Re: Galaxy IV & public radio

[TC Cheever <tc@chaostheory.com>]

David W. Harris wrote:
>  Oops!  After a very brief period of silence, the NPR 
> newscast came up, albeit with a major hum on the line. 
> This must have been a satellite feed, though, as I
> found the NHPR feed running about a second behind WBUR,
> Maine Public Radio, and Vermont Public Radio, which 
> probably all were using land lines.  

A post that I read on the Mac Evangelist made me wonder whether the NHPR feed
may have been an analog phone line, & the other feeds possibly RealAudio
feeds. 

The following post appeared today on the Mac EvangeList. It was written by
Mike Pappas, the Engineering Manager of KUVO, Denver Public Radio. I contacted
the author & received his permission to repost it to this list. Remember, it
came from the Mac Evangelist, so it's also an extremely pro-Mac post.

> Subject: Tidbit - G3 Saves NPR Station During Satellite Outage
> 
> Keyword: Advocacy, Macintosh in Action
> 
> This tidbit is from: 
> 
> Mike Pappas <mpappas@uswest.net>
> 
> As many of you know a communications satellite failure
> yesterday [5-19-98] left millions of pager customers 
> out of service along with hundreds of National Public 
> Radio Stations Nationwide without vital audio feeds.
> 
> NPR provided a standard analog telephone feed for most
> all of their programs. The audio quality of this feed
> was very poor.
> 
> They also provided a 56 Kps RealAudio feed on the 
> Internet. When I found out we could get the audio 
> feeds we needed from the net, I grabbed my 
> trusty PowerMac G-3 266 Mhz computer and 3 Com mpact 
> ISDN modem and headed down to my station. I plugged 
> the modem into our ISDN line, patched the computer's 
> audio output into our On Air board and entered the 
> SPID numbers. In less than a minute we were connected
> and getting NPR Morning Edition via RealAudio on the internet.
> 
> The system has been up and running ever since and we
> haven't had a spot of problem from it.
> 
> While our competitor station has still been using 
> analog feed from telephone lines, we have been 
> enjoying great audio from a G-3 Mac!


- -- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   TC Cheever * Deputy Minister of Chaos
 Chaos Theory * http://www.chaostheory.com  
  Original Sketch Comedy    ...and Stuff.
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