20 Mar ROOTIO – Tech­no­log­i­cal changes high con­nec­tiv­i­ty and par­tic­i­pa­tion all fits in a buck­et

Grass­roots Radio’s new fact­sheet is out! This piece of infor­ma­tion pro­vides an overview of RootIO, the free/​open tech­nol­o­gy stack facil­i­tat­ed with­in the project. RootIO com­bines low-pow­er com­mu­ni­ty FM with con­tem­po­rary Inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies for a very low cost, thus facil­i­tat­ing the oper­a­tion of low pow­er FM radio sta­tions in com­mu­ni­ties that depend on FM radio the most such those involved in the Grass­roots Radio project.

Rather than have one sta­tion span a large area, RootIO advo­cates for the pro­lif­er­a­tion of more but small­er sta­tions, each serv­ing a local neigh­bor­hood or town, a seg­ment of the would-be lis­ten­er­ship of a large radio sta­tion. To this effect, RootIO sta­tions are low pow­er and cov­er a frac­tion of the area of a typ­i­cal sta­tion, with low­er cost impli­ca­tions for cap­i­tal and oper­a­tions. This also means that local issues can be eas­i­ly dis­cussed and delib­er­at­ed, and local music and cul­ture can be heard. That said, sta­tions can also join togeth­er for region­al or nation­al pro­gram­ming.

The Rootio archi­tec­ture relies on 3 main com­po­nents: a web-based stu­dio, the Android RootIO phone app as trans­mis­sion site, and the low pow­er FM trans­mit­ter.

To learn more about RootIO, read the fact­sheet at this link.