Heart more local than a local radio station
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James Cridland posted on Tuesday 27th November 2012 at 10:12This story is interesting – Radio Exe falls off-air, while Heart broadcasts more local output, even though their presentation team were… in London.
What the hell are Radio Exe playing at? If they can’t get their emergency coverage right, what right do they have to be on the air?
And for those criticising Heartification: surely this is the right way of using the technology… local information for local audiences where they need it, but with resource put behind it.
I think it proves quite nicely that networking need not be the death of local radio. It doesn’t matter where the person and the mic is – it simply comes down to the age-old question of “Does It Sound Good?”
Reminds me of when Rother FM got cut off in 2007 – Lincs kept a service going using facilities at Trax FM in Doncaster – where the station’s now based fulltime – and their HQ in Lincoln.
When my online community station had premises to broadcast from, if I couldn’t make it in due to weather it was still possible for me to record links (as live) at my home and send them to the PC in the studio 20 miles away and just insert them into the playlist. It wasn’t difficult, though it was slightly cumbersome because the remote access tended to give sticky images on my home PC of the playout computer screen in the studio, falsely giving the impression that the playout PC was stuttering.
You just need someone with the facilities at home, which naturally not everyone’s gonna have. But certainly most modern playout systems now make it very easy to remote voicetrack programming. I remember hearing about another situation where (I think) the then Touch FM Banbury was inaccessible (at the time, not co-located and a satellite station) but jocks at the CN Group’s main hub were able to record links for the programmes from that site and drop in stuff like news and travel. Dial into a Phonebox PC to divert phone lines appropriately and nobody would ever tell the difference.
It’s incredibly simple to do James and the equipment needed at the presenters end is nothing more than a 40 quid mixer and a 20 quid mic along with a decent PC and broadband connection.
As I said before, it’s down to a lack of basic technical skills. I know 14 year olds who achieve this with no more than a pocket money budget.
If you do have a system for outside broadcast and the ability to remotely or automatically switch to OB then you could theoretically do a show from anywhere (if IP based).
At Marlow FM our studios are normally about 100 meters from the Thames, but at the moment because of the flooding we’re actually in the Thames!
We’re not indulging in any of that remote presentation stuff though. We’ve been on air live throughout, have presenters in wellies, and three pumps going to get the water out faster than it can come in.
The flood is predicted to reach a high point at lunchtime today, so wish us luck.
Congratulation Graham, good to see some dedication but, out of interest, what happens if the water shorts out the electrics and you are forced to abandon the studio?
Is there a contingency plan to keep the station on air from a temporary studio or something?
We’ve got a little trailer, normally used for outside broadcasts, which we can move to if we get completely inundated. Hopefully that, and a generator, should keep us on air.
There’s a link to our flood cams from the news section of our website: http://www.marlowfm.co.uk
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Interesting.
Even the smallest of online station I deal with are able to function with remote presenters. The more organised ones can actually provide really good output. Why couldn’t Exe do this too? Certainly seems they don’t have the technical expertise they should have.
Fair play to Global on this one.