Development Of Jos Tv Broadcasting Studio Reliability Model

ABSTRACT

The broadcasting stations in Nigeria often encounter sudden failures, which results in loss of signal

that causes the station to experience down-time. Causes of the failures could be traced to the issues

that range from erratic power supply to degradation in the studio equipment. Each failure and its

consequent down-time influences the reliability of the station. In our environment (Nigeria) reliability

does not only depend on the established parameters, instead it includes parameters such as lack of

superior equipment and equipment maintainability. This is the more reason why the definition of

reliability for a sensitive system such as the television station in our context is very important. In this

work, the Jos television broadcasting station (NTA Jos) was examined in order to developed a

reliability model with which the station’s broadcasting studio’s reliability can be defined, at any

point, with high precision. The TV broadcasting studio configuration was therefore determined and

modeled analytically. The model was simulated and the simulation results analyzed. Analysis

resultshow that failure and restoration rate is expected to influence reliability significantly. Within the

period of reliability assessment, analysis of the model shows that Jos Broadcasting studiois expected

to experiences an average equipment failure rate of 0.0001687units per hour with negligible

restoration rate that resulted to mean reliability of 0.33%.It was established also, that the level of

equipment redundancy influences reliability to a significant extent. The modified model with added

redundancy as opposed to that representing the studio, showed a reliability disparity of 1.04% indicating a 382 hours gain on down-time.