I've been contemplating switching my part 15 AM to a talk format of sorts. Traditionally my stations have been musical in nature, though I have had talk content in the past. How difficult is it locating daily content for a talk formatted part 15 station? Naturally the full power stations have the luxury of picking any network out there, what offerings are there for the part 15 talker? I know Fox Sports is carried on a part 15 in Flagstaff which makes it appear the network may be willing, additionally several years ago Fox News Radio was also willing. I've seen a few talk nets dedicated to low power radio, though there doesn't seem to be a good list of active networks and shows or what the better content might be.
So on my AM station, I run U7 Radio which is 24/7 classic C2C Art Bell shows. I also air Global Community Radio which has different talk shows throughout the day.
We do GCR2 at night on our LPFM.
I wish GCR 1 had a lower bit rate, my internet likes to drop them after a couple hours and i expect Zara to try to reconnect but it fails evry time.
Scroll down about halfway down the page to the "Talk Radio" catagory: http://part15lab.blogspot.com/2016/02/free-programing-sources-for-your-part.html
That is pretty much my only beef with Zara, Stream playback is problematic.
I've never experienced a problem with Zara having problems with streams.. but if your internet connection is sketchy, then obviously any stream will cut out regardless of what software you use.
I would second that. I ran FSN News for over 2 years, streaming the link they provide within Zara, and the only time it failed was when the FSN server was down.
Seem's odd to me that both Winamp and Windows Media Player can carry GCR 1 for days without a hiccup. Put it in Zararadio and it seems to drop out at some point and will not pick it up again unless i manually restart the stream.
And I also had two instances of the stream url and running time added to the playlist, still no joy.
Zara's shortfall on streaming is its lousy buffer. Unstable connections cause some very interesting glitches and bugs including double playing the stream, playing the stream and the playlist at the same time, or outright failing to connect at all. These issues are not present in winamp which seems to hold a stream for weeks at a time.
To get around these problems I would have zara set to automatically reset the stream at the top of the hour with a backup connection in the pending cue at the bottom of the hour.
Another option would to use an auto-downloader to download it ahead of time to a specified location on your hard drive, and then schedule Zara to play the file..
Thats something I have done in the past with great success. At the time I used Free Download Manager, no idea if it is still any good or not.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!
Got my hands on a WW1 XDS Tuner, this will certianly make programming a heck of a lot easier. Talk about a powerful reciever, there is no comparison to the ICP tuners I'm used to messing with.