Remote On Air

A studio ON AIR sign in two houses, on two continents. Whoever keys the radio, both of them light up.

In design

On Air

Spring Range, Australia · Graford, Texas · both at once

Every broadcast studio has one: a sign above the door that lights up when the microphone is live. Everyone in the building understands it instantly and nobody has to be told twice.

Remote On Air is that sign, for a station whose radio is somewhere else. One at my place in Australia, one at Ed’s in Texas. Whoever is using the Flex, both signs light up.

Why

Two operators, one radio, eleven thousand miles

A shared remote station has a problem an ordinary shack does not: you cannot hear whether somebody else is on it. Ed is fifteen time zones away. Opening a laptop and checking a web page to find out whether the radio is free works, but it is friction, and friction is what stops people using a station.

A lamp on the wall has no friction. You glance at it on your way past.

It solves a second thing too, which is domestic rather than technical: it tells the rest of the household that the radio is in use, without anybody having to say so.

How

The signal already exists

This is the part that makes it buildable rather than wishful. RS1 already knows when the radio is keyed — the Admin page on ALAMO has had a live on-air lamp on it for months, driven by RS1.FLEX.LOG. Remote On Air is a physical output for a state the system already produces.

The sign. A real illuminated ON AIR box, not a strip of RGB tape pretending to be one. It should look like it belongs in a studio.
A small controller behind it — an ESP32 or a Pi Zero — driving a relay to switch the sign.
Outbound polling only. The controller asks the exit node whether the radio is on air. Nothing listens, nothing is forwarded, and it works from behind any home router without touching it. Same architecture as everything else in RS1.
Two signs, one source of truth. Both poll the same state, so they cannot disagree about whether the radio is busy.
Fails dark. If the link drops or the controller cannot reach the node, the sign goes out rather than staying lit — a sign stuck on ON AIR is worse than no sign at all.

The obvious extension, once two of them work, is that it does not have to stop at two. Any RS1 station could drive a sign, and a club could put one in the clubroom.

Where It Is Up To

Being honest about it

The software half is effectively done, because it is the same on-air state RS1 already publishes and already displays. What does not exist yet is the hardware: the sign, the controller, the enclosure, and a sensible way of getting mains to a lamp without it becoming a project of its own.

So: designed, not built. When there are two of them lit, this page will say so.

Want one?

If you run a remote station and want a sign on the wall, say so — it is a much better project with more than two of them in it.

ian@iangilchrist.net