Category Archives: Radio

Exetel’s new small business offering on Optus ADSL2+

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Exetel sent me an e-mail on Wednesday about a new product they have for small businesses in areas serviced by the Optus ADSL2+ network. At the time pricing hadn’t been published however now it is.

The plans start at $59 per month and include a Netcomm device that is NBN capable, VoIP capable & has failover to Wireless Broadband with a 1GB service included in the package.

Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:30:24 +1100
Subject: New Small Business Offering
From: Exetel Agent Sales <agentsales@exetel.com.au>

We are in the late stages of offering a small business plan for those businesses that can get an Optus ADSL service.

We will base it on the Netcomm box that has both an ADSL and a fibre connection port and has the capability of housing a wireless broadband (low cost) dongle and has ATA capability built in.

The new Optus plan will be designated as B33and will provide unlimited ADSL downloads with the ability to switch to wireless if the ADSL service fails and to operate over wireless at no charge while the ADSL service is non-functional.

There will be an option to acquire the Netcomm box, dongle, SIM and VoIP handset at no upfront cost on a 12 month or 24 month plan and the ability to switch from Optus ADSL to NBNCo fibre when/if it becomes available for whatever is the, then, published NBNCo install cost with no retail markup from the NBNCo wholesale published price.

We would welcome any suggestions on how to make this business service as attractive as possible

Telstra PrePaid iPhone 3GS

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I noticed this ad today, strangely as a Google Ad on my Samsung Galaxy Gio.

telstra-prepaid-iphone-3gs

Telstra are offering the iPhone 3GS for $429. Seems strange you’d even consider this offer when Apple sell them directly for just $20 more and theirs isn’t locked to the Telstra network.

Or, why you’d consider an iPhone 3GS over the $134.10 Samsung Galaxy Gio which is easily unlocked from the Optus network – is beyond me.

Root & Unlock the Samsung Galaxy Gio GT-5660V

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I’ve previously blogged about how to root & unlock the Samsung Galaxy Gio GT-5660S. My brother in law really loves my Gio and wanted the same phone so today he bought one from Optus. Unfortunately they supplied him with a slightly different model to my own which cannot be unlocked and rooted in the same manner. But never fear, that doesn’t mean it can’t be unlocked and rooted.

You will need:

So first we’ll start with rooting/flashing. Unlike the 5660S you cannot use “root gb updated.zip” and you need to reflash the firmware with ODIN.

  • Turn on your phone by holding the home, volume down and power buttons. Make sure the power button is the last one you press. Your phone will boot up and say “Downloading…”. If it boots up normally, you did something wrong
  • Connect your phone to the PC via the USB cable. Wait until all drivers are loaded correctly (Samsung Kies will install them upon connection)
  • Load ODIN 4.42
  • Click the OPS button and select GIO_v1.0.ops
  • Tick the “One Package” checkbox
  • Click the “One Package” button and select GT-S5660M_MUGKG3_stock_rooted_ROM_v2.tar
  • Hit the Start button
  • After a few minutes your phone will reboot. The handset I used didn’t boot correctly after flashing probably because of the user data. To fix this I held down the home and power buttons and performed a factory reset, then rebooted the phone again, and it booted normally

So now the SuperUser app is installed and the phone is running firmware from Bell. So to unlock the phone its now the same process as the 5660S (so I just copied and pasted from the previous blog):

  • Install the Java Developer Kit
  • Install the Android SDK
  • Run the Android SDK Manager and install the “Android SDK Platform-tools”
  • Open the command prompt with administrator privileges
  • Run the command:
    cd "\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools"
  • Connect your Samsung Galaxy Gio to the PC with the USB cable
  • Run the ADB shell. This is a command prompt viewable on your PC which is executed on your phone. The command is:
    adb shell
  • Once the ADB shell has loaded you’ll need to step up into rooted mode. Run the command “su”. After executing this, on the Samsung Galaxy Gio the SuperUser app will pop up requesting permission to grant superuser privileges
  • Now we can start with the actual unlocking. Run the following commands:
    mount –o remount rw /
    mkdir /efs
    mount –o nosuid,ro,nodev –t vfat /dev/block/stl5 /efs
    cat /efs/mits/perso.txt
  • There will now be an 8 digit number that is not entirely made up of 0’s on your screen. This is your unique unlock code. Write it down.
  • Turn off your phone and replace the SIM with a card that is locked out of your phone – ie. a SIM card from a different provider
  • Enter in the unlock code you wrote down when requested
  • Your phone is now rooted and unlocked

