Locality Switch

I love it when things just work; there’s really no need to think about these things or meddle with them. After all, if it ain’t broke, why try and fix it?

The trouble is, what happens when something breaks? How do you fix it if you’ve never touched it before? For example, I’ve never had to clean out the faders in our broadcast console before. I don’t know the best method to do it, and even now that I know the best method thanks to other experts in the industry, I still haven’t used their advice because I haven’t done it before and am a bit nervous about pulling faders apart.

So, what is the best way to learn about equipment before it breaks and now it is critical that it gets fixed? I’ve learnt that it is best to dive in and fiddle with things whenever there is a chance. Whatever equipment there is around you, just grab a screwdriver and pull the lit off it.

For example, a few weeks ago, I pulled our low powered backup FM transmitter out of the rack, opened the lid, and had a look around. I now know that to program the frequency of it, you need to switch the dip switches and use binary. I didn’t know that before I opened it up! I also got to see how all the different components of the transmitter connect together.

Another technique to learn about equipment is by reading the manual. And the manual for other pieces of equipment similar to it. Or even manuals for bits of equipment you don’t own.

I learn heaps about compressor/limiters by downloading some old manuals off a manufacturers website, and reading through all of the instructions and application examples contained within it’s pages. I now know a bit about how Axia Audio over IP networks operate thanks to the extensive manuals they provide on their website. I don’t regret spending time doing things like this.

It’s a combination of pulling stuff apart and reading through manuals which has helped me learn what I know, but I need to keep doing this to keep learning more and more. I’m only young, and I have my whole career ahead of me, so now is defiantly no time to stop learning!

I love a bargain; we all love a bargain. It’s even better when you get something really good for a dirt cheap price. One of the things I have been meaning to get for quite some time is a VPS, but I haven’t found a provider which meets my requirements in terms of price and reliability.

I’ve wanted a VPS to do so many things. As I work in radio, one of the primary things I’ve wanted to do was setup my own streaming media server. However, as I don’t have much cash to spend, it has been hard to find a reliable VPS provider within my price range.

The key word is here is ‘reliable’. There are countless dirt-cheap VPS providers out there, but when it comes to their network latency, uptime, and other factors, well, that is another thing all together. Not to mention the tendency for providers in this area to be here one day, and gone the next!

There are entire websites setup to track this whole ‘low end hosting’ market. One such website which I’ve been following for some time is low end box. They track the very low end of the market. In fact, their criteria for listing is under US$7/month. Now, that’s pretty cheap by anyone’s standard!

After umm-ing and err-ing for a while about singing up with one of these services, I finally decided last week to take the plunge. US$6/month and a few days waiting for PayPal to clear my money, I had signed up for Delimeter USA, which ironically, has their servers located in Germany.

For US$6/month, I got 256MB of RAM, 10GB of hard drive space, and a seemingly unlimited amount of data transfer (terms and conditions apply, of course). The data transfer was the deciding factor for me to choose this provider; I was happy when I found a provider which wouldn’t shut me down if I used a bit of extra data transfer.

As far as the stability of this service goes, I currently have no clue what to expect. They boast 99.9% uptime, but I’m not holding my breath. As long as they don’t go down for hours/days on end (as a previous Shoutcast host has done to me in the past), then I will be happy.

Right now, I have Icecast2 and Apache installed on my low end box, and it’s serving up 2CCR’s MP3 and AAC+ streams. I setup Apache as a reverse proxy, so I now have our station streaming on Port 80 (in addition to our legacy ports still working). I’ve also configured it to ‘pull’ the data from our encoder, rather than our encoder ‘pushing’ the stream out to the server constantly. The advantage of this is that if no one is listening, then we don’t use any bandwidth. So far, so good.

It’s great to finally have my own server running. Being able to do whatever Ubuntu supports is great. No longer am I restricted by what Plesk or cPanel wants me to do, or what my shared hosting provider dictates. I hope it stays up and running, and the provider doesn’t collapse. But if they do, there’s a whole world of other providers out there to choose from. To me, it’s a great adventure!

