Radio Site visit Report

Executive Summary
The main purpose of this report is to present the information collected at 4 Site visits to different radio staions conducted during third week of october ,2012 . The methods of analysis include face to face interview with Station DJs , Scheduling/Programming staff and Technical staff . Additionally site visit gave us a good opportunity to closely different systems and methods they use to perform day to day broadcast operations. The sites was visited after the follow-up of different phases adopted for the selection process . Different phases which perfmord so far includes a)exaustive comparision and tabulation of both Dalet and VCS system , b)Price comparision, c)POC (Proof Of Concept ), d) Site visit by two engineers to different sations using Dalet or VCS systems Each site visit report includes information about the sytem they use , The following is a list of the site visit reports included in this report: Meeting with Mr Rainer Eichom at ON-AIR Digital office ,Germany on 17th Oct, 2012. Site visit to MDR , Halle , Germany on 18th Oct, 2012 Site visit to VRT, Brussels, on 19th Oct,2012 Morning. Site visit to Vmma, Brussels on 19th Oct, 2012 Evening. Site visit to Catalunya Radio , Bacelona on 23 Oct, 2012

MDR Site Visit :

Facts and Figures:

Central public broadcaster in Germany having 5 radio stions and many regional channels broadcasting different content ranging from pop music to News .Additional MDR broadcasts various tv channels System used: VCS Dira used by all 5 stations for the last 5 years continiously using complete Windows plat form upgraded from unix platform two years ago.

Uses Standard HP hardware (server and workstation) with VCS Mirroring techniques for high availability and a Carts player/Backup sytem in each studio inluding the editing studio . The same sytem is proposed to us. Interwiew with System admin: I had a very fruitful interview mainly with the Engineer , He is Satisfied with the support VCS provides and the overall performacnce of the vcs system. Many times support is achieved through VCS remotely connecting to their software using logmein. The engineer does not maintains sthe sytem too often but does plan a regular maintenanc e job once every 3 or 4 months in coordination with VCS . I discussed about the system monitoring and Auditing , which thy do not do actively even though the auditing is available with the system Remote maintenace is done through a Admin PC using Windows xp to remotely connect to differenct servers to check the health or solve issues . The engineer gave very postive and relaxed feedback on the back end with mirroring being used . Scheduling Feedback: MDR uses Music master for scheduling , the person was scheduling for three stations, using the MM for last 5 years and he found it very good software and good integration with Dira I asked the person incharge to show how he does the scheduling and I could see the schedules being built in MM were immediately reflected in the Scheduler application of Dira . This is ofcourse controlled so they can allow the studio DJ to perform last minute changes. Again this is controlled through user rights. I also asked him if he would go for any other system for scheduling and he reply was a big NO as he also worked with Selector before and he said the biggest problem with selector was the complicated rules and also there was no PRELISTEN option in selecter for the scheules created. And there is all achieved through MM. Meeting the Staion DJ : The studio DJ was using both the Carts to play jingles and the on-air mahcine the monitors side by side . The DJ is very much satisfied with the system . I asked her to show how carts work and she could use the touch button to play the carts instantly . I asked what they use in emergency and she was confused as she does never used the emergency CD player or the carts player during any failure. She dos not even know that there is a CD player ready to be used in emergency which was a live proof of the system not failing any time . During performing regular maintenace they use adobe to go on air from the system recorded audio. When I asked about the dull user interface of Dira , they are used to the system quite long and have not seen/worked with any other system (like Dalet) before . However they wished it would be good to get more attractive interface . Absolutely no conerns found by the DJs

Meeting with Audio editing staff: Discussion on different topics including the integration of audobe audition as they use adobe as well as dira for editing heavily .

Commercials : Being a public Radio staion they do no have any commercials to play. Also they do not have HOOKS requirement.

Overall it was a very satisfactory visit

http://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/pdfs/SiteVisitReportTemplate.pdf http://services.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/471286/Site_Reports_for_Enginee rs_Update.pdf http://www.asha.org/uploadedFiles/CAASiteVisitReportTemplate.pdf http://www.nps.gov/blac/parkmgmt/upload/HoaglandRptBLAC.pdf http://www.ashanet.org/projectsnew/documents/1079/Site%20visit%20report,%20July%202012.pdf http://www.cpwr.com/pdfs/Perini/ExecSumFinal.pdf http://www.behavior.org/resources/288.pdf

References :
WEBSITE ADDRESSES