Ken Heron is a radio guy. We know this because he has a VU meters, a tower, and the call letters of every station he’s ever worked at tattooed on his left arm. His right arm tattoos include a transmitter schematic diagram! But Ken is also here to talk about drones and putting them to good use - for fun, art, and a new perspective.

More than a few radio stations have been “done in” by not being able to recover after a disaster. A cluster of Florida radio stations never returned to air after Hurricane Michael. While some disasters can result in a total loss, Chris Tobin and Joe Talbot bring advice for recovering from two of the most common outages affecting broadcasters. They’ve both worked through numerous disasters and their planning made the difference in a quick recovery.

Nashville, Tennessee, is known not only Country music, but for the early studios that recorded Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Brenda Lee, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. Some of the first recording engineers worked full-time at WSM and other radio stations. Our guest, Mike Porter, shows us the microphones used in recording some of the most familiar and popular songs in history, and takes us on a tour of Columbia Studio A and Studio B - the Quonset Hut - on Nashville’s Music Square.

When PC-based music playout systems became popular in the mid-1990’s, it was small and medium market radio stations that were quick to adopt. Now, almost 25 years later, more broadcasters are finding value and reliability in virtualizing their broadcast infrastructure. From business admin to sales to audio operations, virtualizing dozens of PC onto a a couple of servers (with full redundancy) is making sense. Kevin Buente, Chief Engineer for WHIZ Media Group in Zanesville, Ohio, joins us to talk about virtualizing AM, FM, and TV operations in a small market.

One may reasonably argue that broadcast equipment is more reliable and stable now than ever before. One reason is the broad use of general purpose computing platforms and the same networking infrastructure as the huge IT industry uses. Peter Femal optimizes these ubiquitous technologies for reliable broadcast service. We discuss Audio over IP redundancies, as well as more traditional backup systems. And, as Peter says, “It’s not a backup if you don’t trust it.”

We know that digital broadcast equipment handling real-time media needs a common time reference. PTP - Precision Time Protocol - is used in many time-sensitive industries, and it’s perfect for broadcast gear, too. Greg Shay, CTO at the Telos Alliance, joins us, along with Shaun Dolan to discuss both the science behind and the practical application of PTP Clock standards and devices.

Paradise? How about hurricane winds over 200 mph, salt air, ice, and snow? And throw in a 100-mile Studio-Transmitter Link. It’s all in a normal week’s work for Don Mussell. Don is a consulting engineer in Hawai’i. He brings common sense and a serious outlook to the challenging radio broadcasting scenarios found in this tropical island paradise.

Chris Tobin and Kirk Harnack are talking “war stories” with Stephen Poole, Chief Engineer at Crawford Broadcasting in Birmingham. Seems today’s war stories are involving more computers and networking than traditional broadcast equipment. We discuss replacement of IP Radio links, a misbehaving Cisco switch, and Stephen’s famous “3,000 year old generator.”

WebRTC is the technology suite powering Google Hangouts and many other communication and conferencing services and apps. Tom Hartnett, Technical Director at Comrex, joins us to explain what WebRTC is and how it’s enabling a new generation of remote audio connection equipment and services.

“Pop-Up Studio” is a new name for a time-tested radio practice. Or is it? What makes a pop-up studio different from an old fashioned radio remote broadcast? Chris Tobin talks about the tech and the financial motivation for pop-up studios, and Gary Kline joins us live from Paris, France, to explain what he’s seeing among European broadcasters.