TechCon 2009
Posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 9:00am. #
“Pull the string tight,” he says, “and hold the tin can up to your ear”.
I’m at TechCon, the technical prelude to the Radio Festival, and I’m watching Simon Mason from the transmission company Arqiva. He’s plucked someone from the audience, and he’s demonstrating the differences between two new forms of mobile broadband transmission technology – one called WiMAX, and one called LTE – using tin cans and string.
TechCon used to be aimed at people who, when I started in commercial radio twenty years ago, were called “Engineering”. If you worked in Engineering in those days, you wore a white lab coat and spent most of your days in a dark room with a soldering iron and some isopropyl alcohol. But these days, TechCon is inhabited by rather different people: the audience this year at the Nottingham Playhouse also included policy makers, regulators and website types, reflecting the growing importance of technology in radio.
The BBC was well represented. Andrew Mason discussed why TV commercials can sound louder than the programmes – it turns out that you can measure and control the perception of ‘loudness’. Geoff Woolf showed off the two new types of radio car in use in BBC English Regions, one called VERV and one that narrowly escaped being called the SatChav, which enables full multimedia reporting from anywhere in the country. I explored the great new sound of the BBC Radio iPlayer, and was delighted when the audience failed to notice the difference between studio output and the high quality sound you get from the iPlayer these days. Also from Future Media, Richard Cooper gave us a fascinating talk about how difficult internet broadcasting is to plan for. He shared examples of the snowfalls earlier this year and the tremendous peak after Michael Jackson’s recent death, and his point was that you should automate as much as possible: if you rely on manual processes, you’ll be too late.
We also heard from a variety of others. We had a demonstration of surround sound via DAB Digital Radio in the back of a rather nice Audi – a car which also contained a bright colour screen showing images from radio stations. We learnt what it means now that some parts of the radio spectrum are being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Finally, there was a rather alarming demonstration of the most dangerous thing in any radio studio: the headphones. Any radio presenter would be wise to turn the volume down.
The variety of subjects gave a clear reminder that the technical aspect of radio has come a long way in twenty years: and that it’s more a part of radio’s future than ever before.
“Keep pulling the string,” says Simon. He now has two tin cans and two pieces of string. I think he’s showing the benefit of asynchronous communication: but the only thing I know is that whichever mobile broadband technology we go with in the UK, my iPhone will look depressingly slow. Such is progress.
I wrote this article for Ariel, the BBC’s in-house newspaper. This version hasn’t had the benefit of decent subbing.
