rock95seven

Just wanted to drop in and let everyone know we are now broadcasting online using the services of Live365.com.

Just wanted to drop in and let everyone know we are now broadcasting online using the services of Live365.com.

Right now our stream is set to On Demand or playing from a playlist stored on the Live365 servers. I have been testing out a combination of Shoutcast/Winamp & Zararadio for live broadcasts and it seems to work pretty well.

Once I have everything working the way I want it the live broadcasts will become a regular thing every week. Check our page if you’d like.

The broadcast schedule page will be filled in once we get all our proverbial ducks in a row.

Rock 957 – The Classic Rock Station
http://www.live365.com/stations/radio_101

Enjoy!

Ive been messing around with different way’s to feed my a.m. signal to antennas that wont take a big pipe on the porch but would get my signal out of the house around the community.

Ive been messing around with different way’s to feed my a.m. signal to antennas that wont take a big pipe on the porch but would get my signal out of the house around the community.

One thought I had was feeding 100mW into a long piece of coax using the shield as the radiator and grounding the tx to earth ground.

What would I have to do with the end of the coax that is not connected to the tx? Should I put a couple 47 ohm resistors on the open end of the coax or just leave it open?

I was thinking i could run the coax behind the under-skirting of the mobile home i live in but would not have it laying on the ground.

Any ideas?

EDIT: I will be using the SSTRAN because of the hi-fi sound , i am irritated with talking house lack of bass response.

Most websites for part 15 radio stations and yes even commercial radio stations have coverage maps.

Most websites for part 15 radio stations and yes even commercial radio stations have coverage maps.

But up until recently, I have been copying maps from yahoo maps and drawing a circle showing my coverage area according to what I have heard using a car stereo and specific locations around town.

Enter Google Earth
Great program to play with if you want to do some armchair exploring.
You can see any place on the globe without packing your bags or waiting in line at the airport , in fact you can even explore space.

Best of all it’s free. But im not writing this to plug Google Earth but rather the idea of using this program to help plot out strengths and weakness of your AM signals.

Here’s what I have done.

1. find your location on google earth and print a map, be sure to save that map to the program so you can return to it later.

2. take your map and drive around town with a friend or spouse and have them plot on the map the strong and weak areas around town.
(of course you need a radio to do this)

3. After you have marked on the map the strength and weakness of you stations signal, return home and use google earth again.

Open the map you saved in the program and select the icon in the toolbar labeled “Place marks” it looks like a Thumb tack.

Use your printed map as a reference and place the thumb tacks on the areas you want to highlight. There are many different icons for the thumb tacks so use your best judgment.
A red thumb tack could show strong signals, a blue one could be for the weak signals. After plotting the areas your most interested in you can select the Ruler option in the programs toolbar.

This feature has many options, feet, inches, miles, kilometers, meters.

Ground zero or your stations location will be your starting point and drag the line to the place you want to get the distance from.
As you drag the ruler from point to point it will increment the appropriate numbers for the distance from point A to point B.

You can label the Thumbtacks with the miles or kilometers and of course place other notes there as well.

4. Save the map with the changes to the programs folder for later reference and print the map if you so desire. At this point you can take a screen shot of the map which will include the thumb tacks etc.
Then in your favorite photo program open that screen shot and add the circles or outline your strong signal areas for showing off on your website or as I have done use this information to help determine what areas in your neighborhood you might want to focus on to increase coverage in those trouble areas.

Of course this doesn’t have to be all technical, it was actually fun messing with this program and I now see what areas I need to work on to get a stronger signal .

This is in no way 100% accurate as we all know our signals change from one day to the next. On my website you can view some example maps.

http://radiodizzy.webs.com/apps/photos/

Enjoy

Hope everyone is doing good.
I really don’t have any part 15 revelations to post today.

Until next post, keep on rockin’

comes looking for you.

The other day I was sleeping in as our 1 year old has had her days/nights confused keeping the wife and I awake most of the night.

comes looking for you.

The other day I was sleeping in as our 1 year old has had her days/nights confused keeping the wife and I awake most of the night.

A knock on the door woke us , as i struggled to get some clothes on my wife had beat me to the door, after a few minutes she came back to the bedroom to tell me a old friend was at the door.

I had no clue as to who it could have been.
As I made my way out the front door i was surprised to see my friend David , an engineer from the station i worked for in 96-97.

He had tracked me down using what information he had found on my blogs here at part15.us, my blogspot page and rental manager.
I was blown away and happy to see someone who shares my interest in radio.

Smart eh?

After talking with him for awhile he told me the local station here in town needed some part-time help and that if i was interested i should go speak with the gm at wkfo/wkfc.

I was sort of in shock and probably still a little groggy (i cant think straight without my coffee) and said I would visit the station around 1 pm that afternoon.

After meeting with the manager and seeing yet another friend from the past, i aggreed to help out with ball games and anything else they needed help with.

This is a large group of stations and the owners have a long history of broadcasting that date back to the 1960’s.

It would be an understatement to say that i was looking forward to this new adventure in radio.

My stations will continue to broadcast as usual and hopefully Ill pick up some pointers along the way that could help my part 15 operations here at home.

Until next post, keep on rockin’

I have posted a few airchecks on my Blog at http://97pointseven.blogspot.com or http://radiodizzy.tk if anyone is interested.

I have posted a few airchecks on my Blog at http://97pointseven.blogspot.com or http://radiodizzy.tk if anyone is interested.

These recording’s were taken from the headphone jack of a Sony am/fm stereo Walkman fed into the line-in jack on my Dell ripped at 64 kbps using Audacity.

I think there might even be some hetrodyne introduced into one of the recordings, this is more than likely coming from the computer since i get a lot of noise caused from the cable lines feeding internet and t.v. into the house.

Don’t be afraid to criticize the sound quality, this is a learning experience for me when it comes to setting the processing.

Thanks