Until the 2012 National Student Radio Conference in Bradford
Warwick University
The University of Warwick's student radio station, playing out the best new music, news and sports coverage and cutting edge speech programming.
Best Live Event or Outside Broadcast – Smoke Radio
Smoke Radio has been involved in many events at the university, but one of our most complex to organise was a week’s worth of broadcasting to end the academic year. We set about organising a week of OB’s, focusing each day at a different campus culminating on Friday with a live music event in Harrow.
This year the university upgraded our low quality OB unit to a ‘Tieline’ that could work internally via the University’s network. This enabled us to locate ourselves anywhere in the university and connect back to the studios in broadcast quality.
We began planning the OB’s several weeks in advance, with the team recceing the campuses for the most suitable locations to broadcast from. This meant checking access, power and signal to the studio via the network points. Once we had decided upon the most suitable broadcasting locations, the Universities Facilities Manager was contacted to approve the proposals.
When this was signed off, a programming schedule was composed seeing three programmes a day coming live from location. With the Request Show kicking off the broadcasting taking requests from the students around the campuses, and ending with Preloaded with Dan Roberts. There was also a programming slot that varied for each day.
Our most complex day was Friday as we had organised a live music event at our SU bar. We’d booked three bands to perform as well as 4 hours of live programming. We had created a set up similar to an OB truck with an on air studio and full front of house set up both being fed live directly onto Smoke Radio. We also took a feed off the front of house desk and multitracked the bands for post production, as the event was being filmed. This video content was turned around for the website, as well as photos documenting the week’s worth of broadcasts.
The aim of this week was to unite all four campuses and fulfil our station aim of integrating the Smoke Radio brand into our other sites. We achieved 20 hours of live on location broadcasts, as well as countless photos and videos for our added value content. The event was promoted and trailed weeks in advance resulting in a great turn out and interaction with our audience.