I'm setting up one of these and have been told I can have £3000 funding but I have to have stuff spec'ed out by 2 hours from now! (4pm).

Ok... what do I need? A PC, mixing desk, mics, headphones, cables, CD players? and.... ?

LOL, 31st January....hmm..... well I'm not an expert but I guess the more you have to think about the better.

I'm not an audiophile but springing to mind - a microphone and stand, 2x CD players (I'm sure people will suggest here), a nice soundcard, some special radio station planning software of some sort? If there isn't a studio perhaps some special partitions to cut out excess sound?

I can't remember what people suggested re. hosting but are you running the main machine as a server too? If so you'd need to sort out what streaming platform you'll use.

Gareth

Ok well I'm just going for a high spec Dell for about £1000 to ensure future proofing and possible video editing for the future. I'm hoping the local college will give me a room and let me use their servers.

Couple of cd players

Mixing desk

Mics / headphones / cables

Anything else?

Check out some of the available stuff under broadcast here www.audiotools.co.uk . You can get mixing desk programs, but I'm not sure of the names of any.

Mics 2x Beyer M201 £153 ea.
Headphones 2x Beyer DT100 £102 ea.
Desk D&R Airmate £900
CD Players Denon DR-635's £400 ea.

Mic Arms, Speakers, Amp.... All from canford

Catalogue Numbers:
Microphone 92-001 £153.10
Mic Arm 53-001 £43.00
Table Bracket 53-002 £10.20
Headphones 54-103 £102.10
CD Player 93-630 £400.00

Airmate desk is from Preco UK.

Just go to RIcher sounds for the speakers and amp, just get the cheapest ones you can, they won't get the hammer. The mics, HDs and desk will.

Cool! Cheers Andy! Once again this BBS makes me look superhuman!

Thanks again.

Edit: Will we need speakers and amp even for Internet radio? Or will the outputs go directly into the PC?

Suppose not, the speakers are for control room monitoring, however if your presenter and guests are wearing headphones then you can do away with them.

Do you have to buget for an internet connection ??? Or do you have an existing backbone to jump onto. The Super Ja.net is often very useful if you are in a Uni building, they always have loads of spare BW as far as I can tell, we once used it for 100Mbps un compressed DV transmission for a project we were working on, nobody at the Uni's involved even noticed any slow down

Cheers

Cris.

The only official restriction for using ja.net is that it has to be related to higher/further education. Even a community project wouldn't be allowed to use it... and if you carry any advertising or make profit then forget it.

The university radio station I used to help out could only stream across ja.net because they carried no advertising, were a student union society and any money (not that there ever was) was plowed back into the society.

Yawn!

Hey I just provided the link, I left the full geekyness to the guys from the Uni who were setting up the custom software.

I think it was running at about 30Mbps per stream, Our connection hardly maxed out during transmission.

I'm not sure how they got permission to use Ja.net then? Maybe they didn't ask first

Cheers

Cris.

Well it's my job to know crap like that. I know the first year they streamed without asking permission but the following year the station manager was paranoid and made them check the legalities. The inter-site links aren't actually that quick (admittedly there are some fast nodes, Manchester is one of them) but some of the IT departments at these Uni's are actually quite accepting and open about using the network certainly internally anyway.

When I was first at Sheffield Uni we had one 9600 baud link to Janet. How things have changed.

How on earth could you share that across a university? Even before the WWW. It'd take an hour to send an email!

Back in 1989 not many people at Sheffield Uni even had access to email. There were a few Prime mini systems with dumb terminals. None of the PCs around were connected to Janet directly, they were just used as dumb terminals to connect to the Prime machines.

By the time I left in 1993 things were very different, lots of Sun workstations, Sun servers, PC Netware servers, SGI servers and hundreds of PCs all connected to the Internet proper.

For a while there was an odd situation where everyone was connected to the Internet, except the computer science department. They were convinced that it was full of hackers who couldn't be trusted to connect to the Internet, how wrong they were. Most of the compsci students had no idea about how to actually use a computer

When I was at Uni (well, what was Portsmouth Polytechnic) in 97-99 they "only" had a 30 meg connection to Janet. I've just looked at the topology map and it's a main POP now, 10 Gig no less!

Gareth