Community Media/KRUU FM/Tech
Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page. |
Getting a radio station off the ground and broadcasting is not strictly a big deal. Once you've got your basic hardware and a little audio know-how it's pretty easy to get a signal out to a neighborhood. With a bit of work and ingenuity the neighborhood starts encroaching out to your community. And your community extends to your township. And soon your little community neighborhood project is sending cool tunes and good vibes to every recess of the globe.
The step from low-power neighborhood broadcast to global reach is pretty easy in today's world. Thanks to the availability of low-cost hardware and Free software, let alone the readily-available instructions to put it all together, it's a relatively easy task to contribute your voice to meaningful international media.
KRUU started off with some advantages over many grassroots community radio projects. These contributed to making it a bit easier for KRUU to take a head-long dive into 24/7 operations from day one. With a little bit of foresight and planning we believe that the head-long diving is the recommended approach to community media. After all, why do it if you're not going to do it all the way, right?!
This page details the technology that went into making KRUU work. KRUU uses more technology than most operations require, so the document's sections start with simple solutions and go into more complex. Detailed implementation is provided as links back to the KRUU's main documentation site, in the interest of not duplicating effort.
The details are broken down by function, so that expansion to more complicated realms is a gradual process.