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.