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I’ve written a bit about the “bet” that UtahFM is making by making its mark online instead of via the FM band.
As you may have heard, WiMax is coming to Salt Lake City. (Full disclosure: I am employed by a competitor to Sprint ).
At any rate, there are many — including myself — who believe that while WiMAX is not a particularly turnkey solution for generalized Internet access, it does have very interesting possibilities. Obviously, one of the biggest of those is breaking down the last wall for Internet radio — the automobile.
So, I wanted to share this post with you from one of Florida’s radio gods, Brock Whaley who has been broadcasting since 1971. After 30 years in radio, he thought to himself, “Hmmm, WiMAX + laptop + car + Hawaii == radio heaven?”
You’ll like what he found: read his post for full details
We need laptops!
If you have one in working order, you can donate it to us. We need several for broadcasting live events. It doesn’t have to be a particularly powerful machine or even particularly recent. Ideally, we’d find something that’s lightweight and easy to lug around but we’ll make do with whatever you come up with.
Contact me if you have something that might work. We’ll get it of your basement, and we’ll introduce it to nice people and bring it to fun shows. We’ll buy it a beer (OK, a couple beers) and the morning after we’ll even cook it breakfast.
You know you want to — email me and we’ll talk.
If you do, we need your help.
Volunteer to be a language translator for UtahFM!
Part of our mission is to serve the community. This means the *whole* community, even those that don’t speak English. If you’d like to spend a few hours helping to translate our website into Spanish, French, Chinese or whatever language you happen to speak, you’ll be helping us expand our reach around our community and around the world. You can work whenever you like and do a bit at a time and you can even collaborate with others who are working on the same language — helping to improve your language skills and theirs.
Interested? Email me and we’ll start talking.
Well, we just had a midday outage. Sorry about that. We lost our primary server and it wasn’t coming up after a power cycle. Luckily, it did eventually make it back to the land of the living but it’s throwing some serious hardware errors. Hopefully it remains stable through the day. We’ll keep an eye on it.
Obviously, Murhpy heard that we added additional redundent Internet connectivity at the studio last night and decided that hardware failure would be the best response. *sigh*
So, if you happen to have a spare SuperMicro Xeon motherboard in your basement that you’re not using….
Are you a PHP/Perl/JavaScript programmer who likes to create interesting pages and do interesting things for interesting people? Interested in a job where a paycheck is replaced by vodka shots at the bar after a night of hacking?
Apply to be a volutneer hacker with UtahFM. We can’t pay you, but you’ll get to work with cool people, learn a lot, and you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want while becoming a community radio hero. All our code is licensed via Creative Commons and all our our music licensing is done via code that you still need to write, so you’d better hurry up.
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but it appears that a deal is all but done between terrestial radio heavy-hitter Clear Channel and the current online king of personalized music streaming, Pandora.
What does this means for the future of online radio? Not much in the short run, but if there’s one thing that music licensing companies DO seem to respect — it’s a corporate powerhouse like Clear Channel. Perhaps not co-incidentally, the issue of online music licensing is back in the Senate.
Came across this very nice post today.
That’s the way you build meaningful and lasting communities. One listener at a time.
While we’ve had a fantastic launch, knowing that people are settling on UtahFM as a part of their media diet is what’s heartening. While I’m a graphing and data visualization nut, it doesn’t mean that I really care all that much about what the raw number of connected listeners is.
What really thrills me about the Internet and about new media specifically is that people are empowered to select just what they want to hear and they can hear it from anywhere. It still amazes me when I notice that somebody is listening to the stream from Hawaii, or from Japan. I suspect it’s the same feeling that Hertz or Marconi must have had when they fired up old spark-gap transmitters for the first time — the feeling that a very small transmission was about to make a very, very big difference.
Broke the map last night and didn’t notice until now. It’s all fixed up.
Remember kids, don’t drink and derive.
UPDATE: I broke the graphs, too. Thanks Andy, for pointing this out. I suck. ;]
We have Utah Free Media bumper stickers!
If you want one and you’re downtown, just drop by Urban Utah or XMission Internet and shout, “Hey, give me the loot!”
OK, don’t shout that exactly. You’ll scare people. But do come by and ask for a sticker.
Just be polite.
I love everything about this photo:
This says everything you need to know about community radio.
Slightly out of focus, a little thrown together, but in the end you hit your stride and find that transition between tracks, straddled between something that’s about to end and something that’s just beginning — the perfect fade.
Yes, we had an outage today. Here’s the story:
We have a UPS in the studio that provides clean power to our gear. It also has a large orange button on the front with a pulsating light. It’s a light that would charm snakes, angry rats or most importantly — small children.
You can figure out what happened. UtahFM unplugged is not as acoustic and trendy as you might imagine.
So, the moral of the story is this: you can have the best gear and engineering in the world and the one thing you never planned for was a bored toddler.
With that lesson, go forth and build things but for the love of god – go easy on the glowing lights. They look cool, but they might just sink your battleship.
This has to be my favorite search string yet for somebody on the hunt for UtahFM via Google:
take+a+peek+in+the+funky+trunk
If this was you, stand up and take a bow.
Oh, and we’re going live tomorrow. That’s an important detail. 
A few people have asked me how to wrap a bunch of songs up into a nice package for a preview show.
On linux, it’s a matter of two commands:
There’s certainly a way to do this on Windows, but I’m guessing it doesn’t involve me typing two commands and then going out for a beer. ;]
The on-air studio is fully built and the results are impressive:
Our thanks to Ted McDonough at the City Weekly for writing an excellent article about UtahFM
We’ve been thrilled with the response of the community to UtahFM thus far.