I don’t typically post what I have coming up, but I feel that I really should start sharing that with you. At the very least, someone can hold be accountable if I don’t get through all the things I say I will do.

School Certificate

I’ll get rid of the boring one first. Since I am still in year 10 at school, I’ve got the school certificate coming up soon. These are a series of exams on the core subjects I have been taking at school over the last two years, including Maths, English, Science, History, and Geography. It’ll be held on the 9th and 10th of November. It’s kinds important, so I won’t be very active in other projects until these finish.

Radio Traffic Software in Access

Yes, I plan to write some software in Access! It’s something I haven’t done for ages (or ever?). Basically, I hope to make something which 2CCR can use instead of Excel. I haven’t really told anyone about it, and I don’t expect them to use it. I’m doing this for the fun of learning something new.

It’ll be real basic, basically allowing the addition of sponsorship messages, and manual scheduling of spots for each hour. It’ll also export a text file which can be imported into StationPlaylist Creator, as well as a printout of all of the spots so presenters can load them themselves.

Squid Proxy – Nicer looking error pages

At the moment, the Squid proxies I have setup display error messages wrapped in some HTML which used to replicate our station’s website. Of course, since I have changed the site so much since the proxy was setup, it’s kinda broken-looking. I want some standalone error pages (not linked to any website), which I can drop in any proxy I use and not have to worry about dependencies.

Fix the Headphone sockets in a studio

Studios experience wear and tear – this is a fact of life. One of the things I’ve been slack about recently has been replacing the headphone sockets in our main studio. I’ve got the bits ready, and the new amp has even been installed! I just need now to install the sockets on the table. This will require slightly larger holes in the desk than are already available, because naturally the new pots are larger than the old ones!

Install a new PABX

The board at 2CCR has approved the purchase of a new PABX. It’s a Talkswitch 488VS, with ten TS9133i handsets. In a desperate effort to save money, I’m doing all of the install myself. As it’s a software configurable system, it shouldn’t be too hard. Besides, I’ve already read quite a bit of the manual and it seems pretty reasonable.

You’ll certainly get a few blog posts out of this. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve!

Work Experience, V2.0

That’s right, I’m going back for more work experience!! After a chat with my school’s careens adviser and constantly being in contact with Stephen Wilkinson, I’m organising a week of tech-oriented work experience from November 16 to 21st. I love that place… I can identify with the mission and I absolutely want to be a part of it, in whatever way I can! I’m sure I’ll also be spending a bit of my December holidays at that place.

Back to the 80s

That’s right, our school’s musical is coming up soon. And it’s set in the eighties! Back to the 80s is apparently a “totally awesome musical”, and the first rehearsal I was a part of was yesterday (but the cast have been rehearsing endlessly since August). It’ll be staged in our brand new hall this November. I’m on the tech crew, so I’m in for a fun week of getting everything happening in this brand new hall.

Blog more…

Over the last few weeks my blogging level has decreased, due to school commitments, etc. However, there’s been heaps of ideas buzzing around in my head which I now need to get written down. Hopefully it’ll start coming out soon.

I’ve got a big problem: Email. I use email for everything. If it needs to be communicated, chances are I’ve used email for it. Forget phone calls, face to face conversations, or anything which allows you to communicate emotion. Email is my answer to any communication requirements.

The thing is, I’m probably the person who needs to convey emotion the most! I can be sarcastic at times, and use wit in strange ways. When I talk with my friends, I use sarcasm and they know I am being sarcastic. Thing is, you really can’t convey emotion and vocal tones through a written email!

The way an email is read all depends on the person who reads it. I could send the same message to fifteen different people, and they could all interpret is differently. This is a massive problem. When I think to be a nice email has been interpreted by people as just plain nasty. I’m really not a nasty person, and I don’t want to be. But when 90% of communication with some people is through email, then really it isn’t hard to see why some people think I’m not being nice to them.

What do I do about it?

Scott H Young hits the nail on the head in his blog post, “The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You“:

3) Wrong Medium

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

The solution is to bridge the e-mail gap when you recognize you’re wasting time with it. Ask the person if you can discuss the issues in person or on the phone at a specific time and date.

