From BillyBurg

This may not be a good solution for everybody; I’m just saying it works for me.

Some time back, I stopped trying to make one computer do all the heavy lifting and just picked up a pair of junker laptops to use as audio sources. At any moment, I can have the freeware MIXXX deejay program (www.mixxx.org/) open on one box while the other is set up…[Read more]

How are your own engineering chops? Can you park the transmitter/antenna  close to one end of the campus and put a passive antenna some distance behind it? You are essentially creating a short-form directional array to beam the signal straight down the heart of the campus.

Or is that illegal?

If your campus has any across-the-street parking, an annex, a steam/power plant or admin building a bit of a distance away from the main grounds, that may help a bit in “rounding off the corners”.

Otherwise, for a question like this, it might be worth your while to sign on with one of Barry Mishkind’s pro broadcast forums (found at radiolists.net)…[Read more]

Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that. Other than in-house listeners, unless you have a wonderfully robust firewall and some heavy-duty password protection, expect someone in your listening area to go back up through your Wi-Fi appliance and turn your station’s computer into a porn server.

My own home Wi-Fi password is 26 characters long — in an…[Read more]

Sorry if any of this is already obvious or well-known to you now Keith, but it is all helpful in context.

First, are you in the US or elsewhere? What is the local media scene like right now? That will have some bearing on what you should be airing, what kind of streaming services are available, and what kind of advertisers — existing or…[Read more]

Why invoke Wolfman Jack?  He’s earned his rest.

Anyone who was employed in radio prior to 1996 and mass corporate consolidation – myself included – can tell you exactly what the industry needs.

Honest to God, man … if there is something you cannot find anywhere else, just point your browsers toward New Jersey.

How many kids of another era used to get the Edmund Scientific catalog in the mail from Barrington NJ?  While they don’t have the retail store anymore or the same wacky crap they did years ago, the good news is they are still…[Read more]

We are, first and foremost, a broadcast forum; and I always encourage Radio First in conversations such as these.

But I have to wonder: for such an astute lawyer and a well-learned man, why hasn’t it occurred to him he could seek out a classical music stream on the same computer he used to find similarly-programmed stations in his area?

CB, I’ve always thought a useful tutorial video would be one where a Part 15 operator ‘chased’ levels all the way from the front end of the process right to the transmitter and showed the viewer what it all meant.

First, show the original audio, and whether or not it needs normalizing and/or peak limiting before being ingested into the on-air…[Read more]

I work with a lot of audio producers (mostly for podcast, some radio). A lot of them actually don’t make their choices, the software does it for them.

One fellow had a very old bit of software he had not updated, which would only encode at a low bit rate. Others just let the default setting in Audacity take care of the chore. It never occurred to…[Read more]

Spare —

Bag all that paid-for support.

You can post free support questions to the group at

rivendell-dev@lists.rivendellaudio.org

Me neither, but if you haven’t checked out Rivendell as a potential automation system for your station, you really need to.  It is totally free, it runs under Linux which is also free, it does voicetracking and dayparting and is just the cat’s ass. As a bonus, it works on inexpensive second-hand 64-bit hardware you probably already own.

There is…[Read more]

One of the towns shown on TV getting hit the worst is New Bern, North Carolina. That is where the WHEATSTONE company is; the manufacturer of high-end broadcast consoles, AoIP audio systems and processors.

One of the reasons they moved out of Syracuse NY is because the weather up there sucked.

Isn’t It Ironic – – – – – –

Carl said, “…it does allow ‘adding distortion’ which is something to have even if there’s no use for it.”

Yeah, still not interested. I’ve spent the last 18 years trying to remove distortion from my signal path.

In the interests of technical accuracy, the Kerwax studio/company is pushing this as a two-channel preamp, based on the 24-channel tube mixer installed at their studio. With only two channels, it is definitely not being marketed as a mixer. You might tack it in the signal chain between the mixer output and the airchain processor if you want to…[Read more]

Noble idea, but impractical.

Given the 10 kHz spacing on the medium wave broadcast band, we would still have a very choked frequency range on our signals. The noise would indeed be nearly entirely eliminated, but there’s not enough room for a stereo signal, much less a signal with much in the way of highs.

Dont get me started on the public…[Read more]

Carl asked: “Since there’s already a parade every year, why doesn’t Trump just invite himself to that one instead of holding a separate parade?”

Because this one is about veterans — alive and dead — and their service to America, not about how many tanks we can roll down Pennsylvania Ave without buckling the pavement.  New Yorkers have know…[Read more]

Carl, you’ve got my curiosity aroused. How technically were you going to do the broadcast from Washington DC to your community? Your method might be something that would interest all of us.

If you want some event in the nation’s capital to broadcast, I would consider the National Memorial Day Parade held every May. It’s grandly patriotic (minus…[Read more]

Got to grudgingly hand it to the Apple folks … they certainly did not make it simple for hackers.

The company could have directed an analog output to the Lightning connector, making it a simple matter for someone to solder up a suitable adapter. But no, the Apple designers put the D-to-A converter inside the plug. That obligates you to buy…[Read more]