It’s not unheard of for a radio station to give away a car.
But not many radio hosts deliver it live to the lucky winner, while broadcasting from the car!
Here’s how your radio stations can accomplish this novel task, taking a cue from one of Australia’s most popular radio stations.
The subjects in this groundbreaking tech offering are the hosts of NOVA Entertainment’s Kate, Tim & Marty. The trio of hosts drove through Sydney’s peak-hour traffic while presenting their daily drive-time show.
In order to achieve this, they utilized SureStream technology on the APT IP CODEC to ensure professional delivery over public mobile internet connections.
NOVA Entertainment’s Technology Manager John Pearce is used to the offbeat requests of the programming team. He recently put together technical solutions to broadcast from the South African Jungle and while on an airplane.
For this “in-car” scenario, the most cost-effective and available technology was public, mobile internet. However, the link quality was unreliable, with many dropped packets and links.
Pearce turned to the APT SureStream technology to ensure a reliable connection offering high-quality audio.
The APT IP Audio Codec in the car was configured to run 6 bi-directional streams through three 4G modems, each connected to a different mobile carrier via six low gain mobile antennas mounted on a roof rack. These streams were connected back to two separate fiber internet connections at the studio. The engineering team opted to operate mono MPEG4 AAC-ELD algorithm in both directions with a 200ms receive buffer.
After the broadcast was successfully completed, Pearce was ecstatic.
“While there were lots of dropped packets and LOC errors on each individual stream, the reconstructed stream was flawless,” he said. “Not a single dropped audio packet, while mobile–that’s pretty impressive!”
APT SureStream technology is available from WorldCast Systems.
