Until the 2012 National Student Radio Conference in Bradford
University of The West of England
Hub Radio, The University of the West of England's Student Radio Station, providing a diverse range of both music and chat to the city of Bristol. Hub...
The OB took place at the ‘Lounge on the Farm’ festival 4 miles away from our studio. We broadcasted live for 3 days from 9AM to 8PM which saw live / pre-recorded band interviews, in studio live music sessions and roaming mic teams to capture the flavour of the festival. We also recorded and aired many of the sets from the stages around the festival. CSR have never really done a live OB before and despite broadcasting live for three days it was deemed a huge success by the organisers and bands alike. First we had to find somewhere to broadcast from which was secure and central to the festival. In keeping with the rustic charm of the event, an old pig shed was used.. This was ‘pimped’ out to the extent that many of the celebrities seemed loathe to leave and spent a lot of the time hanging out on our sofas. The next task was to provide internet connection to the building. After several false starts we sourced an ADSL connection from a company elsewhere on the farm. However this was roughly 700 meters from the broadcast studio making it technically impossible to run a network cable. We negotiated this by using a point-to-point wireless 5ghz link, placing one of the units on top of a lighting tower in order to achieve line of site to the other unit on a stand outside the studio. We also added a FM antenna allowing on air monitoring within the studio. A feed was run into the broadcast studio from a generator giving us enough power to run 3 flood lights and all of our equipment. We setup 1 desktop pc to act as encoder and selected software which would allow us to utilise AAC in order to use as little bandwidth as possible. Another machine was setup with a piece of playout software with two machines acting as editing machines allowing recordings to be edited for broadcast. A full OB studio was setup with 4 mics, mixing desk, CD players, playout system and monitors with everything networked to allow music to be dropped onto the playout machine whilst also keeping a backup on their own harddrives.