While there has been no official word from the CBAA for a while (the manager of the community radio digital radio project), I’ve been hearing some mentions of digital radio from some of the metro-wide stations around here. In particular, Hope 103.2 has started saying that their new digital-only station, Inspire Digital, is expected to be launched on Sydney DAB+ radio in the next two months or so.

From what I’ve heard, the equipment is almost ready at the metro-wide stations, and now it’s just a matter of getting the connection happening between the studios and the transmission site.

(Incidentally, from today you can start listening to a ‘pilot’ of Inspire Digital via their website. I’ll tell you now: this particular station is sounding like its going to be really, really great!)

I’m particularly hoping that Community Radio will take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of more transmission capacity as a chance to be more innovative, and broadcast new and innovative content. If community stations put all they’ve got into this and do something interesting and appealing to audiences, it could really drive the sales of digital radio receivers, helping the entire Digital Radio project in Australia.

Community radio is in a very unique position to launch new services with minimal costs. There’s no management overheads, sales requirements, or shareholders to satisfy. It’s dirt cheap. Really, the hardest part is coming up with something that will be appealing, and then putting in the effort to see it happen.

If community radio dosen’t take this opportunity, then I’m afraid that commercial operators will. Last week, Austereo announced their newest digital-only station: “U2O Radio“. What’s the concept? “A Radio Station hosted by U for U”.

That’s right, ordinary people submitting programming, and then getting it played on air. It sounds a whole heap like the principal behind community radio, right? But wait, there’s more! U2O radio is an initiative of….. The Australian Government!

Austereo has the advantage over community radio here, because they have much more visibility through their national network. It’s also much more appealing to young people because they have the chance to be noticed by some of the big names in Australia’s media. The splash page of U2O radio says:

Who knows, you could be Australia’s next Hamish & Andy!

Getting your big break on radio has never been easier.

This is exciting and interesting times for Community Radio in Australia. Let’s hope that we take this as a chance to grow, expand and strengthen.

I entered in the Ideas (Student) category, not with any expectation to hear from them again. Of course, my expectations were inaccurate, and I ended up coming second place in that category, and winning $1500 for my school!

As a part of being a winner, I was invited to attend a fancy evening at the NSW Parliament House, last Wednesday. The evening consisted of talking to others in the government, as well as industry partners for the event.

It was interesting to talk to some others involved with the competition, and various other government projects, and to get their opinion on things.

Although the evening seemed a tad too political, it was enjoyable, and interesting to see the other entries. Many of these were transport orientated (including mine), which is not surprising considering that the RTA data is already readily available on the internet (although only as HTML, not in XML).

Now, the thing to watch for is if any of these projects will be taken on board by the government, and developed further. They claim a $50 000 pool is available for development, so I hope something good comes out of it.

Now, here’s a video of the competition which was played on the night. I’m not in this one, but there should be another coming out at a later date which will include a clip from me.

And they also have a Flickr photo gallery of the evening. Here’s a picture of me!

Why am I leaving? It all comes down to time, and a desire to focus on something different. After spending so long working at this one organisation, having everyone relying on my to keep things running, I feel that I need to do something else with the precious time I have. A change of scenery, so to speak.

With the somewhat sad (but yet exciting!) final day approaching, I have been pondering: What could I have done better? If I was to do it again, what would I do differently? Do I have any regrets?

One of things I would have done differently is to be more of a team player. The way things panned out was that I did the majority of the work, and then others around me try and catch up. I very rarely delegated tasks to others, even when they were capable to do them. At first, this didn’t pose many problems, but as the station grew and people changed, it became more and more of an issue.

I could always manage to find a way to get the technology working properly, and doing what I wanted, but as a manager of other people, I fell short. Through the recent circumstances, I’ve been made aware of this. If I was to do it all again, this I would be more conscious about, and I would defiantly act differently.

Another thing I would do differently is to have a clearer plan of where we are heading. Often, due to the chaos of the moment, we were stuck in the mindset of “okay, we need to fix this NOW”, not able to see ahead and plan anything for the future. The problem with this, especially when dealing with technology, is that you often end up duplicating yourself. There needs to be a plan as to what changes should be done in the next year, etc. in order not to replace things multiple times, or reconfigure something only to have it superseded by some other magical device.

Finally, I would make sure I say “I don’t know” more often. I got into this terrible habit of thinking I knew the answer to everything, and when I didn’t, I would lie until I could work out what the answer was. Sometimes this wasn’t such a big a deal; other times it was.

Even after listing these things I would change, I don’t think I have any regrets. What I did was always what I thought was the best action for the moment. I was thrown into the “deep end” at age 14, and now that I’m approaching 17, I’m much wiser. Still a long way to got, I admit, but this has probably been one of the best things I’ve been a part of. The learning is ongoing.

At Cumberland Community Radio, a sub-metro community radio station in Sydney, we had exactly that problem. We had become very reliant on our connection to the internet, and when it didn’t work, I found out pretty quickly and frequently. It just wasn’t acceptable to have your news feed, internet streams and VoIP fall over so frequently.

