Cambridge 105's coverage of Cambridge Rock Festival 2014. 

Music from three music stages. Carried across four digital wireless hops - covering a distance of almost ten miles - from the festival site at Haggis Farm, via the Gwydir Street studios, and onto the FM transmission site at OLEM church, Hills Road (plus a feed to our 14 internet streams). Feedpoints handled with three linux boxes, including a Raspberry Pi, with a further seven linux boxes in supporting roles. Diverse, remotely switchable analogue and digital backup feeds. Digitally archived at multiple bitrates. Satellite news backhaul (with auto intro and outro inserts). Automated, scheduled source switching. Remote, automatic RDS traffic flag signalling. Dynamic RDS and stream schedule updates. Link plus silence monitoring and alerting, with emergency programme fallback.

All handled using open source software with help from some jimmy jammy coding, skip surfed gear, copious amounts of gaffa tape, along with the mystical waving of a soldering iron.

Budget? Not much more than the cost of buying an annual BBC licence (and it probably wouldn't keep the local commercial station in hob-nobs).

Yeah, man, but forget the tech - it's all about the music.... 

How does it sound?*.... You be the judge....


* The buzzin's real on-stage, musician crafted analogue buzz - no buzz was added, taken away or injured whilst travelling through the transmission chain.
"If you're buzzin', we aim to keep it that way."

Two tin cans and a length of virtual string

Another recording through a different, hybrid OB chain.

This is an analogue VHF link from an OB feed, followed by a 5.8 Ghz single hop feed. The live band feed is setup and mixed by myself.

Soothsayer - 06/09/2014

A recording from the live performance of the http://www.thefreddiehallband.com/ in Huntingdon Market Square as part of the Christmas Light switch on ceremony.

VHF analogue link, 2 x digital hops and through the broadcast processor. This recording is taken post processing, direct from the 128 kbps webstream.

BoffinTechnology