HTML5 <audio> and Icecast

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Well with my works recently on a new web based player for the radio station that detects the visitors web browser and directs them to a suitable play head, I decided I could probably expand this with the HTML5 <audio> tag as a player.

Seems like a good idea but the real issue is browser support and codecs.

Apple Safari & Internet Explorer 9 will apparently support MP3 & AAC. My testing couldn’t get it to work with either, when streaming from Icecast.

Opera & Firefox support OGG & WAV codecs only due to licensing reasons. Just recently we killed off our OGG stream because nobody listened to it. So essentially with our MP3 & AAC streams we can’t support Firefox in HTML5 and instead must use Adobe Flash.

Google Chrome supports AAC, MP3, OGG & WAV codecs. My testing revealed that it worked fantastic. However I couldn’t get it working with AAC+ and only MP3.

So after testing a few browsers the only one I could get HTML5 audio working when streaming from Icecast was Google Chrome.

I’ll still implement a HTML5 audio player anyway, but I’ll only send users of Google Chrome to it. It seems the compatibility in other browsers is lacking.

Carrier locking

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I’ve been thinking about this a bit the past week. I really don’t know who carriers think they’re kidding by providing devices with carrier locking.

Android devices can easily be unlocked free of charge with software available from Google and Internet forums.

iPhone devices can easily be unlocked free of charge with software available from Internet forums.

Huawei wireless broadband devices can be unlocked for a few dollars from numerous online suppliers of unlock codes like DC-Unlocker.

It makes you wonder why a carrier would supply hardware below cost thinking they’ll recoup their income by offering 3G mobile services.

Take Vodafone’s Huawei E585 Pocket WiFi device thats on sale at Australia Post for $39.95. Considering an unlock with DC-Unlocker is about $15 and only takes a few minutes, it makes so much more sense for me to buy a Vodafone device, unlock it, then sell it to a customer for the same price as a carrier unlocked device ($150). This way I have better margins at Vodafone’s expense and I only ever had the intentions of using the device on the Optus network. Thanks Vodafone!

The only areas Australian telecos are winning are with wireless broadband. Telstra’s NextG network won’t support any device that Telstra hasn’t sold, and Telstra will only sell devices they have exclusive sales rights to. Meaning there is no chance for unlocking and there is limited opportunity to use carrier unlocked devices from a 3rd party. Vodafone also exclusively buy a few models of wireless broadband dongles from Huawei and Huawei don’t publish any carrier unlocked firmware for these devices making an unlock impossible.

If carriers are serious about their device locking, they need to look more at exclusive sales rights for the hardware they sell.

EPG in Google Calendar?

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I did some more work for the radio station today. I’ve implemented what I’d like to call EPG or Electronic Program Guide in their Internet stream.

Icecast supports metadata in MP3 & AAC+ streams so this metadata can be used to represent whats being sent to air such as the name of the program or the name of the track.

I needed a databased calendar for EPG. So I turned to Google Calendar because of its easy interface to modify the calendar data. It also has an API which can be used to both perform lookups of whats presently on so we can send that to Icecast, and we can use the API to pull the whole program guide and apply our own formatting on our website.

Today I made a script to pull the current entry from Google Calendar and to publish it to Icecast over HTTP. I had always thought this would be difficult to pull off, however it ended up to be much easier than I ever imagined. I wrote this script in PHP so that its modular with the same lookup functions I’ll later use on the web based player.

