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.
