Forest of Dean Community Radio are the latest radio station to purchase several Nica-X ISDN audio codecs. The community radio station is one of 15 groups selected to be part of the Radio Authority’s Access Radio pilot scheme, and has been running short RSL’s since 1995 in different towns around the Forest of Dean.
Forest of Dean Community Radio will initially be establishing 5 studios in different towns in the area, making access as easy as possible to both listeners and presentation staff. Each of these studios will take it ‘in turns’ to produce the weekly programming, which will be broadcast across the whole of the Forest of Dean.
The Forest of Dean is an area of dense woodland just to the west of Gloucester, near the border with Wales. Due to the difficult geographical nature of the area, any use of radio links is very limited and so, land lines have to be used. Four Nica X-1 codecs will be used to connect two AM transmitters to a central studio and hub site, using two kilostream lines for the transmission.
In addition to the main studio, the four other studios around the Forest of Dean will each have a Nica X-2A codec able to call a dedicated Nica X-2A at the hub via ISDN. These will be configured to provide either a high quality mono feed, or a lower quality feed with talkback to the main studio. Using the auxiliary serial and remotes ports there is also the facility of remotely managing the whole network from the hub site.
The Nica X range has an X21 fixed line interface as standard with optional ISDN ‘S’ bus interface. The X21 interface allows connection to any type of synchronous digital data service – e.g. satellite, fixed digital services such as kilostream, etc, and can operate at a maximum data rate of 256kbit/s. The ISDN “S” bus interface allows connection to any international ISDN service and operates at a maximum data rate of 128kbit/s. Additionally, the Nica X can be used in the USA with an NT1 adaptor.
Senior Engineer, Martin Harrison, commented “Whilst I was choosing the codec to use for this project, there were a number of important points to consider. Firstly, it had to support a low delay, and low loss, algorithm such as apt-x because two to three code/decode cycles will be common for some of the audio being transmitted. As we had a very limited budget and an initial requirement for 9 codecs, the cost was also a major factor and the Nica X codec range is reasonably priced considering the facilities for ISDN backup that are available on them. “
“Finally, due to the unavailability of radio links and high reliance on the codecs, we required a codec which would be compatible with other makes of codec and have good support available in case of failure. From our previous experiences of Sonifex and their products, coupled with the features and competitive pricing we were able to achieve, the Nica X range of codecs was our choice.”
The Nica X audio codec system is a highly configurable range of intelligent codecs that can be set up to allow for several different modes of operation, from the very basic to the most complex.
State of the art electronics and modular design give you the flexibility to choose the most appropriate model to satisfy your requirements. You can then easily configure it to suit your particular application. With 12 models available, coding with either apt-x, mpeg or G.722, whether you need to cover basic ISDN operation or a fixed data link with ISDN back-up, the Nica-X range has the solution.
