The Importer can usually be thought of as studio equipment. Whereas the Exporter lives at the transmitter and is tightly coupled with your exciter. The Importer should be close to the 'content', usually in your studio.

Absolutely not. Importers and Exporters are built to be compatible with each other, no matter what brand. Often, the transmitter manufacturer will provide an Exporter. This Exporter can then be paired with any Importer you want.

The Importer does not care which physical transport you choose. There are a few requirements for the link however: Under a full data load (about 9100 bytes/sec) the link should have no more than 10% packet loss to run in TCP mode. In UDP mode, there should be zero packet loss. Additionally for UDP, the latency must be less than 90ms.

Your automation system sends TCP/IP data to the Importer, or writes a file to disk each time a song is played. Data is in XML format and only a minimum of data is required. For instance, if you wish to avoid seeing the Album data displayed on air, just don't include that node in the XML file or stream.

SPS means Supplemental Program Service. In short, any time you add a second channel, HD-2, or "side channel" you're adding an SPS channel. MPS means Main Program Service; your existing station's digital audio is the MPS. PAD is Program Associated Data; such as Title and Artist data. PAD also allows Comments, Album titles, and other information.

When your station bought a digital transmitter, you created a 96k data stream your station can use any way it wishes. When you only have your main audio in digital format, all 96k is used for it. When you add a second channel you must split that bandwidth between your main audio and a new secondary channel using, for instance, 48k for each channel.