By Steve Diamond, WSCA Systems Administrator

This past month, Gordon Sharpless and I conducted a variety of fixes and adjustments, particularly in the main control room. This included replacing the broken guest headphone volume knobs, making various changes on the DJ computer to prepare for future moves and upgrades and improving the connection for the telephone outside of CR-A. We now also have a second telephone patch installed in CR-A, installed by Rocky Smith and recently tweaked by me. This means it's now possible to have two different phone guests on-air at the same time!

I also recently submitted our quarterly SoundExchange report. This may sound like a dry topic, but it says a lot about how the music industry has changed in recent years, and about Portsmouth Community Radio's support for local musicians and dedication to listeners' online privacy.

With the rise of Napster and other online music-sharing services, record labels started pursuing royalties from broadcasters as a new source of revenue. Facing extremely complicated and potentially expensive fees, radio stations got together to organize this to be a fixed flat-rate annual fee, and the SoundExchange program was formed.

After DJs log which songs were played, I send a selection of the live stream logs to an NPR service. They analyze what artists and labels are getting play here at WSCA relative to listenership and distribute our membership fee directly to the musicians accordingly. Thus, the more we play local artists, the more financial support they get.

And then there's the privacy question. Former Programming head Damon Thomas and I conferred in the early days of our involvement with SoundExchange about how to handle the logs we are required to submit. Sending the logs in their original form would share personally identifiable listener information, but the only other option was to process those logs ourselves.

With the support of then-engineering head Dee Hebert and another volunteer programmer, I created a strategy for us to process the logs ourselves, without ever releasing identifying information, which remains in use today. So even well before Edward Snowden broke the controversy of pervasive government eavesdropping, WSCA was doing its part to protect online privacy.