Under the radar

I got told today that "I was one of the boys"in reference to the students at school. It seems that I do things under the radar. Ok, I do. This one has been a fun one.

Since the quakes and the shorter day we have had some of the activities at school stop, plus it hasn't helped when one of the building that held some equipment is now to be demo'd.

B Radio Logo

The school has a radio station which has been developed over a number of years and has all the gear to do something great. I looked at a similar setup at my previous school and it was looking to be over $10,000.

With building being demo'd we have been allowed in to recover equipment, in this case an amp, cable and outdoor speakers. These were sitting in a garage at school when I saw them while working on a fundraising cause. I then thought that at the beginning of the year we were looking at getting the station back up and going, but things change pretty quickly and roadblocks get created.

Radio Room and some
of the gear

So, in a quick chat with one of the staff, we talk about cleaning up the radio room, and the next step, this took a week to organise. The end of the year stuff is painful as the students suck so much out of you as they realise that they have credits to obtain and needed to have worked smarter through the year.
The second step was the location of the receiving equipment. The location suggested would require setup and packdown each day that would cause a number of issues with the room, so that was out. It was then suggested using the outdoor speakers on the hall, asking the right people and a quick check on what is there and how we could connect it up, a couple of days later we have developed a 50m extension cord to hook up the speakers from the old amp cupboard to the clock room 50 metres away with a cat5e cable. This allows for us to not have to enter the building again.

Receiver and connection

The amazing hookup
cat5e to speaker cable

Though it did raise the question of wether you could connect the equipment up through cat5e cable, a quick internet search and some ideas, it seems like you can, I have use a pair for each feed, so two pair for each speaker.

The station has a large collection of nzonair cd's which have been digitalised. This allows for a better mix as well as we can automate the station if needed.
So far 36 cd's have been stored, we have a couple of hundred to go, but this could be a project for a student as part of next years class.

Hopefully we will go live tomorrow and I will take some photos to add to the information here.

I am looking for different opportunities for students to be involved in activities at school.