Design and Implementation of FM Broadcasting Station for Bahir Dar University

1.Preamble

Apart from the university website, which couldn’t be accessed by every member of the city, and university community due to unavailability of sufficient personal computers, the university and the clubs of the university do not have any means to announce their relevant information rather than posting them on the notice board. Further, the university has not any means to introduce its work to the community.

Although there are some notice boards in the campus, they are not sufficient for all university society. These boards are always congested with some necessary and unnecessary posts from the community and with that the reader gets difficulty in selecting the post that concerns him/her. This necessitates some kind of private radio for the university.

This FM radio station will go a long way in reaching out to the community in the campus and city with program content that shall be of interest to the audience. The community would thus get largely benefited and find itself more involved in the happenings within the campus in the areas of education, health, sports, entertainment, university debates, seminars, workshops, cultural events etc.

To develop this FM radio station, the initiation is taken by the Bahir Dar university on the made in Bahir Dar initiative project.

In this project the radio streaming, radio program management and client side streaming software has fully designed and developed by the project members. Further, the FM radio station hardware design, specification preparation, and system installation and integration have been done by the project members.

2. Objectives of the Project

2.1 Main Objective

The main objective of this project is to design and implement community based FM broadcasting system for Bahir Dar University.

2.2 Specific Objectives

Some of the specific objectives of this project include:

  • Design and develop software that will use for FM broadcasting with client side and server side application.
  • Design and develop the electronics circuit and understand how the different parts of this electronics circuit function together to make an FM transmitter.
  • Design and develop a protocol to send FM signals through IP Networks.
  • Design and develop FM Networks to integrate different colleges in the university.
  • Design and develop the way of FM switching control box.

3. Significance of the System

If this system is successfully implemented, the university community will be beneficiary in the following aspects:

  • Each educational and community clubs can have their own broadcasting time so that they can transmit their thoughts easily.
  • Updating students with different current technologies, hence it will assist to initiate the students on developing new ideas and innovations
  • For meetings or conference participation
  • It will be a means to communicate with higher officials or social and government representatives
  • It will provide means to invite guest speakers and professionals to present their knowledge to the community.
  • It will assist to deliver live tutorials for distance students.
  • To conduct lectures for various students in different colleges
  • It will be practical internship center for journalism department students.
  • For announcement and advertizing.
  • The university can provide a communication medium to Bahir Dar City
  • Broadcasting entertainment programs for the community.
  • Can further broadcast FM Radio to specific model places.

 4. Overall Systems Components and Operations

The overall system will contain the FM Radio station at the university President office and various FM transmitters at each campus of the university. The transmission from the FM radio station to the FM broadcasting transmitter will be based on two transmission techniques: via Studio to Transmitter Link (STL) and via the existing IP network. But in this first phase of the project we will use only the IP Networks to transmit the Audio from the studio to the FM transmitter sites. This will provide flexibility for the listener to use either the FM radio receiver or the Internet to listen the university radio. The listener can use their mobile, internet or analog FM receiver to access the FM radio. The system layout for this proposed FM radio station is shown in figure 1 below.

bdufm

   Figure 1: The overall system layout for the proposed FM broadcasting station

  • The complete one way link between the FM radio stations to the listener will be similar to the following.

 

bdufm2