Compression, Loudness and Coverage – A Trade Off
It was always touted as the thing you wanted to be – the loudest on the dial. It was even said on occasion that it could help improve your coverage in rough patches. This...
D/Line Radio Blog
Modern Protocol Problems with an Old Firewall
Legacy systems are part of any mature technical environment. While I was a combination of both impressed and shocked when recently presented with a SunOS 5.7 box (OS dated 1998!) I had to assist...
Reading Cart Chunk with PowerShell
Look at the audio files in any professional radio playout system. They’ll likely be linear WAVE files with the associated metadata stored in the cart chunk format. With this information it’s usually enough to...
NATing (well, PATing) Specific Address Ranges on a Fortigate
It’s a simple little thing I struggled to find any real documentation on but can entirely be done on Fortigate firewalls. The challenge was simple – take a network of made of globally routable...
First Steps into OpenDaylight with Brocade
It’s not often that catch-up meetings with vendors lead to anything particularly exciting but a recent one I attended with Brocade was a little different. While Brocade have had Openflow support for a very...
Logging Failure Reasons in FreeRADIUS
FreeRADIUS is an incredibly powerful RADIUS server and a tool I’m currently taking through a proof of concept as a possible replacement for Microsoft NPS. While the debug output of FreeRADIUS is fantastic in...
Moving a Point-to-Point Microwave Link
At one station I volunteer for, we use a 1.5GHz microwave link to connect between the studio and the transmitter site on top of a hill nearby. Now I should stress that microwave link...
Flipping Over to Your Competitor?!?
Weirdly, I had a problem I’ve not seen for years crop up recently. And it all started with complaints about car radios flipping between us and a competitor radio station. That’s not a good...
LLDP, Voice and Port Security on Comware 7
Getting a practical deployment of 802.1x on the wired network running Comware 7 is something that’s been on my radar for a while now. Until recently, we had a working (for our system) configuration...
Plotting for Improvement
It’s something a lot of community radio stations here in the UK are trying to improve – their FM coverage footprint. While the 25 watts ERP that Ofcom often licence stations at is usually...