Josh Pearson, Operations Manager at Joy FM in Melbourne has been appointed to the Committee of Technorama. He will fill a casual vacancy until the 2018 AGM.
Josh brings with him a wealth of operational and IT experience, and has already started working on the logistics for TR18 in May.
You can read a bit more about Josh and all the Technorama Committee on the Meet Your Board page.
Well, the magic certainly happened on Friday 12 Jan 2018. The plan was to bring together a team of people to clean, check and commission as many bits of donated equipment as we could. In particular, we were focused on a stack of not-very-healthy FM exciters – and about all we knew of these was where they’d originated, and that many had “faulty” stickers loudly stating what we feared. As it happens, the stickers were correct.
Technorama took the initiative to structure the event as an education day. We thought, rightly as it happens, that hands-on is the best way to learn. We almost underestimated the enthusiasm of attendees, who were grateful to have hardware to debug, test equipment to take measurements, and experienced mentors to ask.
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For the Technorama team it was a way to discover if we can mount a similar exercise at TR18. You can read about the plan here, on our event registration page. By the way, THAT was a voyage of discovery too, as we experimented with Zenbership’s Event capability. That, plus payment gateway, was a seamless experience, and showed how even small stations could run paid events with minimal admin intervention.
We had ten participants from Canberra, Dungog, Newcastle, and metro Sydney, and our youngest helper was just 8 years old. Hey, never too early to start.
Over the day, much practical work was completed, and a few splodges of theory were whiteboarded in the process. Attendees appreciated that they could see the relationship between formulae and a real direct outcome.
At completion, 10 exciters were pronounced very much alive. A stereo generator was synthesized from thin air and a certain amount of software. We sang a round of “Ying Tong”.
An audio console was given the serious once-over, and exceeded specifications. We measured <0.2% distortion, and and a frequency response that was flat 20-to-20. Essentially transparent, and you can’t ask better than that.
It’s hard to be anything but pleased about our first TX and Audio Blitz. Thanks to all for coming, and to Hope for hosting.
Our systems are your systems – so here’s some stuff we’ve done to help both of us. A key Technorama aim is to review technologies that we need and that radio stations use, then research and implement those we think might be best of breed. From there we can make recommendations to our members and the Sector.
We don’t sleep! Over the Christmas break, TRITS (the TechnoRama IT Subcommittee) has been focused on two applications that go to the heart of every radio station: the website and our membership system.
You’re looking at the new Technorama site. It’s still WordPress run from our private hosted account, and very little of the underlying content needed to change for the refresh.
What we’ve done is implement “Content Views” to manage the way stories appear and how the site is formatted. CV truly is a piece of magic. Migration to a post-based process from the previous architecture (largely using pages) has taken less than a day of activity and an hour or so of backup and cutover. There’s a small bit of paradigm you need to understand, and then it’s all downhill and easy work.
Technorama’s membership system is based on Zenbership, a really well integrated and highly functioned system that we’ve been using since January 2017. There are three reasons we recommend Zenbership:
However like all full-function systems it’s tricky to learn, and after using it for a year we’re only just getting around to enabling some of the extended parts of the application.
The signup for the TX Blitz day was managed using Zenbership’s Events subsystem, including the mailout and registration payment.
A byproduct of building events is that we’ve started to populate a calendar, using Zenbership. This is fully integrated with the membership system, so it’s better than a standalone plugin or offline diary. It only took a single link to make the calendar available on the Technorama website, and you can check that out. Depending on your display device, the calendar will either be near the top of the sidebar, or in a sidebar menu that appears on handheld devices.
We’re in the process of upgrading Zenbership from V107 to V115, which will add function and fix some bugs. We’re looking forward to getting that finalised.
Expect that the software toolkit and how you manage it with volunteers will be a topic of discussion at TR18.
If you’re a non-technical person, how do you learn techspeak? Our second education event for Jan 2018 is Station Tech Webinar – a reprisal of the standing-room-only session run at CBAA 2017. This is very much for non-technical people who need to understand or interpret technical statements made by others. Read all about the Webinar here, and register online through the link on that page right now – before you forget.
John Maizels (President of Technorama) will deliver the first CBAA webinar of 2018, aimed at providing technical guidance for the non-technical. As with the CBAA session, the Webinar will cover how your station works, and familiarise you with the end-to-end broadcast chain from microphone to antenna and even a bit beyond.
