Sometimes I feel as if I'm stuck in an ocean filled with millions of internet and commercial radio stations and the truth is, I am! With so many choices plus terrestrial radio at your doorstep, how can we stand out and make ourselves unique? The answer is not an easy one. First of all, the sound quality of our station must be great! That alone can be a daunting task. The format is also important. There is so much competition. Personally, I will not play music that I can't lis

When you're not an engineer, getting the sound right can be a maddening task! I added a new audio processor to Edgewater Gold Radio and was working on getting the sound just right. As audiophiles know there are many many settings and unless you know specifically how each setting affects your output sound, you will be literally working in the dark. Yesterday afternoon, I attempted to "play" with the settings without the help of someone who is very familiar with processors. The

The days of spending thousands of dollars on sound processing for radio stations are gone thanks to the advance of some great technology. Radio stations use automation software to run their programming. Some software contains it's own adjustable processing modules but there are many plugins that are very reasonably priced that can sound very close to that $5,000 optimod. You can get many of these plugin for under $100. The processing plugin for Edgewater Gold Radio cost me $3

When I first started Edgewater Gold Radio, it began as a Part 15 station serving my condo community. Problem, nobody in my condo community listened, except one guy in 3L. The power allowed by the FCC without obtaining a license is extremely low. 1/10 of a watt for AM and about 1/40th of a watt for FM with lots of antenna restrictions. I lived in a heavily populated area with lots of buildings and concrete. This is no good for Part 15 broadcasting. My transmitter was on my ter

Most radio station owners and operators always strive for excellence. Sometimes we're perfectionists expecting everything to go perfectly all the time. In reality, this isn't the case. There is always something that we're trying to improve. Before automation, we had to deal with equipment failures. I remember working at a radio station where all of the music was on vinyl records. We had two turntables and in the middle of my show, one of the preamps on the turntable gave out.

One of the most frustrating things about Windows 10 is that it seems to have a mind of it's own. It pushes updates through every now and then and automatically shuts down your computer. I run Edgewater Gold Radio on a computer that uses Windows 10. I've checked off "No automatic updates" but this software seems ignore these commands. There aren't as many updates as there were when the software was first introduced. I do get a message indicating that there is a new update. I

Dan Ingram was manning the microphone at 77 WABC radio in New York City back in 1965, when all of a sudden the power started going out of the music. The cart machines began to grind to a crawl . . . then the lights went out. They went out all over New York City. In fact the entire Northeast went dark from Maine to southern New Jersey. From Wikipedia: An aircheck of New York City radio station WABC from November 9, 1965 reveals disc jockey Dan Ingram doing a segment of his aft

If you are running commercials on your radio station, a big question could be how should I schedule them? In the 60s and 70s commercials were run frequently in between songs. WABC in New York City would play a song, talk run a commercial or two play another song or two and then another commercial. It didn't seem to affect the audience since at the time WABC held 25% of the entire radio audience in the New York metropolitan area. Today's trend is very annoying in my opinion. M

If you.re a radio programmer, one of the things that can gradually ruin you is complacency. As programmers, we are always tweeking our formats even if what we're doing is working well. If you're programming a music station, you should be changing the rotation periodically, adding additional songs, retiring some songs and adding some new features to your program from time to time. Tweeking is not the same a "changing." For instance as an oldies station, I recently, took out th

Terrestrial radio is vulnerable to severe weather. I can't tell you how many times while I was on the air and a thunderstorm or ice storm hit knocking the station off the air. We were plunged into darkness in an instant. Most of the time we were off the air for hours, days sometimes. A couple of stations had backup transmitters. I had to make my way with a flashlight to the transmitter room and attempt to fire up the auxiliary transmitter which ran off a generator. This coul