Communication between various broadcast equipment plays a major role in the daily operation of a typical broadcast facility. For example, editing equipment must interface with tape machines, production switchers must interface with font generators and video effect equipment, and satellite ground controllers must interface with satellite dishes and receivers. Communication between these devices may be a simple hardware handshake configuration or a more elaborate software based communications via serial or parallel interfacing. This thesis concerns itself with the software interfacing needed to allow various dissimilar types of equipment to communicate, and therefore, interface with each other. The use of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in a non-typical manner for the purpose of hardware interfacing is the basis for this work
