Lefty Gomez

Surprised

It has taken me over three months to get Banana Belt Radio ready for the public.

Surprised

It has taken me over three months to get Banana Belt Radio ready for the public.
The Work that has gone into this little station has shown me how little I know about setting up or building a Radio Station.

It took about ten hours to get the Antenna up and the Transmitter running.
However that was the easy part.

All of the studio stuff has been the hard part.
Getting the level’s to work right has been very complex.
I wanted the sound of this station to blow away the other stations in my area.
It took me weeks of testing and using scopes to find my levels.

Right now Banana Belt sounds better than any HD or FM Station out there.
The Station kicks ass as far as sound, but let me tell you it was very complex to get to that point.

Then to stay within FCC Part 209 Limits or 219 I took my grounds down.
That opened up all kinds of new doors for me to deal with.
I Did what Mram suggested to do with the Cable and grounding.
It works and my signal gets out better with this setup than it did with the Ground running from the ATU to the ground rod.

Question is what do I do with that ground rod ? LOL!

Getting the Levels working right for the transmitter was another battle I dealt with over the past 30 days.
Every weekend I would work all weekend on the levels and it was not until tonight that I finally got it right.

I had to remove the CBS Monster that I was using for several reasons.
I will share reason two at a later date.
Reason one was the Transmitter just did not play well with the CBS.
It’s ok I like having that old compressor just because it’s so darn cool.

So I am now using a Behringer Mini Con Compressor and it works darn well.
The Station now has a sound that is really solid.
Levels and more levels LOL, That is what I have been dealing with for weeks on end.

I thought I would have the Internet Stream weeks ago , But all of this other work has pushed it back for two more weeks.

However Banana Belt Radio is ” ON THE AIR”!
Yes today was the first day that Banana Belt transmitted full time.
I have much more work to do to get the Automation working perfect along the side of the live programming.

Now lets get ALPB hitting on all cylinders and let’s get to saving radio.

Thanks to all of you for keeping the dream of Part 15 going. It was you guys who got me going on this station and I thank each and everyone of you.

Lefty G

Banana Belt Radio.
Santa Cruz Ca

Long live Part 15 Radio and the ALPB!