Carl Blare

Most people who stay with a website like part15.us are creative people who want to build, invent, discover, improve their surroundings, and bring the general universe into general compliance with the inner on.

A radio station starts from below the ground and builds upward and outward, connecting to the world in terms of inches and feet.

Once the station exists some thought goes into improving it, through programming and technology.

Soon we gather here at the website to share experience and learn what others have accomplished. This desire for advancement through cooperation lead to the organizing of the ALPB (Association of Low Power Broadcasters) which has already matured to the point of looking beyond National part 15 and wondering about international low power.

Those stations who stream on the web have already been speaking to an international audience without every knowing how many countries there are.

At the recent ALPB Meeting we were reminded that all too many locations still suffer from limited bandwidth availability, while those stations fortunate enough to enjoy high speed connections tend to stream at extra high bit rates.

Problem is that many would-be listeners can’t maintain solid connection, which may very well explain why the streaming server at our station shows listeners who connect for 10-seconds and are gone. On the one hand we think maybe they made a hasty judgement against what they heard, but just as likely they heard a choppy audio stream and gave up.

With that in mind, we have today opened a second stream running 16-kilobytes-per-second, 11.025kHz sampling rate, good even for dial-up listeners.

Our regular stream, having been set at a compromise of 24kbps, 22.05kHz, really a little too high for dial-up, but which provides the quality of the best AM radio, have today been upscaled to 48kbps, 44.1kHz, an FM sound.

What station improvements have you made, or, are planning to make?