Deregulation of industries in our country over the last 20 years has led to a mixed bag of pros and cons. Truck-drivers can drive goods around the country and the railways struggle to stay afloat, you can watch the news on three or four or five different channels delivered by pairs of news announcers, one talking, one looking knowingly at the camera while a wallpaper of irrelevant video clips rush around in the background. With telephones, you get to choose your cellphone provider at least, while your 111 emergency calls get answered by someone in Auckland who thinks the Octagon in Dunedin is some kind of mosque. We have led the western world through Adventures in Deregulation and I have discovered two great deregulated activities that set New Zealand apart. One of them is distillation.
Look up stills, whisky, “how to make” on Google and New Zealand comes up all over the place. Why? Most of these sites have the disclaimer “Illegal in this country, information provided for citizens of New Zealand” (yeah, right) – where it has been, since the mid 90’s, legal to distill alcohol for your own consumption. God bless the good ship Deregulation and all who sail in her!
Another area where New Zealand comes up is in the relatively new field of “micro-broadcasting”. In the setting up and tendering of frequencies on the FM band, the NZ regulators saw fit to make several frequencies at the very top and the very bottom of the FM band available for anyone to use under the provision of the General User Licence. There are restrictions, the main one being that your transmitter is capped at the awesome output power of half a watt. The most common use of these frequencies seems to be for the likes of “hospital radio stations”, in-house conference coverage and the even smaller iPod-to-car-radio transmission, but if you tune your radio to these nether regions you’ll find plenty of interesting stations beaming out as hard as they half-watt can. In the world of micro-broadcasting, the first three principles of real estate are king: location, location, location. High is good, higher is better. Cities like Dunedin and Wellington are ideal.
So what?
So, for less than $3000 you can purchase a transmitter and aerial and set it up in your bedroom or garden shed, then with some old discarded 486 computer with a bit of free software and a couple of thousand mp3s on the hard-drive, you’ve got yourself a 24 hour radio station. Imagine – true folk radio: new releases, last week’s floor spots at the folk club, featured artists, nasty buskers and gossip… And you don't even have to log on to the internet!
Labels: podcast, radio, recording
