Naxxfish

We did it! High fives all round.

After a lot of preparation, sweat and blood we managed to broadcast live, for 11 hours a day for 3 days, from a pigshed in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a little tour of our makeshift station:

This is the Edit Suite and Tech Corner, fully set up. As I mentioned in Part II, we have the encoder on the back wall which encoded audio from the studio (coming up next), and sent it over the point to point wireless link. The edit machines saw a lot of action, as we (the tech team) dashed about the site transporting Marantz recorders from the various stages back to base to be edited for broadcast. They were also used to edit interviews and other bits of audio for broadcast. Once the editing was complete, the data was transferred to the Playout machine in the Studio, where they were added to the database and played out on air.

Here’s the studio. Presenter goes behind the desk, guests and co-hosts in front. We did a lot of mic swapping, and patching over the course of the weekend to accomodate different requirements. The studio ended up being used not only for live interviews and shows, but also for live musical performances! Below we see the rather excellent Harp for Hangovers performing a live set in the studio. We also had Lucy Kitt perform two tracks for us. The quality was excellent, and far better than we expected.

All in all, it was a very successful OB. The editing team have got many hours of live recordings to work with, which will hopefully start being played out on FM in the near future. As one of the OB’s I’ve helped with, I was extremely impressed at how smoothly it went. There were a few hicups, but nothing that caused any significant problems for the running of the TX. High fives indeed!

You can see the rest of my photos for the event on my flickr tag “lotf”.

• Part I
• Part II