Among other things the last few days, the situation in Iran has been on a lot of peoples minds. I’ve seen an uptick in visits to my page on Irans previous block of the BBC persian news site and among other things, it had me looking for a link for the current BBC news in persian - it appears there is a realplayer format radio stream (hour long program) accessible through the following link BBC Persian News (Realplayer format), of course, you can also keep up at twitter… iranelection09 is one feed to watch. TehranBureau another twitter feed to keep an eye on. More audio streams are Radio Farda (Realplayer), Radio Farda (Windows Media). There is also a video stream at persianq.com….

Well, the digital tv transition here in the US has happened. If nothing else maybe we can stop hearing all those PSA’s !!!

For something completely different - I’m launching a ringtones site. You know most phones these days accept mp3 files that can be assigned to different people in your address book. The idea is that you assign a certain song to each person. I have a hard time picking out such things (and frankly the prices verizon charges for their inhouse ringtones is ridiculous….) Anyway, the idea hit of having a morse code clip playing the name of the caller…… I’m not the first to have the idea of course, but the only thing like it I can find out there is something that converted morse to midi ringtones and I can’t seem to find any working version of the site around.

Anyway…… Morse mp3 ringtones are available for free download from the site morseringtones.com. As I’m typing this I’ve got around 1600 names up on the site… although a script is running right now generating ring tones for somewhere on the order of 9100 names which should be uploaded before Monday. At some point I hope to automatically be able to generate user requested mp3’s. They are free downloads, but I’ve throttled it somewhat to keep someone from sucking down the whole lot of them at once and I’ve generated 4 different speeds for each ringtone.

So, head on over to find free morse mp3 ringtones for names and drop me a line if you see a name you want and it’s missing. Given that it now takes 8 hours to generate the whole batch, rebuilds of the site will be infrequent and maybe I’ll just create updates in batches. (I’ve still got those details to work out.)

…-.-

The AP is reporting that the US house has approved a delay in the digital tv transition until June 12th. Stations however CAN go ahead with their transition if they notify the public in advance and the FCC in writing. The article claims that not many will opt to go ahead with the switch. We already have one station locally doing the notice that they WILL terminate analog broadcasting 11:59PM February 17th… it will be interesting to see if they change their plans. The bill is still awaiting a signature though - so until it’s actually law it’s not a certainty, but it is fairly likely as President Obama has supported a delay.

I got a flyer today about the 2009 Charlotte Hamfest, It will be March 14th and 15th this year. (From 8:30AM-5PM Saturday and 9AM-1PM Sunday.) It will be held at the Cabarrus Arena and Events Center (4751 Hwy 49 North Concord, North Carolina (New Location.))

Over 80 commercial exhibitor booths, 300+ swap tables, 75,000 square feet of exhibit space, free parking, VEC testing on Saturday, hourly prizes, bingo, and quite a bit more.

Tickets at the door $10, pre-registration is $7. There’s going to be a Talk-in at the 146.655 repeater. More detail on the website of the Mecklenburg Amateur Radio Society

For those of us that are getting sick and tired of the PSA’s about the digital tv transition, we have a bit longer now to tolerate the ads. February 17th was the deadline, but today the Senate voted to push it back to June 12 a delay of 4 months.

Among other things, the coupon program had run out of funding a few weeks back. This program was to assist people in purchasing converter boxes so they could receive the new digital signals on older analog sets. I wonder if the feedback from Wilmington’s early switch had anything to do with it, but haven’t seen that mentioned much.

I think more needs to be done in mountainous areas to ensure that local terrestrial stations can still be received. (We can get enough on analog from the nearest town to hear the news and weather, but digital is trickier to get a consistent stream from since there’s a mountain between us and the nearest town for example. Our best digital signal comes from 50 miles away, our nearest town is less than 10 miles.)

Update:

Nevermind - the house voted down the push to delay the conversion.

It’s interesting, not too long ago I saw a question posted asking how best to setup a school to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama streaming live over the internet. Most of the answers gave suggestions helpful to the question in how to implement this feat, but some pointed out that local tv stations were broadcasting over the air, for free and in digital. The official stream online was delivered using silverlight, although many news outlets provided flash based video streams, I’m sure there were other streams available via cspan and others, but the truth is that over the air, satellite and cable broadcasting scales MUCH better than web video…..

I saw this morning that they had updated the silverlight (moonlight) plugin for linux/firefox so that stream was watchable under linux. To say that it was watchable is an overstatement.

The plugin loaded and I saw the first few frames of video and then it stopped. So, I waited and waited and refreshed the page. At which time it started again and ran for a few seconds before buffering. and buffering and buffering. I refreshed one last time and got a pretty good run of video. Comparing it to the tv. It was about 12 minutes behind, there was frequent stopping, digital noise and every time I looked at it there was a percent indicator overlayed indicating that it was at 93 or 97% buffering capacity.

Finally it just hung at one spot and I didn’t bother to refresh the browser window.

The problem is not with web video in general, but the idea of one to many broadcasting. A radio transmitter doesn’t care how many receivers there are, the work of transmission is the same. Multiple clients in current video broadcasting mean bandwidth is divided by the number of clients. So, it doesn’t take too many viewers for a single T1 connection to be brought down to the level of 28.8 dialup of yesteryear.

Peer to peer video scales better, but I wonder if we’ve ever seen that put to quite the test of a large event.

The bottom line of this is that just because something is new technology it’s not automatically better for all implementations than the old technology. We watched the inauguration via cable tv and there were no glitches with the signal.

Of course, online video excels at many things. It makes video broadcasting accessible to most anyone. It makes niche content more plentiful, available and viable, just like many other utilizations of the internet.

February 17th is coming up VERY quickly here in the United States, our Digital TV Transition is a little over a month away. I’m sure that many of you won’t be greatly affected by the transition. Hopefully those of you that will be are already informed and have the equipment they need for the transition.

Do you think the transition will be smooth?

Happy New Year from onlineradiotv.com!

(May all your reception be clear and static free!)

I hope you’re enjoying Christmas day in the way you like best. The Christmas season is a neat time to tune into the special programming on shortwave by the way….

If you’re looking for a late Christmas gift for yourself might I suggest the Sangean HD Radio Receiver for Digital Radio tuning this coming year!

The short answer to this is NO. We all know that as of February 2009 TV broadcasters will be required to shut off their analog signals and broadcast only in digital. The same will not be true for radio broadcasters. (Which I think is probably a REALLY good thing.) Radio is transitioning to digital as well, here in the United States the format that is catching on is HD (High Definition) it gives them the capability to send information along with the audio stream and multiple audio streams. Also, the quality of audio can be better than traditional analog. The GOOD news is that if you don’t want to go out and buy a digital receiver, you don’t have to. The traditional analog signal for radio will still be out there (at least that’s how things are currently planned.) So, you can still tune in with the same old radio receivers as usual.