Live From D.C., It's NATO-TV!

Peter Daniels, a NATO information and press official, stands amid Nato's news cast area at the Ronald Reagan Building. (Rick Bowmer — The Washington Post) Related Links Metro Girds for Big Day For Volunteers, a Piece of History Balkans Stability Is NATO Goal Map of Closings

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 1999; Page B1

Live!

From the bowels of the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington . . .

It's clean. It's unedited. It's free of anchors, stand-ups and voice-overs. It's a rolling, continuous summit journal, as smooth as a gun barrel and straight as a missile.

It's NATO-TV!

Amid the hammering and wiring and false fire alarms and last-minute checking of the vast communications infrastructure being assembled yesterday for the NATO summit, a crew of technicians and producers was busy setting up the organization's own TV coverage.

It is hard to imagine who in the world will want to watch – but every nation has its insomniacs, shut-ins and jailbirds, so the gathering of pin-striped suits and military brass may find an audience.

Tucked away behind cinder-block walls off the sunny atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, dozens of recording decks and TV monitors have been stacked on wooden catering tables to process the hours of pure, unedited film that NATO will churn out for use by the biggest networks and the smallest, Third World, state-run outlets.

From Washington to Paris to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, NATO-TV ("That's what we call it," said director of broadcasting Albers J. Jaeger) will provide perhaps the purest television coverage from the dim control room governed by two giant digital clocks blinking Greenwich Mean Time in red numbers.

"There's no commentary," Peter Daniel, the director of information and press for NATO headquarters, said as he stood in the makeshift control room yesterday. "There's no editing. It just rolls . . . play by play. It's just a rolling record."

"The point of the coverage is to serve the NATO countries and the partner countries, and the partner countries takes us all the way to Kazakstan," Daniel said.

"We want to get to Uzbekistan and Kazakstan, because their presidents are going to be here and they have no other ways to get picture. They don't have the facilities, the money, the capability or the resources to do it."

"They have no other way to get it," he said, so they use NATO-TV, which, using a dozen cameras, also files footage of obscure officials and lesser events that would not otherwise be covered by commercial networks.

"It's available to everybody," he said. "No rights. It's free. They do whatever they want with it. They never take it as they get it. . . . Everybody does their own thing. Everybody takes certain pictures. Others, they don't want. They do whatever they want."

And, perhaps surprisingly, along with tanks, jets and missiles, officials said yesterday, NATO also is experienced at TV.

"It's the same thing we've done at any other meeting," Daniel said. "This is exactly the same. It may be a little bigger."

As Daniel spoke in the building, which was bustling with workers, tourists and foreign military officials in unfamiliar uniforms, outside, checks were being made of the summit's other communications systems.

Dena Reszczynski, a performance engineer with Nextel Communications Inc., which is handling wireless communications for the summit, drove slowly along Constitution Avenue NW in white car crammed with a satellite receiver, a special laptop computer and a special cellular phone broadcasting the same phone message again and again.

As she drove, a stream of data rolled across the laptop screen – including geographic coordinates, and a list of cell locations across town that showed how her wireless phone transmission was being passed safely along from one site to the next.

Reszczynski was examining the effectiveness of the elaborate system of receivers, antennas and amplifiers that Nextel has put in place to handle what is expected to be a massive amount of calls and transmissions from the 2,000 Motorola cellular phones/walkie-talkies the firms have given free to summit officials and delegates.

She was checking for the dreaded "dropped" transmission, where, because of a blank spot in the system, the call is lost.

But everything worked fine, she said, as the laptop showed her call being handed off from a site at L'Enfant Plaza to one inside the old Customs building, where engineers have hidden a special antenna and have packed 16 transmitter/receivers.

Nextel has installed scores of extra transmitter/receivers around town, raised several more smaller antennas and set up a towering cell on wheels that includes three antennas atop an 80-foot tower anchored with guy wires at a site outside the D.C. Armory.

The armory, Nextel officials said, is expected to be ground zero for cellular calls: It's an assembly point and traffic control center for motorcades and limousines.