Fewer than 50 chances remain to become one of Utah Free Media’s Founding Members. Will you donate today?
The Desert News and the Salt Lake Tribune have both picked up on utahFM today.
I think you’ll all be very impressed with the photos from the remodel.
We went from this
to this
View all the full resolution photos here.
We had so many kind and helpful volunteers who came out. Thank you everybody so much!
Listen up all you people who have said you wanted to help!
This Saturday at 9 AM we’ll be painting and working in the new downtown studio. Please email radio@utahfm.org if you’d like to help.
Gavin from Gavin’s Underground wrote up a nice interview with Troy and a follow-up piece about UtahFM.
Thanks Gavin!
Apparently X96 mentioned utahFM this morning. I know this is probably the wrong crowd to ask, but if anybody has a recording of that, I’d love a copy.
I’m really impressed by what these folks are doing.
OK, Campcaster uses Postgres which I have no experience with.
Anybody have any good book recommendations for learning how to administrate one of these things?
Please join us tomorrow morning for the Salt Lake City Weekly parade!
We’ll be handing out information about UFM and meeting new friends. I understand there will also be a UFM giant marching elephant…
You can march with us if you like. The parade starts promptly at 8:10 AM. Don’t forget to wear green.
We’re meeting with our brave construction volunteers to begin the work of transferring our unfinished space into a full-functioning broadcast and production studio.
The first meeting will be held on Tuesday morning, March 18th. If you would like to help out with some light work, please contact me.
Radio Free Utah received a cease and desist letter from KRCL, demanding that we discontinue the use of the mark “Radio Free Utah”. KRCL does not have a registered trademark under that name. Presumably, their belief is that they have a right to the name under common law.
After review with our very knowledgeable legal counsel, we have decided to refocus our efforts on creating the best station possible and not on a prolonged legal battle.
In the interest of transparency, we invited community members to participate in our naming process.
I’m very pleased with the discussion and I’m even more pleased to announce the name of Utah’s newest and most truly independent radio station: Utah Free Media — utahfm.org.
The new server that will be the power plant for this entire operation has been ordered. If you’re especially interested, here are the specs:
(1) 2.33 Ghz Xeon processor
(2) 2G RAM, for 4G total
(1) Supermicro server-class ATX motherboard
(1) 250G SATA II system drive
(1) 3ware 9550 4-port RAID card
(4) 750G SATA II drives for music storage
(1) Antec Titan case with room for 10 drives, 650 watt power supply
With another RAID card, this thing should hold about 1.5 million MP3s. That ought to cover it…
Troy and I spent some time down at the new studio space getting an idea of the tremendous amount of work that’s ahead of us.
Full resolution photos of the new space
So, know anybody in construction? We could use some help.
I wrote the following FAQ for Radio Free Utah:
Frequently Asked Questions about Radio Free Utah
Q: What is Radio Free Utah?
Radio Free Utah is a non-profit entity, founded by people who know community radio and will rely on the involvement of volunteers who are dedicated to quality on-air programming, are already trained to use a board, and, in some cases, have an established listenership from their programs at KRCL. It is founded around the idea that community radio should be as transparent as possible. To this end, RFU is committed to posting as much information about the processes and procedures governing the station not just to the volunteers, but to the listeners as well.
Some people have asked what they can do to help. Please visit radiofreeutah.org and do two things:
- Join the mailing list. The link is on the lower right.
- Send us a donation. Our first-year licensing costs alone may run into the thousands of dollars. Though we’ll be running pledge drives and asking for donations, we have to pre-pay for our first year fees. We have a PayPal link on radiofreeutah.org that’s safe and secure.
I walked into a meeting with an idea.
I’ve long believed very strongly in public radio and years ago, I used to be a volunteer at KRCL. At the time, I was introduced to Gena Edvelson who got me into radio production by organizing a team to do an independent documentary of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. I continued to produce short pieces for the station for about two years. I teamed up with the extraordinary artist Melissa Bond who produced a series of short stories in tandem with mine.
At the library meeting, volunteers and listeners were very upset with station management for making changes to the music format. Generating the most controversy was the decision to fire daytime volunteers and replace them with paid DJs.
As a very lucky employee of the Salt Lake institution, XMission run by the veritable Pete Ashdown, I thought that maybe I could help. Since 2005, XMission has provided free streaming of KRCL’s broadcast which amounts to a donation of around $30,000 in service every year. Since we already have the streaming infrastructure in place, offering space to fired DJs seemed like a natural extension of our desire to serve the community which has served us at XMission well since 1993.
The offer was made and almost immediately things started to fall into place. With considerable help from Troy and Teri Mumm and their excellent web design firm as well as help from dedicated KRCL listener, Terra Cronshey, generous donations thus far from displaced programmer Babs DeLay and so many others, we’ve managed to make considerable progress.
In the future, I’ll be documenting progress as we move the station from conception into reality. Please join me.
I am Michael Place.
I am work in the XM Labs division at XMission Internet as a project manager for emerging technology.
I’m thrilled to be one of the founding members of Utah Free Media, born from the ashes of some changes at Utah’s oldest community radio station, KRCL.
The blog you are reading is Radiojournal — a site that documents the process of setting up a streaming radio station for a community from the ground up.
If you’re a stalker and you need to know more about me so that you can get ready to spring your trap, you’ll probably want to start by following my Twitter feed.