Well, I am sorry to say we did not make it to full-time on-the-air by the end of 2015.  But we are making some good progress and I am confident we will meet our deadline in the summer of 2016.

We have been running on-the-air tests, broadcasting for most weekends since November 14, 2015.  We missed a couple of weekends around Christmas for travel and other obligations.

The weekend operation has been very beneficial.  We have been figuring out our equipment and giving it a “burn-in” test.  Our transmitter actually had a failure which we were able to repair.  And our audio processing is getting better each time.  I think we have most of the system working in pretty good order.

For content, we have been using a schedule of selected items from our library of readings.  Each hour starts with a longer selection  (over 30 minutes)  or two medium selections (20-30 minutes) followed by fill-in at the end of the hour from shorter selections. We do get some repetition just because our library is not yet as big as it should be.  But I think it makes an interesting broadcast and I enjoy listening to it.

When we go “live”, we plan to have certain hours dedicated to chapters of longer books, that’s where we are aiming.  But even then we will have a need for the fill-in at the end of the hour.

We are learning how the scheduling software works, how the equipment works, and how the signal gets out.  Learning a lot!

Plans for the future, besides getting on-the-air full time, include internet streaming, addition of RDS to the over-the-air signal, and an integration of our broadcast schedule with the website and social media.

For the moment we have left fund-raising behind.  And we will probably need to come back to that as things develop.  Over the course of 2015 we made a number of presentations to local community groups and had a lot of positive feedback and a few contributions.  I would like to see that grow.  But we are focused on getting on the air to meet the cut-off date requirement of our broadcast license.