102.9 today

[nrglcb2016]

whos using this freq now. was a very faint signal earlier but couldnt work out what it was between the static

[Albert H]

I've got a driver board running on that frequency in the bench at the moment. Perhaps you're near to my place?! It has an internet feed of "Arrow.nl" running through a limiter, stereo coder and into the exciter. The driver is doing about 22 Watts into a load.

[nrglcb2016]

im in dagenham m8 so if thats any help

[Albert H]

Then that's not me (unless we're got some weird tropospheric ducting going on!).

I found that a connection failed overnight - the power meter was showing zero. I found that the BNC connection at the output of the driver was dodgy, so the FET was running into an open circuit! Replacing the cheap 'n' nasty Chinese BNC socket with a good European one restored the output into the load - at exactly the same power as yesterday. These Mitsubishi FETs are tough little blighters!

I think that it's time for some nice little frequency-agile 12V 25 Watt rigs for festivals and the like. They'll be in ½-width 19" 1U cases, so the RDS generator , stereo coder and limiter can sit beside one in a 19" rack case. I'll include all the usual silly-proofing to prevent their destruction by idiots, and they'll leave LB's workshop at a sensible price.... It might be worth doing a nice "fat dipole" (wideband) to give a simple-to-use aerial, and the option of a good mains PSU that'll work off any supply voltage. All the punter would have to do is provide good quality stereo audio.

[nrglcb2016]

what i heard is interferance of 102.8 got rds of rdyoumut . im also getting this on 103.6 with the same rds sign

[pirateaddict]

Hi Albert.. These "festival" rigs sound interesting.. I'll keep a look out for these as i may well be in paid employment next week, yeah!

[Albert H]

They'll be on eBay by Christmas.

I was asked yesterday for several "microphone to aerial" portable systems at 1, 4 and 20 Watts. These will be a dual CD / MP3 player and a basic stereo mixer with PFL and remote starts on four stereo and two microphone channels, an audio processor - including microphone compressors and music bus compressor / limiters - connected through normalled insert points and proper level metering. All inputs - microphone and music - will be balanced. Microphones will be the choice of the purchaser. There will be an option to include a small "industrial" rack-mount computer with Linux, with automation and jingle / advert playing software pre-installed.

There will be an overall feed-forward stereo limiter, stereo encoder, RDS generator (synchronised to the stereo pilot) and a 1 / 4 Watt exciter board that can be used as a standalone low power rig. There will then be a 20 Watt PA to go on the end, probably using an old-fashioned 2N6083 or even a BLW60 since I've got tubes of them!

The whole thing will be fitted into a flight case, and there will be an optional short range UHF link to separate the Transmitter from the studio gear. All the relevant aerials and leads will be supplied, to make it a truly plug 'n' play system. It will have two 70 - 260V AC supplies - one for the studio end and the other for the transmitter. It will also be possible to power the whole thing from car, marine or caravan batteries, for use in the wilds.

The systems won't be cheap, but will be pretty bomb-proof and the connectors will be impossible to mess up - BNCs for link aerials, "N"-type for the output aerial, XLRs for microphones, mini-XLRs for music channel inputs and so on. Levels in the audio chain will conform to the industry norms, to make the system compatible with a wide range of other broadcast equipment.