You may know that I am part of community radio station in the North East. We have been using IP to stream from the studio to the transmitter for many months now, and we have started to do more outside broadcasts using the Internet. We have done most of this using the Ogg Vorbis audio compression. It is my intention to blog about this in the future.

At the start of 2008 it cam to my attention that 3 Mobile had reduced there data charges and how now introduced a pay as you go service for the same cost as the subscription one. The dongle that acts like a modem cost £100.

After a previous broadcast from the Gateshead Swallow Hotel was complete disaster because the Cloud wifi let us down we decided to give 3G a go. For reference the problem was not the actual wifi connection that was good, but the Internet connection behind it being overloaded, and we did get a refund for the night.

Sadly the data rates promised were nothing like those theoretically possible but after a switching to SimpleCast to stream MP3Pro we managed to get by with a reliable 23kbps stream running. Not ideal for FM broadcast, but it was passable and most listeners would not have noticed.

Things went very well for almost 2 hours, and then it all went a little haywire. In the end, after many dropouts, I decided to move the dongle. I stuck it to the window with some tape and everything sprung back to life for the rest of the night. There was then even some bandwidth for me to do things like start this blog posting.

In the end this showed it can be done, but it is not yet 100% reliable. Since the broadcast I have learned that the bandwidth problem was because I only had a 3G connection and not a HSDPA (Turbo) connection in the OB location. I will continue to experiment and will report back on this blog. If you are interested in doing the same then do get in touch.

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