How to do a remote broadcast

As a member of the WRHU Sports Department, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of in studio work, but one of the coolest things that I have had the opportunity to do is on-site, or remote, broadcasts.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to Towson, Maryland to broadcast the CAA Women's Lacrosse Championships as the Hofstra Pride qualified for the tourney as the three seed and were matched up with the James Madison Dukes.

When you travel on the road, bringing all the necessary equipment and knowing how it works because it's essential to know how to connect and work all the equipment.  If you don't you will not be able to connect with studio and in the real world, if you mess up a live broadcast, you will be fired when you return home.

I have identified five things that are essential to a remote broadcast:

1) Mackie Board
2) Hotline
3) Headsets
4) XLR's
5) Zoom

The Mackie Board is what the entire broadcasts runs through.  The signal that you send output on air, and your connection that gets in-put back to studio all gets fed through the mackie board.  The board controls your audio levels as well, meaning once you connect with studio, you communicate with the engineer to figure out whether your levels need to be changed or not.

The hotline connects to the mackie board that through a phone line is connected with the studio.  A broadcast can either be done through the hotline, or hotline is used simply for "talkback," which is the term used to describe being able to talk to the in-studio engineer through your headsets.  You plug in a phone line in the hotline and connect that to a phone-jack located something at the remote site, dial studio through the hotline, and if there are no issues, the connection should work.

The headsets are simple and relatively self explanatory, but important nonetheless.  Your headsets allow you to hear studio, hear yourselves in your ears, and also is the tool through which your voice gets transmitted onto the air.

XLR's are the wires that connect all the equipment to the mackie board, and if your don't bring enough XLR's with you on a broadcast, you will not be able to connect.  They are the blue wires shown in the slideshow.

Finally, the zoom is a portable recording device that allows you do interviews on site and send the audio files back to studio.  Simply, an XLR connect a mic to the zoom, and the audio recordings get saved on a SD card, and all you do is once the interview is complete you pull the audio off the zoom and send the file back to studio.

The most difficult thing about remotes is when something goes wrong and you have to troubleshoot.  A multitude of things can go wrong, but the most important thing is that you communicate with someone on your on site location before hand and make sure they have broadcast capabilites.  For example, when I was in Maryland, we knew before hand they did not have phone lines, so brought wireless internet with us and did the broadcast over Google Voice, which is not the preferable way to do a broadcast, but it got the job done.  As long as you prepare beforehand and don't go to the remote without any knowledge of the equipment they have, in most circumstances you will be able to connect and successfully air the broadcast.

My last thing for you in this post is that if you are interested in radio and have an opportunity to do any sort of remote broadcast cherish the experience and have fun with it because you'll never know how long it will last.