I’m using the wrong medium. If I want to be sarcastic or witty, I need to do it elsewhere. Somewhere which allows an exchange of emotions and laughs. Somewhere, such as a telephone. Or a face to face meeting. Something; anything!

If I want to use email, I need to be direct and to the point. No wit. No sarcasm.

Try and define the current community standards for decency. It’s pretty hard, maybe even impossible. Where do you draw the line on what is acceptable to say and do on radio, and what isn’t? How do you know what your boundaries are, when they aren’t clearly set out.

Both Community and Commercial radio have clauses in their relevant codes of practice to explain that programs broadcast must meet certain standards of decency.

1.5 (a) All program content must meet contemporary standards of decency, having regard to the likely characteristics of the audience of the licensee’s service.

[ Commercial Radio Australia - Codes of Practice & Guidelines ]

3.2 We will attempt to avoid censorship where possible. However, in our programming decisions we will consider our community interest, context, degree of explicitness, the possibility of alarming the listener, the potential for distress or shock, prevailing Indigenous laws or community standards and the social importance of the broadcast.

[ Community Radio Broadcasting Codes of Practice ]

But what is deemed acceptable? Let’s take swearing as an example. What words would you anticipate you couldn’t say on air? I would think that almost all swearing would be a no-go, except for the lightest swear words. When I tuned into a commercial station last week, heaps of songs in their countdown program contained meny words which I wouldn’t thing were suitable to broadcast in the early evening. I’m sure this isn’t the first time their music contained these words – it must have been happening for a while.

But yet I don’t hear a public outcry about it.

Nor did I hear a huge amount of whinging about the woeful contents of Kyle and Jackie-O’s brekky show, until that fateful morning containing a lie detector. Media Watch must have been the only media outlet I saw complaining about their stunts. So, does that mean most people don’t have a problem with it? Or just don’t care?

All of this must mean that people think swearing is acceptable for broadcast. Yet, whenever we have an incident of someone saying a naughty word on air on 2CCR, a flood of complains ensues. Something’s up? What’s so different?

The answer, it seems, is: “audience”. The audience your station has determines what you can get away with. If you have an audience consisting primarily of those in their twenties, you can get away with heaps. But, if your audience is filled with families or slightly older people, you can’t get away with anywhere near as much.

This still doesn’t answer my question about community standards, but I don’t think it ever will be answered, unless we turn into a communist state.

In radio, one size never fits all. What is suitable for one station isn’t suitable for the other. Just because you hear swearing and questionable content on one station doesn’t mean you can get away with it on another station. There’s no role models in radio – everyone has to be unique.

Being a fairly small and somewhat closed industry around the world, I’ve found it hard to find some good online resources to help me as a broadcast technician. On top of that, there aren’t any university courses specific to radio engineering, but that’s another story.

However, there are a couple of resources I’ve found around the place which may be of some help. Here’s a few:

Radio Magazine – radiomagonline.com

This free online magazine focuses on radio technology, with a particular focus on the USA markets. It has reviews and tips about every bit of radio equipment imaginable, stories on studio builds, and also an “Engineer’s Handbook”. I’ve always found this site to be very informative and enjoyable to read.

The Broadcaster’s Desktop Resource – thebdr.net

Although all of the articles are in PDF format and require me to download them, The Broadcaster’s Desktop Resource publishes easy to understand articles on a variety of different topics relevant to radio techies.

This Week in Radio Tech (TWiRT) – thisweekinradiotech.com

I was pointed towards this podcast only yesterday. As I write there’s only one episode available, but apparently it will become a weekly thing. That’s good, because the first episode was excellent! It’s hosted by Kirk Harnack, who works for Telos/Omnia/Axia, and even though I’ve only spoken to him through a couple of emails and then heard him on this podcast, he is a very knowledgeable guy. Also co-hosting the show are Tom Ray are Chris Tobin.

