Locality Switch

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.

AVG Network Edition works great at my local community radio station. It comes with a central management console, isn’t very obtrusive, consumes little system resources, and comes for a great price. There’s only one thing I hate about it: the AVG Security Toolbar.

I fail to see how a toolbar with a Yahoo search bar can enhance your security. Seriously, it’s just annoying. And I want to disable it. Don’t you want to do the same?

There wasn’t an option within the network management console to disable such a feature site wide, and the AVG Knowledge Base didn’t provide any help. In fact, the best advice I got was to reinstall the software and choose not to install it. However, the Network Edition remote installation tool didn’t support this, and doing it manually on every PC wasn’t an option for me.

Thankfully, Group Policy came to the rescue! It all revolves around the CLSID, which, in short, is a unique identifier given to each Internet Explorer Addon.

The CLSID for the AVG Network Edition is:

{CCC7A320-B3CA-4199-B1A6-9F516DD69829}

What if you want to find a CLSID for a different add on which you want to kill? It’s simple! Kinda. Within Internet Explorer, navigate to Tools > Manage Addons. The CLSID is shown if you right click on the column headings on that popup window and tick the CLSID option. Make note of it.

Within the Group Policy Management Console, navigate to User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Security Features > Add-on Management. You want to open up the Add On List. Here’s what Microsoft instructs in regards to this window:

You specify individual add-ons by using the CLSID in the Add-on List policy setting. The Value Name part of the policy setting must be the CLSID of the add-on, and the CLSID must include the braces that enclose the rest of the CLSID. The Value part of the policy setting must contain one of three possible values:

• 0 – The add-on is disabled, and users cannot manage the add-on from the user interface.
• 1 – The add-on is enabled, and users cannot manage the add-on from the user interface.
• 2 – The add-on is enabled, and users can manage the add-on from the user interface.

So, to disable the AVG Security Toolbar, you would set the Value Name as {CCC7A320-B3CA-4199-B1A6-9F516DD69829} (including the curly braces) and the Value as 0. Save all of that, and then wait for the changes to be applied to your machines (or force it with gpupdate).

What a relief this is. Now my users aren’t bothered with annoying toolbars or invaded search results, and we still have AVG running unaffected! Group Policy saved the day, once again.

You’ve just made some changes to your Group Policies, and are now waiting for it to update on the clients to see what the result is. Surly there must be a better way!

There is: It’s a command line tool called gpupdate, and it’s real simple.

Sit yourself down in front of a computer on the domain, and load up a command prompt. The quickest and dirtiest way to get it working is to type gpupdate /force - this will just force the system to grab all computer and user policies and apply them. If it needs the user to logoff and then log back on again, it will prompt you to do so, unless you add the /logoff switch to the end – this will force it to logoff.

All your waiting is over.

Just because you’re a community station doesn’t mean you will have an audience. I don’t believe marketing yourself as “community” will get you more than a handful of listeners, at the most.

If this is true, how does a general interest station market themself?

It’s a tough one, but tough problems encourage creativity. And creativity, I hope, is in our domain. After all, we are a creative medium, right?

Firstly, let’s check out what the CBAA has to say in their CBAA Handbook.

Marketing relies heavily on designing programs or policies which satisfy the needs and desires of its target market. It particularly involves research and promotion. Marketing is about discovering your clients and identifying their characteristics. More importantly, it is also about the type of radio station you are, what you want to achieve, how to go about it and how to measure your success.

Source: CBAA Handbook: Marketing

This is very wise advice. In fact, this must be my favorite chapter in the handbook, and is probably more relevant to us now more than when it was first written. At least from what I see of the general interest community stations that are around me (or what I don’t see!), I think we need help at marketing.

So, the CBAA reckons we need to “satisfy the needs and desires of its target market”. That’s all very well and good, but if you’re licensed as a general interest station for a local geographic area, your interests are probably defined as ‘whoever lives in the area’.

There is also the issue of what to market. What should we really be selling to the community? On air programs? Volunteering? Sponsorship? Donating? With so many choices, the default thing to market is everything, all at once! This is great, except people don’t like having a million things shoved down their throats. They need time to digest everything.

What should we do?

What I suggest is placing focus on a particular aspect of your station, and then push that for a couple of months. For example, you may want to have an increased amount of hits on your website (an easy way to measure an increase in awareness and interest). Go crazy trying to get your brand and URL out there. Spend two months trying to push this whole idea into your local community.

Be creative. Find all of the noticeboards in the area and get something interesting posted up on those; something catchy and memorable. Approach the local sports club and ask if you can get stuff in their newsletter. See if the local schools can do the same. What about a notice in the local newspapers?

But wait. Before you go ahead and push something like this, you need goals. This is critical. Without goals, your team won’t know what they’re aiming for. They won’t know if they’re succeeding, or doing badly. After a while of going crazy trying to push an idea, they will loose interest, because they have no metrics to measure up against.

What sort of goals should you set?

Firstly, they should be realistic, but just a bit out of reach of what you are currently are attaining. In the instance of increased website hits, there is no point saying you want 500 unique visitors this month, if you already have that amount of visitors on a regular basis.

It’s important to set goals which are measurable. If you can’t measure the response to a campaign, it’s almost pointless. Saying you want more listeners isn’t a good goal to set, because how do you measure listeners? Sure, you can do a survey, but those are expensive and take some time.

Be creative. Have goals. Have fun!