Last day at bFM

Today was my last morning, for now, as a news volunteer at bFM.

This is definitely what I'll miss most about Auckland! I've listened to bFM breakfast for years, and I was thrilled to be there.

The team are great. Jose Barbosa has been lovely, very patient, understanding and encouraging.
The other news vollies have been great – and they'll go as far they want to, too. Plenty of talent!

Bonnie is incredibly hard-working producing Breakfast, and it's host, Mikey Havoc, really is like that. A real people-person.

Degen again…

Oops… I dropped my Degen the other day, out of my jacket pocket and onto the tarmac. Btteries came loose but otherwise fine… I thought.

I was just outside the house, and when I got in I realised the audio was muted even when cans weren't plugged in.

So I took a deep breath and opened it up, eventually smoothing out the lower contact on the
headphone jack, to allow the audio to the speaker when there wasn't a plug in there.

Put it back together, it was working again. Except for some distortion when the volume was a little bit loud – not too loud mind! It sounded like something loose on the speaker. I opened it up again but couldn't access the front of the speaker, without removing it. I don't have the gear or confidence to do that.

After a while the distortion got too bad, so I thumped the radio on my knee. Well it works with some machines.

This time, it didn't.

But it did make the aluminium face plate start to peel off.

Straight in there, I peeled it back enough to see the speaker, under its little gauze veil. I gently touched the centre paper with a small screwdriver, and the distortion went away.

Cool!

Super-glued it back down. Looks kinda bumpy. Let's call it character.

Degen D1105 in NZ

My Degen 1105 finally arrived by post from Ireland on Saturday. Hurray!

It works a treat here. FM reception of Radio National in central Auckland is absolutely fine – no more of that hiss that came with the Pure PocketDAB 2000 (which, incidentally, has failed the exact same way the first one did, but after an even shorter time).

My 1105 has lost it's telescopic antenna, but still gets all the local FMs fine. On the move is also fine, as it uses the headphone wire as antenna when it's there.

Shortwave hasn't done much for me so far – a bit of Radio Australia, some China, and a couple of unidentified, maybe Russian language.

Mediumwave… it's like I expected, and my it's odd. Nothing, certainly during the day, from any other country.

All in all, rather happy to have it here.

Spectrum

Most of the best radio I've heard so far in New Zealand has been on Radio New Zealand National. I have a particular fondness for Spectrum. I am proud to tell people of the training I received from Spectrum's Jack Perkins, back in CRI.

Here are a sample of two of their good recent shows.

Migrant workers from Roratonga in the second world war.

The Silver Fern Tape Recorders Club.

All available as podcasts too, so you can have mp3s rather than the mwa I've linked to above.

Dannistava

Had a thought about Danny Baker this morning while I was brushing my teeth.

We all call him a radio genius, some call him a radio god.

But given he's tubby short and bald, shouldn't we call him a radio Buddha?

But this evening while I was walking back from the kebab shop, with the kebab inside my jacket keeping one side of my belly toasty, I realised why not: were does re-incarnation fit in? It doesn't, cos he's so much in the 1970s and what not.

So radio god he is then!

Chris Watson & Sarah Blunt collaboration coming up

[UPDATE: 3.10.2007: Only just noticed I had the title wrong on this post, corrected it today. Slow-poke.]

Really looking forward to this, it looks fab:

BBC Radio 4
NATURE – The Sounds of Britain 1. Wicken Fen
Date / Time: Monday 10 September at 21.02 – 21.30
repeat Tuesday 11 September at 11.02-11.30

Producer : Sarah Blunt
BBC Natural History Radio Unit
SYNOPSIS

In the first of a short series of richly evocative sound portraits, writer and naturalist
Paul Evans and wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson, capture the spirit and sounds
of wild Britain.

In the first programme, a wonderfully lively, lyrical and entertaining narration written
and read by Paul Evans, and illustrated with sounds of the wildlife and habitat
recorded by Chris Watson, offers a very personal and fascinating exploration of the
reed beds, ditches and dykes of Britain’s oldest nature reserve, Wicken Fen.

PocketDAB 2000

Still no improvement in FM reception. I've been checking for stations 10.7 below the RNZ Nation frequency of 101.4, but no sign. Tonight I'll try leaving the batteries out all night if I can, to see if this helps reset it or something.

DAB is good on the high ground around Grey Lynn too, I discovered today.