It is said you learn something new every day, and today most of my learning came from this podcast. One of the things of interest to me was the EAS system, which is a way of broadcasting emergency messages simultaneously through a group of stations in a geographic zone. I wasn’t aware such a system existed in the USA, but now that I do know, I’m wondering why we don’t have a similar system out here.

Audio Over IP: Building Pro AoIP Systems with Livewire by Steve Church & Skip Pizzi

Okay, this isn’t really a online resource. Hey, I haven’t even read it yet! But I have been promised a copy from the great folks at Axia, and I can’t wait to get a hold of it and read it cover to cover (several times over, I’m sure!). Not having read it myself, here’s a description from Amazon:

Position yourself at the forefront of audio and broadcast studio technology by learning audio over IP. You will gain knowledge of IP network engineering as it applies to audio applications, and then progress to a full understanding of how equipment built on Ethernet and Internet Protocol are used in today’s audio production and broadcast facilities for the transporting, mixing and processing of pro-quality audio. A chapter on integrating Voice-over IP telephony (VoIP) to pro-audio and broadcast facilities is also included.

Radio While Papers – broadcastpapers.com

I must admit, some of the papers available from Broadcast Papers can be very full on, in terms of writing style and content. They can also be very biased towards particular products, as many of these papers have been written by representatives from particular companies. None the less, there are a few good tips to be picked up and some new things to be learned.

The Product Manuals

There is a lot to be gained from reading the manual for different products. Some manufacturers of pro audio gear put tremendous effort into making their manuals informative and very useful. Better still, many are available on the internet. Some of the manuals I have enjoyed are from Axia, Behringer, Comrex, Sonifex, Tieline.

The best manuals not only explain the actual product, but provide background information which helps you understand why things work a certain way.

There we have it, a few resources we have in regards to radio technology. They’ve all been useful for me, and I hope that by sharing them here, you may find something new. If you know of any other handy resources, please post them in the comments below, or email them through to me.

It’s been a long time since I have listened to a commercial station for an extended period of time. Occasionally I would surf the bands, and stay with a station for the duration of a song which I found catchy, but overall I have just been listening to community radio. To me, it’s much more personal and much more enjoyable.

This week I decided to listen to a commercial radio station for a couple of hours in the evening. Why? I’ve been on holidays, and decided to do something different for a bit. Break out of the routine, and all of that stuff.

Now I remember why I don’t listen to Commercial Radio.

The station I decided to listen to was 2Day FM, and the show which was on at the time was the Hot 30 countdown. I haven’t listened to one of these countdown type shows for a while, but I was under the impression that they typically consisted of music. What did I hear? Anything but music! With so much talking and phone ins happening, they might as well make it a talkback show.

After listening to this show for a couple of hours, I really came to appreciate community radio. Commercial radio is so, well, commercial. It may seem a stupid observation to make, but there are just so many ads! I literally couldn’t tell the difference between ads, show promos, sweepers, talk breaks, competitions and the music.

Everything just blends together into one very very tight package. There’s no room to breathe. From one aspect, this is a credit to the people who produce the show – such tight integration doesn’t happen magically, and i know it takes quite a bit of work to achieve.

However, I believe there should be a line drawn somewhere. When is enough, enough? Sure, there are bills to pay and shareholders to please, but in some ways I believe it would be more beneficial to loosen things up a tad. I was quite confused when trying to distinguish what was an ad or not. I eventually concluded that if it wasn’t a song, then it must be an ad :)

For once, I am greatful that we have community radio which is limited in the amount of sponsorships which can be played. I am grateful that we don’t play the same twelve songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over…

Community radio is a breath of fresh air, but it wasn’t until I ventured back into commercial radio that I realised this.

Will I listen to another commercial station again? Sure. But it won’t be for entertainment. It will be to analyse what they are doing, and to learn as much as I possibly can about on air presentation. Even though I want to be a technician, I still think it’s important to learn about what actually goes to air. After all, that’s all the average listener hears.

Daylight savings starts this Sunday morning in NSW, and that means one thing: Clock nightmare in radio land!

Last year, I spent all of the Saturday morning before hand checking registry settings on each computer to make sure they would adjust appropriately come Sunday morning. That isn’t a very efficient way to spend an entire morning, but it had to be done to make sure funny things didn’t happen to our overnight programs and everything played at the correct time.

