Maintaining a 24 hour radio service
takes a fair bit of technology and configuration to deliver. In order to ensure
our station remains on the air for the patients we’ve got a fairly impressive
setup, most of which depends on technology. Below is some of the technology
we’ve invested in to make Bay Trust Radio work and sound the way it does.
Studio 1 Mixing Desk: The heart of any studio is the mixing desk. We
have a Sonifex mixer in our studio 1.
Studio 2 Mixing Desk: Allen & Heath broadcasting mixer.
Audio Processing: We use a Audessence ALPS-1 audio processor to
make sure that the audio and speech is of the highest quailty
Telephone System: We take a lot of calls at Bay Trust Radio. In
fact we have 5 incoming lines. 2 Trust extensions, 1 direct line from Hospedia,
a private line for volunteers and an IP line. To handle all these lines we have
Cisco IP telephone system which manages our calls and allows calls from any of
our lines. Calls can be picked up in the studios or office and sent directly to
the desk for broadcast if required. All callers get our station output as their
music on hold whilst waiting.
Servers: We have 2 servers which maintain the service. Our
primary file server store all the music and files for the playout systems.
These are replicated in real time so if we have a failure on one we can
immediately switch to the other. Other server include remote access systems,
intranet, web filtering and streaming servers.
Uninterruptible Power: Being in a hospital environment there are always
things which can affect our power supply, generator tests or pre planned
maintenance for example. All essential equipment is maintained by UPS. These
can keep the station running for at least 30 minutes with no power at all or
until the main power is restored. Our UPS’s are fed by the generator which
means the equipment stays online the whole time.
Automation Automatic Playout: Being a small charity we can’t provide live
programming 24 hours a day so when we’re not around we let the computer do it
for us. We invested in software from Psquared called Myriad. Myriad allows our
programmes to go out when we’re not there. We can tell the system exactly what
we want to play or it’s even smart enough to pick the music for us based on
rules we set.
Silence Detection: Sometimes things go wrong and if they do the
station can fall silent. We use software to detect if there is silence for more
than two minutes. If that happens an automated failsafe service will start
playing and an email alert will be sent to various people to alert them of the fault.
The email also contains screen shots of the automation playout system showing
the last thing it was doing before it went silent.
Live Assist: We don’t use records at Bay Trust Radio, in fact
we rarely use CD’s or Minidiscs. Our Myriad system provides us with what we
call the ‘Audiowall’. This is a huge database of music, categorised by decade
and searchable by numerous fields. If a patient phones the studio for a
request, we can tell them if we have the song whilst they’re on the phone and
it can be next song to come on the air.
Software : Our list of software is endless Myriad Play out,
Autotrack Pro Local Voice Tracking & Remote Voice Tracking, Scoop Capture
& Scoop Edit, Online Content Processor, Audio TX.
News On The Hour: Listeners to Bay Trust Radio can keep up to date
with national and international news courtesy the Sky News service which we
subscribe to. SKY provide a 2 minute news bulletin on the hour, every hour.
This is delivered to our studio live from London via a special satellite
receiver and the automated system can bring the news in automatically when
we’re not around.
Listen Online: Our service is primarily for the patients, staff
and visitors of The Westmorland General Hospital, The Furness General Hospital
& The Royal Lancaster Infirmary.The reason for making our programmes
available online is that patients of the hospital, some who had been in
hospital for a long time would enjoy our service but never had the opportunity
to listen after they left the hospital. We now offer listeners the chance to
‘Take Bay Trust Radio Home’ via a free media stream right here on our website.
Of course, anyone else is very welcome to tune in and enjoy the service.
Listen on PC (staff): Hospital staff form a large part of our audience
on a daily basis. Since 2010 we’ve offered staff working in the hospital the
opportunity to listen to our service via their computer on an internal stream.
Using the Trust’s internal network anyone inside the hospital with a set of
speakers and a windows computer can tune into Bay Trust Radio – and they do in
their masses.
Webcams: There are 3 webcams watching Bay Trust Radio 24
hours a day. We have one in each studio and the other in the office. The
cameras take a snapshot every 30 seconds and upload to our external web server.
VPN (Virtual Private Network): To allow our volunteers access to our internal
network and for outside broadcasts to work we have a fully secure VPN. This
means that once dialled in, volunteer’s home computers appear as part of our
internal network. They can then use our intranet, take remote control of our
computers or perform other functions such as remote voice tracking without
having to physically come to the studio.