Now all that remains is to convince the web developer that the program guide should use the Google Calendar data so we’re not maintaining 2 different program guides. I’m still waiting for him to implement my web based player. And its been 2 months since I first requested admin privileges to his WordPress installation. So my hopes on having anything done any time soon aren’t high.

Root & Unlock the Samsung Galaxy Gio

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Today I rooted my Optus PrePaid Samsung Galaxy Gio and also removed the Optus carrier locking. Quite a simple process – it was easier than I imagined.

First off you’ll require a few things:

So we’ll start with rooting. You’ll need “root gb updated.zip”. If this link is broken, I have the file, so just post a comment and I’ll update the link.

  • Copy “root gb updated.zip” to your SD card
  • Turn off your phone
  • Press and hold the home button and the power button
  • When recovery mode loads, select” “Add update from SD card” then select “root gb updated.zip” as the update
  • Reboot your phone and you now have the SuperUser app installed

Now we’ll remove carrier locking.

  • Install the Java Developer Kit
  • Install the Android SDK
  • Run the Android SDK Manager and install the “Android SDK Platform-tools”
  • Open the command prompt with administrator privileges
  • Run the command:
    cd “\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools”
  • Connect your Samsung Galaxy Gio to the PC with the USB cable
  • Run the ADB shell. This is a command prompt viewable on your PC which is executed on your phone. The command is:
    adb shell
  • Once the ADB shell has loaded you’ll need to step up into rooted mode. Run the command “su”. After executing this, on the Samsung Galaxy Gio the SuperUser app will pop up requesting permission to grant superuser privileges
  • Now we can start with the actual unlocking. Run the following commands:
    mount –o remount rw /
    mkdir /efs
    mount –o nosuid,ro,nodev –t vfat /dev/block/stl5 /efs
    cat /efs/mits/perso.txt
  • There will now be an 8 digit number that is not entirely made up of 0’s on your screen. This is your unique unlock code. Write it down.
  • Turn off your phone and replace the SIM with a card that is locked out of your phone – ie. a SIM card from a different provider
  • Enter in the unlock code you wrote down when requested
  • Your phone is now rooted and unlocked

I’ll later blog about custom firmware because the Optus firmware is bloatware.

VoIP in an radio broadcast environment

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My article about using Linux inside an FM radio station certainly got some attention. To this day its ranked as my number one blog. I plan on revisiting that article soon as I’ve gained more knowledge and experience in this area.

Today I’m writing about using VoIP in a radio broadcasting environment and why its really awesome for a radio broadcaster over conventional PSTN lines.

A radio broadcaster will typically have 3 unusual telephone devices that most people wouldn’t need.

They’d have a “telephone interface” to connect a telephone conversation to their broadcast which has volume balance capabilities and retains a studio quality audio feed for the studio microphone (instead of phone quality). This can be replaced with a PC running a VoIP softphone and a couple hardware based audio mixers to interface the PC to the studio’s main mixing deck.

They’d also have a recording device that would also retain studio quality audio for the studio microphone so that pre-recorded interviews can be produced. This can be replaced with Asterisk’s Monitor() function without care of studio quality audio. Or, it can be replaced with a PC running a VoIP softphone capable of recording. If the VoIP softphone can’t record in high qualities, you’d just run Audacity simultaneously and later use Audacity to mix the two ends of the conversation together.

They’d also have an external broadcasting unit that uses a specialized modem to encode studio quality audio on a regular phone call so the broadcaster can broadcast outside of their studio. This can be replaced with Audio over IP technologies which are also used in STL (sometimes called STL-IP).

Typically each of these devices are worth several thousands of dollars or more and every replacement can be done entirely with free software.

On top of this, some broadcasters will also have a PBX system provided by their teleco so they can play their broadcast as music on hold and in place of ringing noises when someone calls one of their phone numbers. Asterisk of course can match this functionality.

VoIP is really beneficial for a radio broadcaster for a whole range of reasons, the main one is that expensive hardware can be replaced with free software. The low cost of computer hardware makes it possible to build redundancies into a telephone system that essentially did not have these features to start with.

