> Station vans , trucks and cars
> Whats your dream vehicle. Would you have car a truck a van
> an rv in the shape of a sausage???
>
If I were running a locally-oriented, full-service radio station, I would buy a heavy-duty van and outfit it for both commercial remotes and electronic news gathering:
It would contain a generator, a good surge arrestor and UPS for smoothing out the spikes and surges that often accompany generator power, a couple of mini-disc players, a computer with Cool Edit Pro or some other editing software on it, a good pneumatic mast for the RPU antenna, and codecs for POTS and ISDN (used when out of RPU range). A built-in PA system would be good for non-news remotes, along with a couple of CD players. The CD players would be connected to the board and the PA system could be fed from either the board or a receiver tuned to the station. A wireless microphone set would also be nice, provided that the talent could be kept aware of the coverage limitations of these microphones. VHF or UHF two-way radios could be used for communicating with the studio, either on the broadcast auxiliary or business bands, if frequencies could be found for repeaters on the mountains in this area. (Why pay Nextel?)
If the station is an FM station, IFB for cueing the talent could be transmitted over an SCA subcarrier and two SCA receivers would be used, a fixed unit at the operator's position in the van and a portable unit for the talent. The van would also have an FM Yagi on its roof for receiving both the main programming and the SCA IFB.
Think of my dream van as a TV ENG van, only for radio! A good, self-contained van would eliminate the need for people to shlep a lot of crap out to remotes just for getting the remote on the air. This leaves plenty of time for the promotions people to hang banners and pass out key chains and bumper stickers.
