We have finally launched the station today! After just about 3 years in the making it’s long overdue. If you’re wondering, the delay has had a lot to do with the fact that we lost access to our original antenna site. It has taken me about a year to resolve this issue. We went through an absurd number of hoops, and the solution we currently have is far from ideal. Our antenna is literally on a rooftop, but being on the air at all is much better than not!
I may make a longer article sometime about the journey that this radio station has taken, but I won’t get bogged down in this now. We had an insane space constraint to work within due to the various adjacent channel protections
I’m personally thrilled to finally come online! Thank you to everyone who has made this possible!
Even so, we have fairly decent coverage all the way to Palmer Lake which is surprising. We are also already making plans for raising the antenna onto a higher structure to improve our coverage down south, especially downtown. This will be our first major push after we get through the initial launch.
Where is the SDR?
It’s still here! Our excited is fed with a GNURadio flowgraph that generates the MPX audio for the exciter. We have plans to add some fun hooks to this.
That isn’t to say the SDR exciter is totally gone. For now, the strength of adjacent channels and antenna placement makes full-time HD operation not worth the dividing the transmitter power for, but we do also have an experimental HD transmitter that does work. We will likely experiment with this on occasion going forward. For now, everything is run through a 100% FCC compliant Armstrong FM exciter and PA. We will more seriously consider bringing the HD signal online permanently once the antenna is up a bit higher.
Where is the code?
We will post a github repository once we get some time to get everything organized and ready for public release
What’s next?
We will start by gathering more content and establishing our schedule. After this, we will begin fundraising and planning for improving our coverage. Want to know how to help out? Donate or Contact us today!