HFM hemel looking for presenters

General Lighting

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Although Hemel is in English a fairly well known short form of Hemel Hempstead, I did wonder at first whether you were a Dutch Christian station! (it means heaven in Dutch).

Coincdidentally I noticed you have been asked to broadcast a church service, which isn't an unusual request. but your webpage seems to keep linking to some free hit counter, and the link to the tweet with more info is locked to a facebook page (I don't use FB, and you may find that some of the older generation who could help you don't use it either).

I am not the most religious person (was once a Catholic and I do listen to a Dutch Catholic station on analogue radio but more out of curiosity and for language learning), but have respect for all faith groups and am willing to give some advice as I was reading about how the Dutch do this, and listening to some of it.

The Dutch do have a mobile studio rack full of some decent kit, and it appears some Dutch churches (even if they don't have broadband) have not just analogue telephones but ISDN. They often seem to use the telephone line for sending audio, which might seem old fashioned but a 2-3 hour phone call will only cost a few euro cents and its bandwidth is guaranteed, that is not the case for the Internet!

I'd start off first with investigating whether there is an existing sound system in the church, and whether any useful sound can be obtained from this (you might need trafo boxes (DI boxes) to avoid hum/noise) and also if broadband is available (or if you are technically skilled whether access is possible to put up a dedicated wifi link to your main studio site) and where you can get a reliable and safe electric supply, route cables safely and store and operate equipment in such a place it would not disrupt the service.

if the church still uses a traditional pipe organ, you will need to provide microphones and other equipment to capture this for broadcast (I would record it as well as folk often want recordings of services), also choirs are not always amplified (as thats the whole reason of having lots of people singing at once).

If you are not yourselves religious, find someone who is and knows about sound engineering, and visit the church midweek along with them, as well as getting hold of whatever the format of the service is so you know exact start and end times. I would suggest doing a test run on a midweek service or when there might be a youth group or some other kind of activity in the church (choirs and organists usually do practises and rehearsals)
 
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