Australian broadcaster 8CCC selects AEQ digital consoles for its studios

The community station has bases in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek, serving a large, unpopulated area in the isolated northern lands.

Radio 8CCC, a community station created in 1981 with programming focused on the Northern Territory of Australia, which broadcasts on 102.1FM and online around the world, has adopted AEQ.

This region of Australia has an area of ​​almost 1.5 million km² with barely 240,000 inhabitants, which gives an idea of ​​the immensity of the area, as well as how dispersed and isolated the towns located there can be.

At the end of 2020, the management of Radio 8CCC decided to renew the technical equipment of the broadcast studios with two vital parameters in their idea of ​​technology: robust and easy to use.

Radio 8CCC have their main studios in Alice Springs with secondary education in the town of Tennant Creek more than 500 kilometers further north. In both cases, the two towns are very far from any other population center in the area, so that any technical problem is very difficult to solve, making it mandatory to have especially robust and fail-safe material.

In addition, it produces many of its programs with volunteer staff without specific training in radio, making it necessary for the equipment and systems used to be extremely easy to manipulate.

With these conditions in mind Radio 8CCC decided to install a new console Forum IP by AEQ in Alice Spring and a console AEQ Capitol IP in the main Tennant Creek studio.

The Capitol IP console installed at Tennant Creek is an 8-channel fixed configuration digital audio mixing console. One of the main qualities of AEQ Capitol IP is the wide input capacity available: 4 mic/line, 12 analog, 4 digital stereo AES/EBU (AES3), 2 digital stereo USB, 2 optional telephone lines, and optional digital multichannel audio links; 16 AoIP channels over two Ethernet connectors or 64 MADI channels via fiber optic input.

Its output capacity is also surprising: 8 analog, 4 digital stereo AES/EBU (AES3), 2 digital stereo USB, 2 optional telephone lines, optional digital multichannel audio links; 16 AoIP channels on two Ethernet connectors or 64 MADI channels fiber optic input, control headphones, primary and secondary booth headphones, control monitoring, booth monitoring and special output for a pair of CUE speakers.

Forum IP en Alice Springs

The Forum IP console installed in Alice Springs is based on the same technology, but has two fundamental differences due to this station being the main one. On the one hand, greater input, output and control capacity, with 12 faders and 4 program buses with direct assignment keys, making it easier to manage several programs or recordings simultaneously. On the other hand, greater security against possible breakdowns is that its modular composition makes it unlikely to have to send the console for repair to Sydney, on the opposite side of the Australian continent. It is easy to identify the module and ask for it to be sent, and it can be replaced by station personnel.

The installation, configuration, commissioning and training of the entire project was carried out Broadcast Components AEQ's local partner in the country, located in New South Wales, in direct communication with AEQ's central technical services in Madrid.