Yesterday the radio transmitter for WGRG Geneseo Radio was brought down to my office.   Apparently after 8 years of service it stopped and was not working.  On the LCD panel on the front of the unit was an error message indicating it was not detecting power from an adapter.  With the machine opened I could identify that the machine had two power supplies, a small power supply that powered the logic board and LCD front panel, and a large 48 volt Power Supply that powered the actual signal for the Radio Transmission (Up to 200 Watt).
Inside of the Ramsey Radio Transmitter – Notice the giant Aluminum Heatsink (circled) towards the back -¬¨‚Ć I am fascinated by new electronic devices and just like examining some of the basics.¬¨‚Ć Powered by 48 volts of electricity – the small electronic components attached to the heatsink are mounted directly on Copper which is then attached to the aluminum heatsink with two giant fans behind the heatsink ( with this kind of power = lots of heat).
The machine had never been cleaned (= really dirty) so I used compressed air to simply clean everything, then tested the machine – sure enough the large power supply appeared to have failed.¬¨‚Ć Lucky for the school this part was not custom and was found easily on the internet.¬¨‚Ć (Meanwell 48 Volt Power supply)
With overnight shipping and a quick part swap and a thorough cleaning the Radio Transmitter is back and should work another 5 + years (unless lightening).
Old Power Supplies Next to each other
New Power Supply
Fixed and working Transmitter
I was at Sam’s Club the other day and saw a Demo HD television playing the Blue Ray movie “TinkerBelle’s Lost Treasure”.¬¨‚Ć Although I was not impressed with the movie I was completely impressed with the picture quality of a Blue Ray playing at full 1920 x 1080 playback.¬¨‚Ć Having lots of old computers and computer parts in my home along with a newer HD Samsung television I decided to try and build a HTPC that could playback Blue-Ray’s in full capacity, hold my personal media collection and stream Netflix Movies at the highest quality settings possible.
To work with I have an older Dell Dimension computer that has the Intel 915 Chipset and Pentium 4 hyperthreaded processor set at 3 ghz.¬¨‚Ć With this Intel Chipset upgrading the processor to Dual Core or Core 2 Duo was not possible so I am sticking with the Pentium 4.¬¨‚Ć After reading review after review of Video cards I came to the conclusion that the ATI 4670 Graphics board was the best fit – having 300 stream processors, an HDMI output and full digital audio.¬¨‚Ć This card also is capable of off loading the CPU intensive task of decoding Blue-Rays and providing a full 1920 x 1080 resolution on my Samsung HDTV.¬¨‚Ć If you had a more robust processor you could probably get away with using the ATI 4350 which costs only around 40$, in my case I needed a step up to make up for my aging system.¬¨‚Ć There seems to be some disagreement on the internet as to whether a Pentium 4 can handle Blue_Ray playback,¬¨‚Ć I can say from experience it can handle it perfectly if you are using it in conjunction with a robust video card (pci-e).¬¨‚Ć For the Operating System I went with Windows 7 Pro as this OS offers great performance, slick interface, and is fully compatible with the ATI graphics Card.
75.00$ on new egg  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125277&cm_re=ati_4670-_-14-125-277-_-Product
For Memory I eeeked out having 2 gigs of total RAM at 800 mhz – in addition I added a 2 gig flash drive to the back of the machine and dedicated it to Windows Ready Boost for faster caching.
For the Blue Ray Drive I purchased a 67.99$ unit on Newegg.com.  This drive comes with PowerDVD version 8 with Full HD and Blue-Ray playback capability.
One tricky element or having a working HTPC in the house is configuring a remote to use the machine.  Here I suggest two options: a friend of mine showed me a Iphone Ipod application called Air Mouse.  This easy app lets you control the HTPC with an IPOD or IPHONE and works well.  Since I use this HTPC to surf the web I decided to also try a extended range wireless keyboard and trackpad.
I chose this Adesso model off of newegg and have been very happy with its function.¬¨‚Ć Works from easily 35-40 feet away from the television – responsive, small, easy to type.¬¨‚Ć The only downside was it was a little pricey at $85.99.¬¨‚Ć http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823166047&cm_re=addesso_wireless_keyboard-_-23-166-047-_-Product
Just a note: watch out for cheap wireless keyboards and mice from Logitech (and other brands), if you check the range on most models available at retail stores like Wal-Mart it maxes out at around 5-6 feet.  In my opinion a wireless keyboard with a six foot maximum radius is worthless.