So now all I’m left waiting on is board approval to begin some migrations to VoIP at my first signup. At a later time I will have to revisit this blog with some more technical detail.

Improving WiFi performance with channel selection

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2.4GHzWLAN-NonOverlappingChannelsOver the weekend I had a look at my wireless routers at home because I found that within my home there were a few black spots in my own home where VoIP worked poorly.

I live practically in the middle of nowhere, there are no more than 10 WiFi routers on my street, and most of these are beyond my targeted range.

I have two wireless access points. I haven’t used WDS because one of the routers does not support it, although roaming between each AP means the DHCP server assigns the same addressing so connections are retained.

I got the Android app WiFi Analyzer while I was out walking the dogs. This app is quite handy as it illustrates the channel overlapping of WiFi routers that are in range. I immediately noticed a street away there is quite a high powered router on channel 6. Interesting because my router nearest to this router was also using channel 6 which explained the poor performance.

So I manually changed that router to channel 11 and instantly noticed the area covered by that router doubled. Quite an improvement for just channel selection.

My second router I was able to install a larger antenna which brings its EIRP up to around 3.5 watts. Its nearest to a neighbour who runs a router on channel 1. This router was using channel 2. So I manually changed the it to use channel 6. I walked down my backyard after changing this and found my whole yard (which is quite large) is covered, when before I only had half the area in coverage.

My work which is in a central business district was more challenging however. There are routers on essentially every channel (when you consider the overlap) within a 100m radius. I did however notice that nobody is actually using channel 3 but instead are on nearby channels. Because of the intense use in the area this seemed like the best pick. Changing the channel here however only made a marginal improvement.

So I suggest that anyone wanting to improve the performance of their WiFi router should look at interference from neighbouring WiFi routers and select the channel they use carefully. Also keep in mind that many WiFi routers are configured to “automatically select” the channel which does not appear to be the best configuration. Typically these routers will end up using Ch 1, 6 or 11 (and in that order of preference).

Wigle.net is another website that is for WiFi Wardriving. They have an Android app where you can contribute data, which if you donate your data to Open Street Map, can use WiFi routers to help determine locations (when GPS isn’t available?). Their maps can be used to discover neighbouring WiFi networks.

Digital Radio for Radio Broadcasters

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I’ve been looking in to Digital Radio the past few days on behalf of one of my customers who is a community FM radio station.

I was interested to find that community radio stations won’t need to buy any new transmitters to enable digital radio – as digital radio is “multiplexed” so numerous stations are squeezed into a single signal with 1000kbits of bandwidth. There are approx 30 digital stations in Sydney which all come from just two transmitters. Because of multiplexing, the law was made that any commercial digital radio transmitters must allocate two ninths of their capacity to community radio stations.

So all we need to do is get backhaul into the transmitter site (whenever it becomes available).

Its also interesting to note that DAB+ uses AAC+ encoding. There is a new uprise in IP based STL (Studio to Transmitter Links). Many STL-IP solutions can encode in AAC+. So with an AAC+ STL-IP, there is no encoding required at the transmitter site.

My customer will be attempting to seek funding for STL-IP even for their FM transmitter but this will cost at least $10,000. Their studio is probably 200 metres from their transmitter, and is currently serviced by FM modulated analogue audio over microwave. There is only one pathway to the transmitter site and if this goes down the FM transmitter goes off air (or transmits nothing).

So the thought is by implementing STL-IP we could continue to use microwave as our primary STL, and we’d need to migrate the microwave link to something IP based. But if the microwave goes down we could utilize the studio’s ADSL2+ link and the transmitter sites fibre optic link to provide a secondary IP pathway. Migrating to STL-IP only makes sense as we could later use multicasting to send the same feed to any digital radio transmitter that pops up in the area.

But something curious about this is that CBAA’s policies on digital radio state that commercial transmitter sites only have to provide one pathway and don’t have to offer any secondary pathways. Meaning a migration to STL-IP would make our FM transmitter more redundant, but digital radio would be more susceptible to failure.