SANTAfm (otherwise known as RadioVOU - Radio for the Villages of Urbana) narrowcasts live from Urbana, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC.  It could also be argued that we are a suburb of Baltimore, MD as well as we are almost equidistant from it as well.

Our signal at 88.7fm is transmitted via a mighty 1/10 of a watt Ramsey Electronics FM30 Transmitter and is operated within the FCC's Part 15 Guidelines - which allow for non licensed operation of AM and FM transmitters within a range of maximum effective radiated power.  The problem is, that the signal (if we are lucky and the wind is blowing in the right direction - and the planets are alligned etc.) reaches only to the edges of the neighborhood. 

Quite honestly, that's ok with us.

We also stream our music to a ShoutCast server that currently can provide listening for up to 50 simultaneous users.  If we ever cap out on that number, we'll buy more slots to keep everyone happy.

In case you are wondering how we keep the music flowing so beautifully - it's thanks to a wondrous piece of software by Spacial Audio called SAM 4.  SAM is a very high tech piece of software which compares with that in use for commercial radio stations.  It allows us to rotate the playlists, schedule programs, drop in voice work etc.

Hardware wise, our "studio" uses an HP Celeron 2.8 GHZ CPU with 768 MB of RAM.  We use a Westinghouse widescreen 17 inch flat panel LCD to get more screen real estate (which is great when running SAM full screen).  On the rare occasion when we pull out the mic for a live broadcast, we use a MXL DRK.  DRK is short for Desktop Recording Kit.  MXL makes a fantastic mic and you can read a review on the MXL DRK here.

Production wise, we are a big fan of Adobe Audition 2.0 which puts an amazing array of tools at your fingertips for audio editing.  I think we've only scratched the surface of what the program is capable of.