Finally Adding a wireless pci card (could use a USB one as well) this unit connects to my Home Network.¬¨‚Ć With the Network Connection and adjusting the visual settings on Windows 7 for best look on a televsion (larger icons, text, ect) everything is set.¬¨‚Ć Honestly the frequently used feature of the HTPC is streaming Netflix – using this computer to stream netflix results in a much clearer and contrasted image than streaming from Xbox or Playstation 3.¬¨‚Ć With a $8.99 a month subscription you get unlimited movie streaming which equals 70,000 available movies and television programs – A Super Redbox in the home.
For Storage I installed an Internal 1000 Gigabyte RE3 Western Digital Sata drive.¬¨‚Ć This is a server class drive (5 year warranty) that is fast, reliable and not too expensive.¬¨‚Ć Again at newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136313 159$.¬¨‚Ć With a sizzable collection of children’s television shows and movies stored on DVD – I simply copied all of them onto this massive hard drive making it an all in one media center.
Main uses of the HTPC
Stream Netflix (This is outstanding)
Play Blue-Ray movies in full 1920×1080 resolution
Stream Digital Music from Pandora.com or Playlist.com
Play MP3/Music Collection
Store and Display family photos
Run Boxee – Vast collection of online video streams
Often on the weekends I find myself on the road during Geneseo Football away games.¬¨‚Ć To get a score update I have depended on online local news sites which update scores from time to time.¬¨‚Ć The ideal solution would be to have Geneseo’s radio station WGRG simply stream online and be playable by the iphone or other similar portable devices.¬¨‚Ć Early this week I was notified that the online streaming server had gone down and the online feed was no longer available.¬¨‚Ć This situation presented the perfect opportunity to revisit the online streaming systyem and reconfigure it to work on mobile devices (as well as computers).¬¨‚Ć I have setup a new PC using the latest build of Icecast 2.3.2 and Edcast and this time put it behind a battery backup APC unit (the last machine was fried).¬¨‚Ć In this new system I am streaming the radio station using the OGG Vorbis format along with the lame mp3 encoder utilizing the M3U container.¬¨‚Ć This setup stays true to my belief in utilizing free open source software whenever possible.¬¨‚Ć Icecast, edcast, the lame mp3 encoder are all available free of charge.
Now to get this stream running on the Iphone I download a great free app called FStream. 
With FStream I configured the player with the following settings.  First simply add a station or edit the default station in FStream.
The settings must match this exactly or the stream will fail to load.  The URL is hard to read in the photo so here it is again  URL  http://homepage.dist228.org:8001/stream.ogg
After saving these settings go back to the main FStream page and simply click on the Stream to start it playing.
The WGRG online stream also works with Windows Media Player, ITunes, and many other popular audio players.  Here is a link to the Online Stream  WGRG Online Stream
Also one other thing,  to enable FStream to work on the Edge or 3g cellular network you need to enable one more setting.  Click on FStream then click on MORE near the bottom.  Now turn the slider on Cellular network from Off to On.
Click here to Listen Live to WGRG 100.5 Maple Leaf Radio
Over the past few days I have been working on streaming the high school’s radio station, WGRG 100.5, over the web.¬¨‚Ć After spending a little time looking at options on the internet I found a solid working solution based on a few open-source projects.¬¨‚Ć I revamped an old PC Pentium 4 machine running at 1.8 ghz with 512 megs of RAM and installed Windows 2000 (not Linux – only because the school still owns over 100 unused licenses).¬¨‚Ć At my house I had an old Sound Blaster 5.1 live sound card which I used to capture the radio stations analog signal.
The software setup on the rebuilt machine is pretty simple.
1.  I used Icecast 2.3.2 to stream the audio
.
2.  I used Winamp to play the analog input from WGRG
3.  I used the edcast (oddcast) plugin to link the audio feed from Winamp to Icecast.
I currently have edcast set to stream the audio using the vorbis OGG format at 64 kbps,  this format works well with ITunes and Windows Media Player.  I may change the quality of the broadcast down to 32 kpbs which would allow more simulteneous connections at the price of lower sound quality.  This revamped machine is now setup to simply to run 24/7,  the only downside with this configuration is the reliance on Winamp which cannot run as a service.  In the future I may alter this part of the configuration or create a startup script that starts these programs automatically in case of a power failure / system failure.
After I tested this setup and confirmed it was working I installed another version of Icecast 2.x on one of the webservers in the district.  Then I edited the Icecast configuration file and added the <master-server> tags which makes the webserver simply relay the audio feed from the older PC.  Lastly I opened up the port 8001 on our PIX 500 device thus making the audio stream available via the web.
M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |