rock95seven

I am off to a slow start with obtaining an experiemental license, there is equipment to find, parts list’s, rules to review and of course cool weather is upon us now. School has been in full swing here in the mountains too, i have two girls in elementery and one in middle school.

This will be their last year in the old school which is a couple miles from home, the new school is closer to Hazard,Ky which means any school functions or conferences will require a battle with traffic, my wife and i are not looking forward to that.
It’s all part of the gooberments plan to consolidate the school districts, one school will cover more grades, with less buildings to deal with.

Plan Of Attack

My plan of attack is to approach this project as if i was building a high powered station complete with equipment list’s, antenna plans, frequencies to be used, power to be used and the area in the yard where all of this should take place.

Also, my progress during this project will be shared here on this blog.
One thing for sure, the weather sure has been great, not too hot and not too cold with a few showers here and there.
But, that won’t last, Autum is short giving away to Winter which can be unpredictable at times, even the weather guy can miss some details and we get a snow storm bigger than the blizzard of ’77.

With that being said, my project might be put on hold depending on the weather in E. Ky, the Farmers Almanac say’s the first part of Winter for my portion of Kentucky could start out mild then erupt into a full on ice age….ok not that extreme lol

So that’s it, my plans so far.

Barry of BBR World Wide.

Do these templates make my butt look big??

Or maybe I should have asked, which look do you like better?

The current template, which is simple and also randomly disordered?

The simple but kind of elegant blue template?

The rather flashy and graphic heavy template?

My opinion? I like the simple blue and nearly elegant template the most, so far it’s nice and orderly while not being to basic or too flashy like the other two templates. What say you?

Barry of Blue Bucket Radio 1620

While i sort out some problems with my station, i thought it would be cool to stream a random frequency from the Grundig G3 Shortwave receiver. Right now it is tuned to 13.570 Mhz, one of the many Part 15 frequencies we have been given for tinkering, broadcasting and experimening.

I am not using a long wire antenna, just the whip built onto the radio.
Ain’t radio fun?

Well sort of live, I am running a minimal playlist of a few programs in Zararadio and streaming from an FM radio tuned to 89.7 Mhz. I have a Grundig G3 plugged into the line input on the streaming computer so when you tune into the stream from http://thefreeproject.no-ip.org you will be hearing what it would sound like if you could listen to our station on an FM radio in my yard or across the road.

This is a test at this point to see how well this configuration works for a long term plan.

Enjoy

Barry of Blue Bucket Radio 89.7 FM & AM 1620

This feature is in the Webmin (admin panel) of my Apache home webserver, it allows the Admin (me) to schedule downloads via the web or ftp of certain files. Let’s say the latest Low Power Hour has just come out, if i know the file name ahead of time, i can program the server to download that mp3 file to a specific folder which in our case since we run radio stations, the folder could be added to Zararadio and be ready for airplay at it’s scheduled time on the radio.

But there is the draw back, you must know the files name before you can program the server to download that file.
I wonder how this could be iplemented for our use?

Below is a screenshot.

Does it exist or did i just imagine installng one of the coolest programs on the planet?

Actually, I am not entirely sure yet but it seems this way works much better, you see i have been trying to run Zararadio under WINE which is a program to allow Windows software to be used on Linux and other non Microsoft operating systems.

While Wine works great for some Windows software, not all of the softwares play nice with WINE or Linux so i thought i would give Virtualbox another chance, it seemed to complicated that first time i tried it but this time around i just told myself
Make It Happen!

And I did, after installing Virtual Box i extracted the ISO image from a Windows XP disk and placed that ISO in a self titeled folder in Ubuntu and then opened Virtual Box back up again, installed Windows on VB and right off the top the software started to install Windows. After installing Windows Xp and tweaking some settings in VB I transferred a zipped copy of Zararadio 1.4.1 to the Virtual Windows Xp machine along with mp3 files. 

Success!
The files loaded and installed just as they should on the virtual machine so i moved on to install B.U.T.T. and a few other components so that i could test out Zararadio and the B.U.T.T. encoding software.

Success again!

They borth work right after installation, i then added mp3 files to the Zara library and in the time folder as well, then directed Zara’s CurrentSong.txt file to display show title in players by inputting the file path from the windows explorer address bar.

Started up the endcoder and pressed play on Zararadio and it works without a flaw so far.

Below is a screenshot of the sofwares working in Virtual Box, i suggest anyone who is a linux fan like me give Virtual Box a test drive, you won’t be dissapointed.

Barry of BBR World Wide