Internship Experience

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Month Leading up to Superbowl

My internship experience the past few months was a huge hands on learning experience. This week, I decided to talk about the month prior to Superbowl. If unclear, my internship is Broadcast Engineering at Statefarm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona near Glendale Community College; the group's known as Insignia. Leading up to the Superbowl, everyone worked separately towards a common goal which was a huge hands-on learning experience.
The goal involved utilizing the new routing system for the Superbowl. Insignia installed the new routing system last year. However, Superbowl involved a different set up that we needed to prepare for; other companies arrived to install their set up. Everyone worked separately and I was no exception.
My role, and another intern's named Tyler, was to connect the switches to the SNP's. The SNP's are devices that receive and send out signal from other devices Insignia is responsible for, such as cameras and TVs.  A part of what other interns were doing was they were bringing out and labeling 851 cables. Afterwards, different interns would connect the cables to the switches and run them over to my and Tyler's location. I separated the input and output, Tyler organized them as I went along, and we would measure, cut, and terminate the cables using a BNC termination kit. We repeated this step for around 851 cables for a total of 20 SNPs. After a while, the 2 lead engineers came to help us since the deadline was approaching fast and we were still relatively new to this process. The end result was worth it.
After we were finished, the control room's accessibility increased. Those in the control room could finally switch between different feeds from computers. They could now choose with signal to route to what using the SNP set up as long as they correctly identify which inputs they want sent to which outputs on the SNPs using software rather than having to manually disconnect and connect cables. If issues arise, you can look to the patch panel of where the SNPs are set up (which is a different topic in it of itself) to identify the error and try to fix.
Overall, although easy to use, the new system brought issues the past few months. After the 2 lead engineers and the other full time employee left after Superbowl, only one full time employee was left in our group. The issue with this was that after the Superbowl, the set up that other companies brought was gone. This meant that some pieces were missing that we had to figure out. Since this was practically a new system with missing pieces, it was difficult the past few months. The executive chief engineer had a vision and plan for after Superbowl, but with him gone, we had to work with what we had and found solutions to a lot of issues albeit in a longer time than it should have taken us. Fortunately, the new chief executive engineer arrived. Now only time will tell how we work with the new system based on not only what the old cheif engineer did, but also what he did not do and why.

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