Sunbury ’24 live outside broadcast

Within days of the Sunbury ’24 pop concert being announced by Hume City Council, a member of the Sunbury Radio team set out to see how the station could support the event.

Over a number of weeks, Andrew, the station’s program manager, led negotiations with organisers offering a quality live broadcast of the event. Once that was agreed, a small production team was formed, and Dan & Steve T began work to ensure a wireless link between the venue (The Nook) and the Jackson Hill-based station was established and tested. This involved modifying the station’s main broadcast desk to receive a signal from a portable transmitter.

On Friday 12 April, a day before the first chord was struck on the Sunbury ’24 stage, station volunteers led by Dan were busy setting up and testing the station’s outside broadcast transmitter, mixer, and microphones.

Volunteering Friday and Saturday, working with other professionals running the event’s main mixing desk, Dan ensured the station got a clean feed to broadcast the show – linking to two sites over a line-of-sight distance of around 5km.

On the big day, a team of five volunteers from the station arrived while bands rehearsed ahead of the main gates opening at 1pm – allowing 4,000 ticket holders to flood in and find a spot in front of the stage.

For those not able to attend, Sunbury Radio broadcast the show from 1pm until late into the evening on 99.3FM as well as online. In between performances presenters kept listeners entertained by interviewing artists such as Matt Taylor, the city’s mayor Naim Kurt, local councillors, and members of the audience.

The broadcast saw a huge spike in the station’s website traffic with more than 1,500 visitors to the site during the broadcast, well over 600 using the site’s pop-up audio player, hundreds more listening online via services such as TuneIn, and a huge boost in listeners using radios at home, at work, and in their cars right across Sunbury and beyond.

On the outside broadcast team were Andrew, Dean, Dan, Evan, and Steve H. Keeping everything running at the studio were Steve T, Chris, James, Alicia and Gary S.

Listener feedback on Sunbury Radio’s broadcast was outstanding with Facebook comments such as:

Great to have Sunbury Radio there, thanks for covering the concert!
Mayor Naim Kurt – Hume City Council
 
Thank you so much to the entire team for your awesome contribution to the success of the festival!
Councillor Jarrod Bell – Hume City Council
 
Thank you for all of the hard work Andrew, Steve T, Chris and Steve H, along with the rest of the Sunbury Radio volunteers.
Mark Oliver (collector of festival memorabilia and one of our interviewees during the broadcast).
 
Absolutely amazing crew! Thank you for having me.
Nathan Gabriel (local musician who performed on the acoustic stage at the festival, and was one of our interviewees during the broadcast).
 
Well done to all of you! Congrats guys!
Deborah Sweeney (avid Sunbury festival fan who was interviewed by Sunbury Radio in the lead up to the event).
 
Thanks guys. Sunbury Radio rocks. Well done.
Carole.
 
Fabulous effort!!
Deborah.
 
I tuned in and really enjoyed the live broadcast.
Peter.
 
Great job yesterday, many thanks.
Ann.

Words and photos / Steve Hart.