So, what do you for DIRECTV anyway?
Greetings from St. Louis! It's Sunday morning and my Battlehawks won a nail biter last night against the Arlington Renegades. It was an amazing game and I was one of the 40,315 in attendance. Life is good. Here is this weeks update. I decided to take a week to dedicate a column to my Field Engineering team. I am sure the optics might lead one to believe that I travel around the country staying in hotels, meeting with the hotel and bar staff and promoting DIRECTV. That is maybe 5-10% of my week though.
I am part of a team of 11 Field Engineers who
are strategically placed throughout the country to support local channel contributions
to DIRECTV in all continental US markets.
We are 100% travel allocated engineers, so we are on the road 3-5 days a
week supporting the systems that bring local channels to the Uplink centers
that supply our customers with programming in their homes, devices, and
businesses.
My job is to make sure that every local
channel in the Midwest makes it to our customers without interruption. I
support 20 markets in 8 states. I also offer "Backup" to my fellow engineers in Texas, the Gulf Coast, Great Lakes and Northern Plains regions. Our team has daily and weekly meetings where we
discuss all issues that might deter our customers from obtaining the best
viewing experience. If an issue comes up, we determine who can resolve the
issue and assign a ServiceNow ticket.
My team’s success is built upon four
cornerstones:
1. Emergency Response
We are always on call. Our team is always
ready to go. We are equipped with newer Chevrolet 2500 series crew cab 4WDTrucks.
Each truck has an inverter, so we can make our own power. We also carry a host
of supplies that we can use to support almost any type of outage in the
field. A few examples would be Aerial
antennas, ethernet and RF cabling, fiber equipment, analyzers, testers, tools,
etc. All trucks have hitches, so if we
need to tow a trailer with equipment, or a portable generator on wheels, were
ready. We basically carry a little bit of everything so whatever the issue is
we can resolve it.
Our systems are designed to ride
through most weather systems, but you can never build something that Mother
Nature cannot break down if she wants. My team is always ready to deploy after a
storm to recover our services as fast as possible while staying safe. In the
past we have responded after hurricanes, tornadoes and even wildfires to keep
our systems up and operational during these events so both our satellite-based
customers and our streaming customers have the most relevant local information
possible. There are times when our systems are working fine after a storm, but
the local station or stations may have been affected by the weather. We try to
assist them to return to air when possible so our customers can get their
signals during these events.
For large scale events that are source fed from local channel markets like “The Big Game” our team starts planning 60-90 days in advance. We like to have an engineer at our LRF(Local Receive Facility) in each team’s respective market as well as the LRF in the city that is hosting the event itself. This allows us to proactively be “Ready to Roll” in the case of any type of outage or issue that might affect our customer’s ability to enjoy an event that we are bringing to them on any of our platforms.
2.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative Maintenance is a vital part of
our work. We perform preventative maintenance on all our assigned sites and
save that data so in the case of a natural disaster or any other issue, We not
only have the tools to get the job done, but we have the data to support our
external teams when the time comes. Each week we are in one of our assigned
cities checking the systems and meeting with our landlords and vendors to make
sure all of our LRF sites are in tip top shape.
Without preventative maintenance, it’s possible we would spend much more
time responding to unplanned outages.
Out team also provides routine maintenance to
DIRECTV’s CCF sites, which facilitates uplink for many of our nationally based
channels that make up the backbone of DIRECTV’s programming.
Because we are a ground fleet and do not fly,
we dedicate a few hours a week to keep our fleet assets in tip top shape. All
trucks are always fully functional and ready to go.
3.
Training
We are always training. We have a host of equipment
in our trucks, and we need to be able to know how to use it all.
Software/firmware updates always needs to be up to date. Batteries need to be
charged. I dedicate one hour a week to DIRECTV Academy through PLE to broaden my knowledge of all
things DIRECTV. We also use SBE training and attend webinars regularly hosted
by our equipment vendors to make sure we have as much knowledge available to be
the best at our work.
We have a great team of dedicated professionals and
support staff from the CRBC(Castle Rock Broadcast Center) that help us ensure
success anytime we are dispatched to respond to issues in the field. Our CRBC
team can drop ship any needed part, product, cable, filter, fitting with an
hours’ notice when we respond to tragic impacting outages. We are a “Well oiled
Machine”. We are always reviewing our best practices to raise the bar and
better support our customers.
4.
Represent DIRECTV
We meet with vendors, landlords, TV stations, Data
Centers, Fiber providers, electrical contractors, software and hardware
vendors. In each occurrence we represent DIRECTV. I would like to think we do
it pretty well. And yes, I might do a “Little Extra” for the company after work
in the hotels and local restaurants that have #DIRECTVforBUSINESS.
If you have any questions for me and/or my team, please reach out in the comments section below. We would be happy to field your questions.
I am coming up on
my eighth anniversary at DIRECTV. It’s an honor to be on this team. If you are interested in Joining me at DIRECTV< please check out JOBS.DIRECTV.COM and see what's available. We would love to have you.
Back to the normal travel updates next week…
Comments
Post a Comment