Looks like I brought the wrong radio to NZ...

In my last minute semi-planning, I decided not to bring any shortwave radio to New Zealand - any means either of the Sony 7600gr with wonky telescopic antenna, and the much smaller Degen DE1105 -- with no telescopic antenna at all.

All I brought then was the Pure PoketDAB 2000. There is a DAB trial here. But my how the signal is weak. It's not useable downtown -- so far the only place I've been able to enjoy it is in Ponsonby, up high. I don't know the details of the intended coverage are, but where I've been -- from Parnell to Ponsonby -- it's not a goer.

So I'm mostly using the FM part of the PocketDAB. It doesn't have RDS, which can slow things down a bit. Some stations it receives well, and some it really doesn't! The most frustrating examble is Radio New Zealand National. 101.4, pretty much everywhere in downtown, the quay, Parnell and Ponsonby at least, sounds like a leaky cable radio singal. If I had brought the beat-up Degen, at least I could use AM...

Ah well!

BBC World Service Trust in Georgia

I missed this announcement, but still, better late than never. I was vaguely involved, for a few days, and I'm really happy – and mightily impressed to see it taking off.

Georgia's first community radio station goes on air

The BBC World Service Trust has launched a radio station in Georgia that has people stopping in the streets.

People gather in the town centre of Ninotsminda in Georgia's Javakhetu region, to listen to the country's first community radio station. 

…

Telly news

Just been watching the coverage of six Bulgarian medics returning home from Libya. Who had it first? France24. They had pictures of the plane landing, while CNN's Breaking News graphic quoted a Libyan official as saying they were unlikely to serve their sentences in Libya. 

I was only channel-hopping, so my observations are limited. 

On Al Jazeera, there was a clear in the pictures compared to CNN and France24 – I think they were anchoring out of KL so that would explain that!

CNN got some pretty good commentators, once they got going. The only thing that had me tuning away from France24 was one of their studio commentators, I think the EU editor, who freaked me out a wee bit!

Richard Sambrook in the papers on WS

Richard Sambrook has written an article for The Independent titled "Why The World Service Matters". As you would expect, it's pretty much spot-on.

My opinion, though, is that Sambrook doesn't take enough credit for the strength of the English output – Nigel Chapman came in and cut out most of the non-news content, and that in turn means Richard Sambrook, as head of Global News Division, has a greater responsibility there.
I think Richard Sambrook is a proper visionary, much more than the "management-visionary" that means Bush House is all about change these days. As a journalist, Sambrook believes in the BBC values. At times those values seemed to not apply to the upper management, the people outside and above the language services.

But who knows, maybe that's all changed since I left :-)

The World Service is fab, and deserves a load more money – hopefully the public service remit for BBC World, and the advertising on BBC.Com can help there. Don't forget other parts of the World Service have websites which could, and I think should, be commercialised. I'd have no problem with radio services getting more air-time thanks to money from top-notch British advertisers.

New Dalet screenshots

Tod Maffin has posted screenshots of the CBC's current version of Dalet. Quite interesting. I've never used it, but have been tempted for quite a while.

Alan is Free!

Great news! I'm going to leave the picture of him to the side for a while. 

I got a text this morning just before 8, asking if I'd heard the news, he's been released  – great news!

Doc On One: My Father Takes a Vacation

Last week, RTÉ's Documentary on One was called My Father Takes a Vacation.

It's a lovely piece. It uses tingly music, the type that may be becoming a radio cliché, but still works well! It uses what sound like answering-machine tapes, another near-cliché meaning Dublin – those screaming traffic lights near Trinity – and delicious editing.

It uses a first person narrator and is compiled excellently. The narrator is a young man, and it comes across. Great images are painted throughout the documentary. It's a dream of a travel doc!

You can listen to it in Real Audio linked from the RTÉ website, or in the Documentary On One podcast.

