Filed under: Nuts and bolts
Seems it was not the power supply but an overheating CPU that was a fault. The cooling fan stopped spinning due to dust causing the CPU to overheat. The CPU got so hot Windows froze up and went to a black screen. I’ve replaced the CPU fan and am running the KONA machine off line for 24 hours to ensure it stays cool. Hopefully the CPU wasn’t damaged in this episode.
A valuable lesson in keeping your machine alive. Dust is your enemy! Also true is that fans are mechanical objects subject wear and tear. The KONA Radio computer has been running more or less non-stop for about 44 months so a failure at some point was inevitable.
Rav
Filed under: Nuts and bolts
KONA Radio was down for about 90 minutes this morning. The wife phoned me at work and said the machine was “beeping” and the screen was dark. She was pressed for time and couldn’t address the issue so I decided to head home and at least fire up the backup computer to get KONA back on the air. I came home, rebooted it and everything came up normally. I’ll need to probe the event logs and see what may have precipitated the crash. The beeping makes me think it was the video card. If that is the case I’ll just pull it out and use the on board video.
Anyways if the original KONA computer goes kaput I do have a backup system that can take over if need be.
Shoot, as I write this KONA froze up… I am firing up the new machine now…. sigh
Filed under: Music
Last night I had a musical experience that took me back to my teen years. I had heard about an Electric Light Orchestra tribute group called L.E.O. . I downloaded the album from Amazon.com and I listened to the whole collection. Wow! They certainly captured the flavor of the late 70s ELO sound. Listen up for them on KONA!
We dropped the MP3Pro stream in favor of an OGG-Vorbis format. Ogg offers similar performance and is more compatible with the various media players out there. To tune it in via the Loudcity launch page please be sure to select “ogg” when you launch an external media player from there. We’ll see if we can get the server owner to configure it so it can be launched from the directory at Icecast.org.
Filed under: Music
Eight tracks from the Bay City Rollers were added to the play list today. Enjoy!!!!
Filed under: Nuts and bolts
The Ice storm we had in West Virginia yesterday cause two, 15 minute outages. Sorry for the brief downtimes.
Rav
Filed under: Music
The first artist is a no brainer as he was on the ground floor of Rock and Roll in the 50s. Willie Nelson was too but found success in country music. Heck if I can play Johnny Cash then Willie is a shoe in.
Filed under: Nuts and bolts
Yesterday KONA had some serious encoder problems with its 64Kbps stream. A warble-skipping issue made it unlistenable for 30 minutes until I was online and able to restart the encoder. Since upgrading from SAM3 to SAM4 I had notice “floating point exception errors” in the event log, but the stream sounded fine. I guess it finally caught up to me and trashed the stream.
As a result I had to revert back to SAM3. The only drawback is that SAM3 does not support +AAC. +AAC was the format I used on my 10 slot 32Kbps stream. I’ve reverted back to MP3Pro which sounds just as good in my ears. Only issue is that you have to manually install the plugin for Winamp.[download here]. If you do not have the MP3Pro decoder you’ll hear the non enhanced MP3 stream instead. Another downside is that Shoutcast.com will not list MP3Pro streams either. So in the long run I may find a cheap icecast solution or just drop it altogether.
Rav
9 February 2008 marks the 1 year anniversary of the launch of KONA Radio. Join us at Hukilau island from 6-8pm SLT (Pacific) to celebrate.
Hi there! Welcome to KONA Radio. This station is a culmination of my teenage dream to own and operate a radio station. Back in the early 80s as a kid growing up in Bellevue, Nebraska I was a big fan of anything radio. It started when I got my first digital watch from Seiko and the little instruction manual listen time stations you could use to accurately set your watch to. My family had an old Telefunken stereo console that could tune in these shortwave frequencies. From there I began listening to all forms of radio, AM, FM, police band, CB and ham. In high school I was a active CBer running with a pack of other local teens on channels 33 and 18. As we were want to do we would talk about all the neat projects we’d like to do; ham radio, computers, broadcasting. We all got our ham licenses at some point and computers? Oh yeah, in spades! I don’t know what my old CB buddies are up to now but I have realized my dream in broadcasting.
In the late 90s I began to build my digital music collection. It was small at first due to space restrictions on the hard drives. Then in 2001 we got DSL and I made my first tentative broadcast with two puny 32kbps slots. As my uplink was only 128Kbps it was all I could manage. I experimented for a while and put it aside until 2004 when I saw a segment on the old Screen Savers TV show about Ramsey Kit transmitters. Hmmm, now there’s an idea! I pawned off some of my old Ham gear and even an old portable Sony AM-Stereo receiver to raise the funds for the kits. “Cherry Hill Radio”-FM went live on 1 May 2004 and the AM signal went live 14 February 2005. The range was about 1 mile and my audience was the housing development I lived in. I had maybe 3-4 regular listeners but they did enjoy the music 
.
The next installment talks about how I started broadcasting on the internet again.
