Home | Programmes | News | Awards | Training | Join | History | Calendar | Contact Us | Members

Technical Tour

Interested about what goes on behind the scenes to get the station on the air? We caught up with Ken David, Life Member and former Station Engineer!

Hi, my name is Ken David - Station Engineer, even though I've moved with my job I'm on hand to advise Rookwood Sound about any engineering at the station.

The Engineering department work behind the scenes here at Rookwood Sound to keep the station on the air and to develop enhancements to the service we provide. It is a job that takes up a lot of time and requires a great deal of patience but it's a worthwhile job because without any engineering work being carried out we will not be on the air.

So without getting too technical I thought I would give you an overview of how Rookwood Sound Hospital Broadcasting is put together and moreover how the music we play gets to your bedside. We serve 2 hospitals, our home hospital which is Rookwood in Llandaff and Llandough, just outside Cardiff.

Rookwood is served by a normal radio transmitter on 945 kHz MW
(the easiest way to find us is between BBC Radio Wales and Talksport).

It is only a small transmitter and can only be heard in the confines of the hospital but is no different in terms of quality to the equipment the bigger broadcasters use. The transmitter is on 24 hours a day and has served us well for the last 10 years or so.

Llandough on the other hand is served by headsets at each bedside.
We can be heard across most of the hospital on Channel 1 or Channel A.
Since there are no studio's at Llandough a VHF link system is used to get the radio signal from the rooftop of Rookwood to the rooftop of Llandough,
some 5 miles as the crow flies. As a hospital radio station we are very fortunate because we have two fully working studio's, most station's only have one.

This means radio programmes can be broadcast from one studio while the other is used for training or recording future shows. It also means as Engineer I can do essential work in one studio while the other is being used.

Both studio's are very similar and have the same type of equipment. The equipment we use to make our radio programmes includes two CD players, one record player, one Mini Disc Player / Recorder, one DAT player / recorder, Microphones and headphones. We also have a computer system called Myriad from P Squared which I will go into later on.

To link all these pieces of equipment together we use what is called a Mixer, for the most part unless you have been in radio studio your unlikely to have ever seen one. The Mixer is the hub
in the studio and all equipment is connected to this in once place so the Presenter has full control over what you, the listener can hear. It is also the piece of equipment that allows sound from other area's from outside broadcasts and our news service.

Rookwood Sound provides a 24 hour a day service, well almost! During the evening and weekends our programs to you are live from the studio's of Rookwood Sound, or increasingly from Central Square at Llandough or within Rookwood Hospital itself. At all other times our output is trusted to a computer system called Myriad, we purchased from a company called P Squared. It's just one of many systems that are used by Hospital Radio and similar systems are used by the BBC and commercial radio as well.

Myriad stores the majority of our music, all our jingles and trailers for our Presenters to use. When we are Live Myriad is used to play music alongside CD's etc and is fed into our mixing desk in either studio. When a Presenter finishes for the night, Myriad takes over the station fully and provides non stop music for your entertainment.

You might wonder what happens to all the sound when it leaves the studio. Each studio is connected to what is called the Central Technical Area or CTA.  In here is where I spend a lot of my time as Engineer. There is a rack of very special equipment which receives the sound from both studios down the corridor.

In the CTA you will find the MW transmitter for Rookwood, the VHF link transmitter, to get our sound over to Llandough, a satellite receiver for reception of hourly news bulletins, a domestic MW receiver (to check the sound quality to Rookwood), two domestic FM receivers (one of which is used to check sound quality to Llandough), Studio Switcher, Telephone Unit & Delay Unit.

There is also a feed to a Long Play Video Recorder which we use to record our live shows, under the terms of our License to operate on the MW band.

Sounds a lot doesn't it? This is the heart of the station and therefore is accessibly only by the engineers, even with my experience I sometimes wonder which wire does what? I hope I have given you an overview of how things work here at Rookwood Sound Hospital Radio.