Here's what the webpage for My Father Takes A Vacation says:

Martin Johnson's mother died of cancer eight years ago. The Johnson family lived in Sweden at the time and after his mother's death Martin's father decided he needed a break and disappeared, leaving Martin and his siblings alone in Sweden for a month.
Two years later Martin Johnson's father cycled along the southern coast of Ireland. After that he continued to disappear periodically. He now lives a new life in New Zealand, having left his three children behind in Sweden.
This is a travel documentary about trying to understand a father, about what Martin's father saw in Ireland, about loss and most of all why one most keep on moving on.
Martin Johnson produced this documentary, following in his father's footsteps from Dublin to Dursey Island in West Cork. In the documentary Martin also meets a fisherman from Dunmore East who talks about leaving home as well as Dennis who owns a Bed & Breakfast in Castletownbere and who lost his wife five years ago and a farmer on Dursey Island - to name but a few.
Producer: Martin Johnson
Supervising Producer: Peter Woods

Surviving the Century

This week's World Stories on BBC World service is called Surviving the Century.

It was made by my colleague Haimo Li, and it's good! The first transmission is this morning, with repeats over the weekend, and of course the Podcast.
Have a listen, in stereo if you can.

Music on special interest stations

Where do you think music fits in on special interest programming?

Special Interest, I guess, means the same thing as Community programming. Feel free to object!

How important is music to community programming? If the community is very broad, the music will be wallpaper to many listeners. Wallpaper is a part of general listening radio, cos it's on all day and you need some breaks. But when you're tuning in once a week for an hour, how much do you want to hear music?

Music can be great on such programmes. "Nostalgia" music can really help define your commununity. But if you are a "special interest" community, chances are you're a small community. And nostalgia for one person might be meaningless for someone just a few years older.

Some nostalgia that works goes back to childhood. As an example, the Ray Darcy Show this morning opened with Caroll Spinney – aka the vocie of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. That's been on TV for nearly 30 years, so it clicks with a lot of people.

Thoughts? Comment me!

Out and about

I've been a busy boy of late. And I've hardly had the chance to listen to the radio. But I've noticed a couple of things, such as:

Around Alexandra Park road, a portable DAB radio'll get a good singal wouthout any aerial at all.
The pure pocketDAB 2000 uses the headphone cable as it's antenna, and without plugging anything in, the signal metre shows a good strong signal, on the residential roads around the Ally Pally TX site. I'd like to see if it works out to Wood Green.

And yes, I understand the pointlessness in seeing if you can get a signal without being able to hear it!


You can see the Crystal Palace mast from the Putney Bridge tube bridge. A nice clear view of it.

The 1296kHz antenna for BBC World Service DRM in Orfordness is like a pair of 3 element beams, stuck into the ground with the boom running along the ground.

No not a good description, but those masts suddenly make sense to an amateur like me once I can visualise that :-)

George Cook – spoof

This is funny, if you know George Hook from Newstalk and rugby on TV

Martin Williams on Thirdcoast!

The Thirdcoast Festival have Martin Williams on their frontpage – hurray! Martin trained me up in my first week in the BBC. He does creative features for Resonance FM – and tries to infiltrate the BBC with creativity too ;-)

Here's hoping being featured by Thirdcoast gives him the recognition he deserves (like an award or two!).

London Chinese Radio Media Literacy Project

London Chinese Radio is doing a project on Media Literacy. I've been roped in to making some content for it too, and I'll not be in London for much longer so I'd better get the finger out!

Media Literacy can be difficult to define. The whole concept is based round community strengthening. But the name is quite daunting, as much for people who take part in community Radio as anyone.

At the first meeting on the project, no one really had an idea. For some, literacy meant to do with books and literature. After a while, the idea of ability was generally accepted.

Then there came the problem of media. If you weren't a media student or practitioner, then media was too distant a term.

Yet everyone thought "Online Literacy/ability" was important to them.
This does point to the age range of our users, plus the fact that immigrants tend to use the internet a lot (speaking from personal experience here!).

It's a good project – but without even a studio, it's a real pressure to reach the proposal's full potential.

I feel without a building, it's difficult for the broadest community value to be maintained at a clear level. When we all go home and use our own facilities to make our own content, we use our own values and goals. That's what podcasting and blogging is about. Podcasting is like YouTube – you can chose to only use established broadcast content if you like. Blogging is personal, though builds up a sense of community in who comments on, links to, and quotes your blog.
But community radio is about good old fashioned community centres, in a geographical location. The common language of community media should be the place and the way of life.

But all that's separate from the problems of East-West – we white Europeans might not give a toss what the people in the Chinese Embassy think. But for people from the PRC, the embassy staff are to be respected (I'm more "laugh/cry" about them, but anyway). Likewise the difference in production values.

And of course, all us media types have huge egos, and every one of of thinks "I'm right"!