There are many small scale radio licences in the UK with radio stations covering just one large town or local area. These stations are usually equipped with a main ‘On-Air’ studio, a production studio and small news booth. Due to limited engineering expertise and restricted budgets many of these stations need a simple solution to their system engineering needs, especially as many of them are doing much of the installation themselves.
The black boxes that lurk in a rack, somewhere between radio studios and the transmitter, used to be the province of the engineer and were often referred to as the “glue” keeping the station on air. The design of the complicated interconnections, the wiring of the many cables needed for routing and the ability to bring the switching equipment into service was a job only engineers could perform. Even a small station needed a number of these black boxes for signal distribution, studio switching and monitoring.
The Station Master from Sonifex combines all of these black boxes into one simple, highly reliable package. It not only connects your studios and switches them to air, but it also distributes your outside sources and incoming news feeds, provides multiple logging feeds and allows you to monitor studio outputs, incoming feeds and your main output. Station Master has a built-in five location talkback system that is compatible with most broadcast audio consoles and also controls profanity delays.
Station Master is the one box solution to a radio station’s central equipment needs. By decreasing the complexity for anyone carrying out the installation and by centrally locating all the equipment, it also costs substantially less than the usual rack-mount switching equipment needed.
Engineers installing a Station Master have found it has made the central technical area installation simpler, more compact (the Station Master occupies 3U of rack space compared to more than 11U that the discrete components can occupy) and has saved a great deal of time which is preciously needed just before a station launch.
