Used to be if you were lounging around on the two smaller Cayman Islands, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, and you needed a radio fix, you were out of luck as the islands’ radio stations were all on Grand Cayman and therefore out of range.
Recently Compass Media, with four stations, decided to solve that problem by installing Nautel VX 1 kW transmitters on Cayman Brac, the island furthest away at app. 90 miles. Sparsely Little Cayman is close enough to it to receive the Nautels’ signals.
But how to feed that signal?
Compass Media Operations Manager Mark Lee explained, “We thought, ‘It’s all WheatNet IP to the transmitters here on the big island and surely because they’re WheatNet, why not take the post processed, pre-reemphasized feed from the two [Wheatstone] FM55s and two [Wheatstone] MP532s and send it across?’”
A release added, “That way, they could route and control the processed programming like any other signal on the network, plus preserve all the audio processing settings already optimized for each of the group’s four unique formats…”
This was achieved by via an underwater public fiber optic cable already connecting Brac with Grand Cayman. Lee specified, “We put an I/O Blade at the Brac site so now it looks like it’s part of the WheatNet and then we just made crosspoints.” More details here.
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