only has a dial-up remote on a copper line. BNM dials it on a schedule, logs every channel and calls our engineer when something drifts out of range. That site used to be a blind spot, and we didn’t have to buy new remote controls to fix it.
I didn’t want another server to babysit, and IT wasn’t opening any ports. We didn’t have to do either. They set it up, loaded our gear and handed us a login. That was it.
It costs less than one stop set a month per station. The first outage it caught paid for it, and across our clusters it has saved us thousands.
Running BNM? We’d love to hear how it’s going. Call 1-844-28-RADIO (1-844-287-2346) or tell us here.
Tell us what's in your racks and how many sites you run. We'll set up a demo pointed at your gear, wire a test dial-out to your phone, and show you what watching everything at once feels like.