IP over Microwave
Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 8:23 pm
Just wondering if anyone has any comments and suggestions cause I'm a total newb to this kind of thing.
Working as a volunteer technician at a community radio station.
We've received advice that a commercial broadcaster will be installing a DAB+ transmitter a few years away. As DAB+ is "multiplexed" which makes it similar to trunked radio, and the law is that commercial DAB+ transmitters must allocate two ninths of their capacity to community broadcasters, we'll get access to use it once its up. The backhaul (or what the industry calls STL (studio to transmitter link)) should be the standardized STL-IP. We will have to provide our own microwave link to the transmitter site.
So we're looking to migrate our current FM transmitters analogue STL to STL-IP.
The STL equipment is fine but its the IP equipment I need a hand with. I'm told we use "microwave" at the moment but the actual frequency is in the 800mhz band. We'll need some kind of IP based radio system - only has to work for about 300m. Once the DAB+ transmitter is installed, we'll need to do it for about 10km. The bandwidth requirements for STL-IP are actually quite minimal - the encoded stream would have plenty of overhead at 256kbit.
There is no option for multiple pathways with the DAB+ transmitter, but with our own FM transmitter, there is already ADSL2+ at one end and fibre optic at the other - would serve as a good alternate pathway.
Does anyone have advise on what IP to radio equipment we should use? What kind of compliance we'd need to get licensed? And how we can do this at minimal cost cause they have absolutely no funding?
Working as a volunteer technician at a community radio station.
We've received advice that a commercial broadcaster will be installing a DAB+ transmitter a few years away. As DAB+ is "multiplexed" which makes it similar to trunked radio, and the law is that commercial DAB+ transmitters must allocate two ninths of their capacity to community broadcasters, we'll get access to use it once its up. The backhaul (or what the industry calls STL (studio to transmitter link)) should be the standardized STL-IP. We will have to provide our own microwave link to the transmitter site.
So we're looking to migrate our current FM transmitters analogue STL to STL-IP.
The STL equipment is fine but its the IP equipment I need a hand with. I'm told we use "microwave" at the moment but the actual frequency is in the 800mhz band. We'll need some kind of IP based radio system - only has to work for about 300m. Once the DAB+ transmitter is installed, we'll need to do it for about 10km. The bandwidth requirements for STL-IP are actually quite minimal - the encoded stream would have plenty of overhead at 256kbit.
There is no option for multiple pathways with the DAB+ transmitter, but with our own FM transmitter, there is already ADSL2+ at one end and fibre optic at the other - would serve as a good alternate pathway.
Does anyone have advise on what IP to radio equipment we should use? What kind of compliance we'd need to get licensed? And how we can do this at minimal cost cause they have absolutely no funding?