After three years of 100% "up time" on air service, the time has come to expand.
As you might know, I'm in the teny tiny town of Bovey. this town is 4 blocks wide and 1/4 mile long. All along this stretch of highway heading up Minnesota's Iron Range there is another teeny tiny town every 3-5 miles.
My daughter has moved from the BWC (Big Wicked City) back to her northern roots in a town 5 miles down the highway.
This presents the opportunity to add a second transmitter, located at their house. they are right on the 2 lane highway, and across the highway from the rest of the town. I still need to investigate coverage from their house over town, but if it's anything like coverage here in Bovey it should be fine.
This is far enough away that you certainly can't hear my signal from Bovey over there, so I can put this station on 1620 as well with no interference issues. Her town is just as small and isolated from big city noise with a nearly non-existant AM noise floor that I think reception should be as good as it is here in Bovey. ALso, of course, they have their own cable TV system, and their own public access channel that shows community announcements and such ans I believe I'll be able to put my audio on there as well, like I do here in Bovey.
I have discovered the wonder and amazement of the Barix box. One box in my studio can feed audio over the internet to nearly as many receiving boxes as I care to implement. I can see this eventually leading to a transmitter in each town right on up the Range over time.
So my plan for now is for her house to house another Procaster, mounted on the peak of the house with no ground (same as my present setup here) with a Barix Extreamer picking up the audio and a backup power supply (UPS). Should take up virtually no room at her house, and should be relatively self supporting. And since I'm just using mono AM quality audio the internet stream will use virtually no bandwidth out of the 60mbps we have available.
If you had the cash you could eventually cover an entire state!
TIB
Congrats on your expansion, Tim.
I've often wondered what the advantage of using a Barix box is over just running a private internet stream (private in the sense that only you know the URL and picking up the stream wherever you have a transmitter). Are there copyright issues with the private stream?
Sounds like Tim is doing what I did with WXTZ, we had 8 transmitters in operation at one point picking up a private IP address and transmitting from well populated locations.
As for music licensing we used a "Blanket coverage" license from BMI and the other media licensing agencies that required it, a few didn't care because coverage was so small and we were a non-profit, non-commercial LP radio service.
http://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/radio
But keep in mind, the stream IP address was private at that time, not open to public access.
Bruce.
Yes, this will be a secure, private stream, just like hundreds of commercial stations use when feeding audio to transmitters using the Barix boxes as their STL's.
And yup, I'll be adding a second BMI license to the lineup. As I've mentioned before ASCAP and SESAC have confirmed to me in writing that no Part 15 station needs a license. So I have no plans to worry about them.
No, you need no special licensing to feed your transmitters with a secure internet stream that is not open to the public. Just like for a UHF or microwave STL system. It's private. Although, it IS possible to listen to radio STL links!
I hope to get this going before the snow hits. Oce winter gets started that sort of work outside isn't much fun 😉 If I'm lucky I have till the end of October.
Halloween in Minnesota, 1991:
I was out trick or treating with my kids...
TIB
We at Saint Leo University use Barix boxes to connect the studio on Saint Leo main campus to the transmitter site 4 miles away in Dade City. I set the encoder to stream @ 128k. Excellent quality. Reliable.
Stream is also private.
I have employed Barix Instreamer/Exstreamer as our STL for quite some time. Always rock solid, good quality audio.
Initially the pair was used with our AM TIS station. The transmitter site moved and the STL was no longer required.
Then the LPFM came along early in 2014 and the Barix system has been used to connect both my studio and the school studio to the transmitter site.
The only problem is the Barix system requires a hardwire network connection. Taking them on a live remote is problematic as first a hardwire network connection is needed and second, either a public IP address or "PINHOLE" in the local firewall is needed to get back to the transmitter.
For those remotes I rely on TeamSpeak with Stereo channel, reasonable audio response and only the occasional hiccup barely noticable to the casual listener.
The newer versions of the Barx Extreamer can be set for 3 different IP address. The first being in Tim's case, his IP. Now if for some reason his feed fails, the Barix box rolls over to an IP that his hosted by Barix. Very good music. Then when Tim's feed comes back, the Barix will reconnect to Tim. Very cool.
I did not realize how close you were to Bob Dylan's home town. I wonder if Mr. Zimmerman ever considered Polka Music?
Tim I think your BMI license will cover the second transmitter since it is the same programming and station, this would be considered a "booster" transmitter which requires no additional licensing.
As for the Barix box vs just using a PC, the Barix (and Comrex) box's have a unique ability to work under the worst possible internet conditions and have negligable power consumption. The added bonus of it always powering up to the designated stream is a huge plus as well.
The Barix and comrex both have their pros and cons, the barix has the upper hand with being able to feed multiple units and have a COM port but can have quite the delay. However, the Comrex has far lower latency to the point where the delay is in milliseconds to 1 second but can only feed one unit at a time and has no COM port.
This could very well be. Research will ensue.
My choice of the Barix over PC or other devices is size and simplicity. The Barix, UPS, and Procaster studio unit will take up a teeny bit of space at my daughters house and shoujld pretty much take care of itself.
In addition recent developments in my world involve another station I'll be engineering for that presently is using a Barix setup to feed a 100,000 watt classic rock station from 70 miles away. So I became familiar with the system through work.
TIB
The Barix setup I'm using has about 1/2 second latency, not bad. Makes it easy enough to sync switch-overs.
A nice feature of the Barix units is version upgrades. Seems upgrades are just software changes. I recently updated ours and what a difference. Much easier to use and more flexible.
As mentioned, 3 IP streams are programmable. My 1st IP is my studio, 2nd is the school studio and 3rd is a backup using a ShoutCast type of stream using BUTT on my laptop. To switch to the school I simply shut off my studio stream.
Good to know the latency can be low with the Barix, we used a barix at the full-power as an emergency backup when the STL failed. However it simply pulled the interenet stream and wasn't fed by another barix. The Full Power uses Comrex for studio linking and transmitter linking for the FM Translator.
@Tim, When our Full Power AM gained an FM Translator we did not need to file seperate licenses for BMI or the others, I don't recall the rates going up either. I would ASSUME the same would apply for your station, do let us know what you find out.
Not to mention that it will re-sync if the connection is lost and then restored. A pc wont do that.