From What The Wiki?!

Not everything on this campsite always works fluently.

Last night, a disagreement in who owns the airwaves almost ended up in destruction of the radio cabin and it's inhabitants.

(note: this article got updated after a talk with two radio coordinators)

What happened?

On a radio group meeting where the time slots were divided, some radio makers from ASCII claimed a night slot (0:00 till 3:00) for their program. Appartently something went wrong and the slot was taken by other people. This was communicated to the ASCII a few hours before, and it a new slot was offered from 03:00 till 06:00. However, since one was agreed that the ASCII would move to the later hours, from 3:00 till 6:00.

At 2:00 the ASCII radio team phoned the radio to let them know that they would make live interviews from the Wireless Village. A studio was set up there, that was sending out a Ogg Vorbis audio stream (it had been up since 22:00). The radio people said ok, so at 3:00 the studio was crowded and people in the village were ready to start their program. However, listening to the radio, the switch to the village stream was never made. The ASCII radio team phoned the studio again and they said they were running a bit late and would switch in 20 minutes. So, the live interviews from the Wireless Village were delayed. After half an hour, there was no signal that the radio was switching over. There was just some music on, nothing happening. So the ASCII radio team called the studio again. The person in the studio replied that they changed the plan and were not going to switch to stream the Wireless Village after all. A DJ was going to do the night slot.

This resulted in an angry crowded of disappointed radio fans going to the radio cabin. The DJ wasn't even there yet, and when he arrived it turned out that he had just been informed 10 minutes before that there was a free slot. This made people even more angry. A discussion started, where one studio guy proclaimed that "this equipment was his" and he can do whatever he wants with it. Since the crowd contained several people involved in making community radio, this was not a very tactical remark.

Some of the ASCII radio fans gained entrance to the cabin and demanded that the radio would swith to the stream right now. Under some almost physical threats, the camp radio crew started to try to connect to the stream. This cooled down the situation a little bit. But then the weirdest event happened: it turned out that the people in the radio studio were not able to connect to a live icecast stream from the internet!

After trying to connect for one hour, switching from OGG Vorbis to MP3 and confirming over phone that people in the rest of the world could pick up the stream without problems, the radio crew asked for a laptop from the Wireless Village because they couldn't manage. Since it was almost 6:00 by then and a morning program was about to take over, the radio from the wireless village was cancelled and a very disappointed group left the studio.

As one of the people going to the studio, i was very amazed and angry about the whole situation. I did not think it was possible that a radio studio in this camp would be so self-minded that they didn't even think of making live connections. Maybe there was another reason for denying access to the airwaves that i am not aware off, but even then a little bit more communication might have helped, because this event made many people very angry. I was close to turning the studio container upside down by myself.

I hope this article will help people to think about what free radio actually means and will help them when setting up free radio in their own community.

the radio stream from WTH sucked almost all the time

WTH radio makers: get a life!