All community broadcasters, especially managers and board/committee members, who have technical interest and more importantly, technical responsibilities.
A stalwart of the community broadcasting sector, John started his radio career as a teenager, learning to build consoles and studios, developing announcing skills and running radio stations at school. He has worked professionally in radio and television in a variety of creative, production and engineering roles, was the founding Chair of PBS, spent 11 years as Technology Director at Northside Radio 99.3 and has been active with the CBAA since it was formed. Professionally John teaches television and works in the broadcast industry as a freelancer and consultant. He is passionate about good broadcasting, good coffee, and answering tough questions in simple language.
There’s no charge for this event, but places are limited. To ensure your place is reserved, register online with this link Details of how to connect will be sent to you.
This Webinar is the perfect backgrounder to assist you with upcoming CBF grant submissions, and to help you avoid some of the obvious technical potholes that trip up many grant submitters. An hour of webinar won’t turn you into a broadcast engineer, but it will definitely help you with the conversations that you need to have.
Q&A FB Group: product policyWe’ve been asked a few times in the last week: is it OK to be commercial on the Q&A Facebook group? Well… yes and no. Check out the policy link in the Q&A Facebook group section on the right hand side of this page (or just go here).
The Technorama Facebook Q&A site is hosting a thread about the ransomware outbreak on 13 May, and one of our members was hit. Register for our Q&A group to read and/or contribute to the discussion. Follow the link above to go to the group and access or register.
We’ve been getting great feedback about TR16, and thanks for the honest comments. The photo repository will be updated soon once we’ve done the uploads – there were lots of good shots.
Most people remember the food – it’s not often that a conference gets such positive comments about variety and quantity of the meals. And we hear you: next year we’ll go easier on the donuts and heavier on the fruit.
Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it a success, and special thanks to Alan Sweeney and his team at MediaHub for making the opening night extra-special. That was an event that might be impossible to top.
Many good suggestions came out of the plenaries, and we’re going to mull over everything we heard as we move into the planning for TR17.
New 160728: If you have experience with using or installing (even better!) specific software for these applications, please contact us ASAP. We would like to have some tools running by mid-August.
And what will make this happen faster: volunteer to assist with one or more of those activities. I’m sure there’s any number of webmaster/postmaster/contributor/writer/documenter types in our midst. Don’t wait for the committee to do everything, because we can’t. Drop us a line at [email protected]
Shortly, we’ll archive everything that happened at TR16, but meanwhile stay in touch. I’d love to hear from you. Drop the team a line via info@, or me directly through john@.
We’re about to launch registration for TR17 on weekend of 16-18 June 2017.
Rates have been held at the same level (or slightly lower) compared to last year. Importantly, there are serious deals for people who become a Member of Technorama and attend: you will get a registration rate reduction that’s bigger than your membership. How’s that??
Since mid-January 2017, the Technorama IT Subcommittee has been moving our platform towards best-of-breed secureness. You will now note that this website and all our tools use HTTPS to ensure that every page-get is end-to-end secure. This is important. While we all accept that secure protocol is needed for transactions which involve financial or personal information, partial HTTPS still doesn’t fully protect those interactions from man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way to ensure that your pages and users are protected is to be totally HTTPS, for all calls to your site.
technorama.org.au is now enabled for HTTPS, our core apps have been cut over, we purchased a secure domain certificate which supports wildcard access (so we now have subdomains like member.technorama.org.au) and we use Cloudflair to provide CDN, DDoS and DNS protection, and we have some nifty plugins assisting WordPress.
Expect discussion on the topic of Web Security at TR17. Oh, and you’re only as secure as your passwords!
In November 2016, just ahead of the AGM, we sent a mailer to all the people who had
registered on the website or have attended a TR. If you missed it, then you can download the bulletin here.
We’re excited: Technorama 2017 will be held on the weekend of 16-18 June 2017, and by popular support we’re going to be back at the Campbelltown RSL.
The program is under development and registration isn’t open yet, but all the facilities bookings are firm. We expect registration price to be similar to this year (in 2016 it was around $100 earlybird for station volunteers, and that covered everything). This year you can expect Members of Technorama to get special treatment.
Start discussing the dates and your attendance with your Board or Committee, and you can safely book travel.
Put the dates in your diary, and stand by as we call for session ideas and presentations.
