Wild Land

Visitors arriving at the Wild Land website via the top level domain wildland.info will have experienced difficulties in recent days.

This was caused by gremlins in the innards of a configuration file, resulting from recent security enhancements to the servers that host my website. A lot of upgrade work has been done in recent weeks to try and reduce the traffic generated by spambots and other Internet nasties that not only chew up bandwidth, but attempt to plant references and links to pornography websites on my site.

One tiny oversight meant that the domain wildland.info was not pointed at the Wild Land homepage. My apologies to genuine visitors who thought I might have “shot the gap” and headed for warmer climes.

My website is hosted by the owner of WorldFM who maintains his own websites and mine, continually adopting new technologies and enhancing security. I get commercial-quality service at “mates rates” because he enjoys tinkering which keeps his skills honed.

So, this an opportunity to acknowledge that support, and put in a plug for one of his projects.

WorldFM is a low-power FM station which broadcasts to Redwood, Tawa and the Porirua basin north of Wellington. Low-power FM stations operate under a different regime from the commercial FM licence which allows higher-powered signals, networking, and exclusive access to assigned frequencies. These low-power FM stations operate within a specific part of the FM band, and the restriction on the strength of their signal limits their coverage area. This provides opportunities to operate community, hobby and other radio stations which would struggle to find sufficient funding for a commercial licence.

But hobby does not necessarily mean that these stations don’t operate to professional standards. WorldFM is a high music content station, well-known for its Kiwi, Gipsy and Flamenco music and sounds from around the world. It provides regular news bulletins from Australian, European and Chinese broadcasters as well as others.

Programmes from Deutsche Welle, Radio Six in Scotland, China Radio International and Ecuador have regular slots. Through the World Radio Network, programmes from the Netherlands, Africa, Romania, France, Radio Slovakia, Vatican Radio, Radio Prague and many other sources also have regular timeslots.

The radio station has an interest in the sciences, including astronomy, and has regular features of interest to radio amateurs and DXers. My favourite in this last category is Glenn Hauser’s “This Week in Amateur Radio” a weekly review of happenings in amateur radio. Even though I don’t dabble in Radio DXing, Glenn is worth listening to because he crams interesting items on new technology, atmospherics, solar activity, regulations and the history of radio into his programme.

WorldFM transmits at 88.5 MHz on the FM band, and has good coverage in Redwood, Tawa, Porirua and, of course, on the nearby parts of State Highway 1. The WorldFM website has a detailed schedule of programmes, information on content providers, a page showing information about what is currently playing, and allows you to listen on-line via the web.

Modern FM receivers receive information on WorldFM’s current programme, track, the time and local weather via RDS and display it on their front panels.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Shameless Plugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.