This year, everything has been made so much easier for me. See, I found this utility called TZEdit. (Downloadable from onlinecomputertips.com)

I can confirm that this utility works on both Windows XP and Windows Server 2008. I can’t say anything about other operating systems, but I suspect that it will work for Vista and Windows 7, too (they have a similar codebase to Server 2008).

This utility allowed me to confirm that each computer had the daylight savings times set correctly for our time zone (starting on the First Sunday of October at 2am).

Now I can sit back and relax, knowing that my computers should drift through daylight savings without a worry. The only thing I need to remember is to not to put anything into the 2am hour, as that will be skipped. Apart from that, it’s all sweet.

Now would be a great time for you to check all of your computers for Daylight Savings compatibility. Don’t leave it until the last minute.

I needed a program fail monitor to tell me when 2CCR was ‘of the air’, and I wanted it cheap. In fact, I didn’t want to pay for it. Not now, anyway. I wanted a quick and dirty solution to let me know when something had gone wrong. There’s plenty of horror stories of when things go wrong and the station goes off the air, and I didn’t want any of this to happen to me.

There’s plenty of solutions out there, such as the Elan Program Monitoring systems. But these cost at least $800, and won’t actually notify me when a problem occurs – they just trigger another program source to start playing. What I wanted was a SMS notification when our program source failed, and stayed dead for more than sixty seconds (so small operator mishaps won’t disturb me).

After searching high and low, it turns out that Pirate Radio has a great software solution, and it’s totally free! It’s called Pira CZ Silence Detector, and will listen to the line in source to the computer and perform a defined set of actions whenever the audio stays below a set threshold for a set period of time.

The different types of actions it can perform are great. Here’s the feature list:

The Pira CZ Silence Detector actually can:

• Send alert email message (now supports also SSL authentication!)
• Save actual screenshot (and optionally attach it to email)
• Run application(s), play backup mp3 file(s)
• Reboot/shutdown the system
• Kill application(s)
• Drive port pin
• Send HTTP query (inform about the status on your web site)
• Speak using the Windows SAPI
• and more!

What more could you ask it to do? Any task imaginable could be performed by this powerful but small app – the ability to run applications and switch a COM port pin enable you to do whatever you want with whatever bit of equipment or software you have.

However, the task I really wanted to do was Send an SMS. This isn’t on the list, but sending email alerts is! Using a SMS Gateway, it’s easy to get an email sent via SMS. I use SMS Global, who allow me to send an email to a special email address, and then the contents of that email are transferred to a SMS message – all within seconds!!

It’s all quite magical. I loaded this freeware onto our logger (it already has an incoming audio feed) and did a quick firewall rejig to route the email traffic through to the server. Now I will receive a notification on my mobile whenever we have more than sixty seconds of dead air. Thankfully it hasn’t happened during the early morning, but I’m sure the day will come sooner or later. Probably when I least expect it.

The next task to undertake is to set this application to play some music whenever the program fails, rather than just sending a notification. I’m thinking I need some really quirky song to play, so anyone who works with us will know when something’s gone wrong, just by the music which is playing. Any suggestions? I also need to get some of our extra network gear onto a UPS so my notifications will arrive even during a power outage. If anyone wants to donate a UPS to us, that would be great (it doesn’t have to be huge, a small one will do).

One of my long time pet peeves is those who don’t roll cables properly. Rolling your cables properly not only makes them look good and stops them tangling, but it also helps the cable last longer and avoids permanent internal twisting of the copper.

All serious techies (hopefully!) know the under-over technique for rolling cables. However, if you aren’t up to speed on this, YouTube has a great video to explain it:

Now that you’re aware of this, get to work practicing it! Try it on extension leads, mic cables, Cat6 patch leads, guitar leads, IEC power cables, or even the garden hose! (yes, whenever I roll the garden hose, I do use this technique – hey, it works!)

There’s no excuse for you to roll any leads improperly. Don’t let me catch you doing it wrong again.