We needed a fix, and fast!

A second ADSL connection was sourced with a different provider, but to manage these two connections we needed some fancy piece of hardware. Something smart enough to work out what both connections were doing, fix any issues, and route the traffic in the right direction. We needed a router/firewall with dual-WAN ports.

I initially expected to spend quite a large sum of money on a piece of hardware like this. But thankfully I didn’t have to. The model we picked was a DrayTek Vigor 2910. This little box cost less than AU$280, from OzCableGuy. These guys were able to get the box to us in less than a week, and that was paying with Bank Transfer, too.

Setup was fairly simple. In fact, if you know the jargon of LANs, WANs, and all that jazz, it’s easy. If you don’t, then I suggest you learn that aspect of things before you buy this box. There’s defiantly an expectation that you aren’t a beginner when trying to set up this piece of hardware.

Configuration is via web interface, which can be a little buggy at times. There isn’t much validation of input, so it will sometimes accept invalid input you mistakenly gave it, and you then are left wondering why something isn’t happening as expected. It’s little things like that which tripped me up the most.

The first thing I did was get the two WAN links happening. For this to work, you need to turn each of your two modems into ‘dumb’ modems. This means that the box which interfaces your phone line with the network dosen’t handle any sort of router functionality. In fact, it shouldn’t even handle any PPPoE authentication. The term used to describe this is ‘bridge mode’.

The two cheap consumer modems I had were a little trickier than expected to get into bridge mode, but a quick look at the manual sorted that out. It’s always that one checkbox you miss that trips you up, right?

Once you’re modem is in bridge mode, the DrayTek Vigor2910 handles all of the PPPoE authentication. The beauty of this arrangement is that if your modem disconnects, the DrayTek picks up on it really quickly, and it’s reconnected before you know it. This would be one of the best parts we’ve experienced so far.

Setting up firewall rules and port forwarding was no-nonsense, and done in a similar fashion to ordinary modem/router devices, but with extra functionality. There is also load balancing policy, so you can choose certain services to go through certain WAN ports if that is desired. There are also features available such as URL-filtering, VPNs, and all that good stuff. I haven’t set all of that up yet on this particular box, but if there is a need in the future, we know it’s there, ready to go!

Overall, the DrayTek2910 has been a solid performer, and I would defiantly recommend it in the future for similar situations.

All of this work has found me increasingly tired with things. It’s not that I am not enjoying the work I am doing, but the combination and amount of it is just tiresome.

To combat this tiredness of day-to-day work, I have committed some of my time to work on what I have dubbed “Free Will” projects. This concept encompasses work I choose to do, and I have control of the overall direction of project.

This isn’t a new concept. It is a concept which I borrowed from Google, who allow employees to devote 20% of their time to do whatever they choose, in what is dubbed “Innovation Time Off”. It dosen’t have to be productive, but ironically, some of the best products offered by Google have been developed in this 20% time. Gmail, Google News, and AdSense were developed in this time.

I personally haven’t chosen to devote a fixed period of time to myself for my “Free Will Projects”. Also, the end result of this time dosen’t have to be saleable or submittable for marking. In fact, the end result isn’t as important. No, it is the journey taken and the things learned which is important.

While musing over this concept during the past week, I realised that the majority of my skills related to technology were developed while working on small projects for myself.

For example, I learnt the fundamentals of PHP & MySQL while working on a project several years ago called Playground Hunt. The original concept of Playground Hunt was to develop a wiki of all the nation’s playgrounds. I developed the code all by myself (with the help of online tutorials), launched it to the web, and then shut it down six months later.

This as a business venture was a complete failure. I was thirteen at the time. Thankfully, I didn’t really loose anything (except for $20 on domain registration). In fact, I gained so much! Every project since then has used the skills I gained while developing that little website.

One of the key features of “Free Will Projects” is calling the shots yourself. There’s no point embarking on a project if someone else is making all of the decisions – this defeats the whole purpose! You might as well be spending this time doing something else.

Also, for these projects to be useful they must be somewhat enjoyable. If it’s just going to make you stressed and tired, well, that’s not worth it. Go and do something else. This isn’t to say it has to be enjoyable 100% of the time – it’s perfectly natural for certain aspects of your project to get frustrating.

Finally, the project dosen’t have to be yourself. It could be for a not-for-profit which you are involved with, it could help a friend, it could be open-sourced in the future, or it could even be sold. This dosen’t necessarily matter.

I’m undertaking a project at the moment which is for a certain Christian radio station, but I have overall control of, and is helping me learn certain things as I go. I’m not getting paid for it, the project is a bit different, making it fun, I’m calling the shots (under the general direction of management, of course) and I am also getting valuable experience as I go! It’s a win-win situation.

The key point of this concept is to learn and grow as a person, while participating in something a bit enjoyable.

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’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!

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.

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.

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.