Above: Caddy, the Cirencester College cat slept in the corner of the studio for much of the weekend.
Its now 1 week since the Corinium Radio broadcast finished and Ithink I’ve just about recovered…
The station was on air for 2 days – Saturday and Sunday – for its 12th broadcast since it was launched in 2006.
I think it went quite well… we managed to set the studio up in record time on Friday night – just an hour and a half (and that includes the time it took Liz, the chair of Corinium Radio’s committee, to go to Swindon and back when we realised that the transmitter didn’t come with cables – this due to the fact that we have switched to a different supplier and we had failed to check the details properly).
On Saturday however, there was a major panic as something with the transmitter wasn’t quite right! We were broadcasting online only for a good couple of hours whilst Malcolm got out the tool kit to fix the cable going between the aerial on the roof and the transmitter in the studio, which was broken. 🙁 It is an old cable now, and it probably doesn’t do much good to it when we chuck it out the window and put it back on the roof when we’re not using it. Being a classroom in a college for most of the year, we don’t want students playing with it… 😐
However, once we’d got those issues out the way, things went well. By midday we had got our link set up between the studio and the Cotswold Show ground, from where we did two live broadcasts (one on Saturday and one on Sunday) – Liz and Cameron on a mobile phone at the show ground, me in the studio with my (relatively new) laptop, the phone call running through Skype. I find it ironic that the Cotswold Show OB was the first programme to pass without any technical problems – because it wasn’t that long ago when a live OB caused major panic: even last year’s one went wrong, with our equipment not working.
In the afternoon I was able to sit back and relax a bit; after a busy Breakfast Show (for which I was ‘studio engineer/producer’ and pressed all the buttons whilst someone else spoke), I was on rota to do all the tech stuff for the Travellers’ Tales programme. A couple of days earlier we had recorded an interview with Matt and Bronwen Coe, a local couple who have been working in the Chiang Mai area of Thailand since 2006, which was very interesting.
In the evening I was on air with my own show – Music from the Decades – playing a mix of my favorite music, before we handed over to Mark Hill for Pure Talent, and had to squeeze a lot of musicians in to the studio. These sorts of live shows are quite fun, because we always get a good response from those listening in and the listener graphs for our online broadcast show a clear peak on Saturday evening. I was also around to do all the tech stuff for Nick Edwards’ show – ‘The Rock Show’ – which is always enjoyable as I never quite know what sort of music he’s going to turn up with, but its always something I’ve never heard of before, or maybe a song I’ve never heard of even if I am familiar with other pieces by the same artist.
Sunday was fairly quiet as we had a lot of pre-recorded programmes on. But our Breakfast Show was very good – we had about 8 guests in the space of 3 hours, including Karen from Cirencester College, Joanna from the Library (a former Corinium Radio member) and local band Ethemia who came in after e-mailing us on Saturday night.
The second day of broadcasting from the Cotswold Show went well, and I think our traffic reports were successful too. For the first time since we started to Cotswold Show Travel News, the traffic was bad for quite a long time, and we were getting reports from people phoning in of people attempting to turn in the central reservation and getting stuck, blocking two lanes of traffic, and people going the wrong way round the Stroud roundabout to get out of the queue. We kept our traffic reports going for much longer than we had originally planned to.
Overall I think it was a good broadcast, but there are some things which need sorting if we are continue in to the future. There are some exciting developments in the pipeline but only once we’ve got our equipment working as it should!!
I’m going to continue with my Summer now, but will keep you updated with what’s going on radio-wise.
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FH.
09/07/2012: Amended spelling error in title. URL left unchanged.
