Tahw a Rissep!

Well, Morley FM has hit the airwaves, but our higher frequency of 94.9 FM doesn't carry as far. It actually does after a fashion, but is competing with strong signals from Radio Lincolnshire on 94.9FM to the South East and Radio Cleveland on 95FM to the North. Karen can pick us up in her office in Wakefield (with aerial positioned just so) and we had a confirmed hearing on Morley Bottoms as well, both firsts. The downer is that before, when the signal fluttered, it just dipped and hissed. Now, it flutters with breakthrough interference, or QRM in Radio Ham circles. My journey to Bradford loses the signal before I even reach junction 27, let alone the hotel at the end of the motorway feeder.

When we were down in the RSL bit (87.7/8/9), we only competed with other stations pushing out 10w or at most 25w signals (in rural areas). Now we are up amongst the big boys, there are hundreds of watts of power competing with our output which wouldn't even light the lamp in your fridge to full brightness.

We could get the mast higher, but it would need money or resources we don't currently have. Even 87.9FM wasn't available, being in use elsewhere nearby for some of our broadcast dates.

Fortunately, the online streaming is OK, although not from the studio. Instead, it is picked up by an old radio receiver in my spare room, fed into an aging laptop, streamed up to the docklands and pushed out to anyone who chooses to listen from our website link.

It strikes me as ironic that the school has a 10 meg connection but it doesn't work properly where we are: it has to go up my ADSL stream. Fortunately, another Member has agreed to lob in for my ISP bill, which will go up at least a Tenner over the next fortnight. (Although usage from Midnight to 8am is free, a time when we are only playing a sustaining service.)

The studio phone still doesn't work, after 9 months of being almost ready. Actually, it works if we plug it in to another bit of the network, but that area is not accessible to us out of hours. Being a Network based phone, we couldn't readily interface it to the studio kit anyway.

A BT line and broadband connection would have solved all of the problems, but the money wasn't available when we needed it.