[Rfu-station] Progress report: CDs, automation, EAS, schedule

[Andrew Ó Baoill]

In this mail I give a report on last Saturday's CD-moving party, as  
well as some other station projects. We need interested people to  
work on many of these, so please check out the news and get in touch  
if you're interested in helping:
CD MOVING
STATION FINANCES / TOWER PROJECT
PRODUCTION ROOM
AUTOMATION
SCHEDULE

CD MOVING
On Saturday, thanks to Tom and Dominique, we made a lot of progress  
on the CDs. We moved around 35 crates (transferring them to  
cardboard, sifting through many of them as we went). There remain  
around 10 boxes of CDs to go - I hope some of you will continue to be  
able to work on them before or after your radio shows.

For those moving CDs - you will notice that the area near the ramp  
that we have been using is getting full. We've started putting some  
CDs under the stairwell to the upper floors, to the right of the ramp  
as you come out of the main building - you may need to move some  
other materials to get to our piles of boxes.

We've also put various boxes of 'sifted' CDs in the studio - these  
are CDs which WRFU members have examined and deemed worth keeping in  
the station. If you have some time, please help move some of these  
from the boxes to the shelving in the studio. We are unlikely to have  
enough space for all the CDs people identify as worth keeping, so we  
will need to come up with other solutions - perhaps additional  
shelving elsewhere in the IMC, perhaps a second culling of these CDs.

STATION FINANCES / TOWER PROJECT
As reported at our last meeting, we now have around $6,700 that we  
can allocate to our tower project. That leaves around $7,000 we need  
to complete a permanent tower. This is very much doable, but it will  
take work from us all. At our next meeting (March 18) I hope people  
will bring ideas for fundraising projects, and enthusiasm to  
volunteer to complete this major station project.

[Note that an off-site solution may also be possible, but would  
involve greater ongoing costs. I'm still investigating that option  
and will report back as I have information.]

$7,000 may sound like a lot - it is - but it's really $100 for each  
member. We shouldn't - and won't - be asking people for $100 apiece  
(though if you have it we'll take it) but if only half of volunteers  
each came up with a way to raise $200, we'd complete our fundraising.  
Thinking hats on! Things we've used in the past include a booth at  
the Farmer's Market, music events at the IMC and elsewhere, and so  
on. We should also continue to seek funding from our natural allies.

PRODUCTION ROOM
We've now reached the point where progress can be made on the  
production room itself. I've already heard from Chris, Habari  
Connection, and others who want to work on this. If this is a project  
that interests you please let me know. This is an area where WRFU  
will need to work with other interested IMC members and IMC working  
groups.

AUTOMATION
On Saturday I started teaching myself how to use Zara Radio, and I  
archived some of the out-of-date show promos that some of you may  
have noticed playing recently. I also added some public affairs  
content (generally podcast-based material) which is now playing in  
the 4-8pm slot, as agreed a few meetings ago. There's a lot of  
repeating at present - if you know of ways to alleviate this by  
suggesting other public affairs content available for free by podcast  
or webcast, please let me know.

There's been some material added to the library that doesn't fall  
into the 'local' category. While this can add variety (particularly  
if we haven't been adding much new local content) we should be  
careful not to have it placed in the same directories, so Zara can  
differentiate between local and non-local, and we can set and follow  
policies on when to play only local and when to play a wider mix.

We don't have many show promos or PSAs in the system at the moment.  
We also only have a small number of legal IDs. Variety is the spice  
of life, so it would be great to see more shows generate promos, and  
more individuals creating legal IDs.

We've had some volunteers come forward who are interested in working  
on automation. If you want to work in this area let me know and I'll  
help organize a meeting of all interested parties, as well as  
providing some initial training.

SCHEDULE
Based on our online schedule, there are some sizable gaps in our  
schedule, but there are also areas where we have almost a full  
lineup. We still have 12 hours to fill in the 8am-2pm period on  
weekdays, but only 1 hour from 8pm to midnight. We have 6 empty hours  
from 4-8pm (the new public affairs content should help alleviate the  
urgency of this gap). Saturday has lots of empty slots: 7-9am,  
12-6pm, while Sunday is almost fully booked out. We also have 22  
empty hours between midnight and 4am. [I've left to one side those  
times currently filled by Radio Bilingue (2-4pm M-F), World Radio  
Network (4-7am daily), and international news headlines (7-8am M-F).

There are several ways to look at empty slots - we can see them as  
wasted opportunities, times when we could be providing new and  
vibrant content to our listeners; we could view them as opportunities  
to play material from our local library and bring recorded/external  
content to our listeners; we can view them as times available for new  
members of our communities to get on air themselves.

I'd suggest that we prioritize the following:
- Actively seek to fill the open morning/lunch slots (8am-2pm M-F)  
and the Saturdays slots (7am-6pm). There's room for 20 single-hour  
shows in this period, or 9 two-hour and 2 one-hour shows. I'm sure we  
can find people to fill many of these slots, particularly Saturday,  
which was previously almost full. This is something that obviously  
falls, in part, within the remit of the membership group, but it's up  
to all of us to find people interested in producing new content for  
our station.
- Continue to expand our automation music library, so when there's  
automation people aren't hearing the same material repeatedly.


Andrew Ó Baoill
Station Manager
WRFU-LP, Urbana 104.5FM
http://www.wrfu.net andrew at funferal.org
(217) 344-2536 (studio)