Behind the Scenes of Radio Monash Tech

Many sleepless nights figuring out what the best mix of old and new tech would make things work!

I've worn many hats at Radio Monash. Tech Director, Head of Studios and Technology, Treasury, and now General Representative. But those titles don't quite capture what the role feels like. Some days I'm tracing cables through tangled patch bays. Some days I'm negotiating with Bulgarian pirates who seized our domains at 4AM. Other days I'm figuring out how to sync live audio with video feeds across multiple platforms. When you're knee-deep in hardware and half-documented configurations, it feels like you’re carrying the memory of all those who built before you.

This is the side of Radio Monash that most people never see. Behind the music and voices lies a complex technical ecosystem that's evolved through four different broadcast desks, three streaming services, and countless experimental setups that pushed the boundaries of what student radio can be.

The Archaeological Dig

The early days of the broadcast studio.

When I first stepped into the Tech Director role, the station was in crisis. The archive was linked to a server we couldn't access anymore. Lost passwords, departed students who never passed on credentials, and systems set up years ago with no documentation. There was no handover. The station had gone without a Tech Director for three or four years.

Walking through the studios felt like radio archaeology. The original iMac cheese graters sat silent but filled with videos from 2011. Computers were labelled in sharpie with cryptic notes like "DO NOT TOUCH – 2016 SETUP." Dead crickets lay inside dusty PC cases, some filled with mould after the station’s roof collapsed and left the room damp for weeks. Passwords taped underneath keyboards no longer worked for anything. A patchbay somehow looped the internet back into itself, causing entire linked systems to crash and other issues due to faulty USB cables led to massive issues for the operation of the station itself.

The challenge wasn't just technical but financial. We had almost no budget. Commercial solutions were out of reach. After exploring every option, from jerry-rigging our own servers to begging for donated equipment, we finally found a startup building exactly the setup we needed. The path to get to that point was nothing short of an episodic tome lasting 4 years.

The Signal Returns

Getting Radio Monash back online was not glamorous. We were running a custom radio stack on a borrowed Synology box because there was no budget for anything else. It doubled as a friend’s NAS, so the stream lagged whenever their backups woke up. We wanted bespoke features but had no time to build them. Most days we were putting out fires. One studio PC howled because the thermal paste had not been changed in years. Every cupboard we opened revealed another orphaned device, another cable that explained a mystery hum.

The lesson was simple and hard. Learn every piece of gear and write it down. The more we mapped, the closer we got to the pulse. It felt less like fixing a radio station and more like finding a heartbeat in a body that had been asleep for too long.

Basic streaming was never the finish line. “Live to airs” were the mountain. Audio had to travel through the MOTU AVB network, play nicely with the Rodecaster, line up with the OBS scenes, and then sync to video feeds coming in from Teradeks mounted in the studio. Add transitions, lower thirds, multi-destination outputs, and you have a production chain where one missed step breaks the illusion.

We pulled it off for the first time as a send-off for our outgoing president. It was our little magnum opus. The show looked effortless because a dozen quiet systems did their jobs. I want the next team to have it all written down so they can push further. The revival coudnt have been possible without the help of our amazing current head of studio Noah Martin and studio director Jackson Norris as well as our Tech/Broadcast squad with Oscar Lupton, Rahul Pejathaya and Evangeline Lee.

Taking the Studio Outside

Our first ever livestream and recorded orientation week session.

Radio Monash in the Wild was not grab a mic and go. I worked with a colleague in eSolutions to get campus Wi-Fi heatmaps. Orientation Week exposed the gaps when we tried to stream the main stage to the big screen outside Campus Centre. We learned where the signal died and how to route around it. Whitelisting MAC addresses was a saga of emails and patience. Finding the right person without staff access took persistence.

There is a heartbeat behind every broadcast. If someone forgets to press the right button on the MOTU AVB, the studio monitors go silent. If the internet drops, sync can wobble. If the studio computer fills up, it will crash at the worst time. In the Messenger days the inbox would explode with panic during a show. Now Discord helps us triage in real time, but the truth is the same. Reliability is a thousand tiny decisions.

Shout-out to our Programming and Broadcast Directors. They keep the schedule sane, help hosts with set-ups, chase gremlins, and calm nerves when something odd appears five minutes before air or even mid show.

The Domain Heist 

Eight Google shared drives across three domains hold the station’s memory. You will find old rota sheets, design files, playlists from 2002, half-built tools, and notes that say things like “do not change this or everything breaks.” The archaeology is not just technical. It tells you how teams worked, what they valued, and where they ran out of time.

The story of our web domain was the strangest chapter. We once ran radiomonash.fm. We also had radiomonash.net. When renewals slipped, a Bulgarian registrar grabbed one of the urls, plastered it with pornography and got the site flagged across the web. They demanded around USD 2,000 as ransom. At 4 am we were on the phone with ICANN (part of the UN court of web domains), learning what a legal recovery would cost and how long it might take. It felt like a diplomatic crisis that belonged in a briefing room, not a student office. We rebuilt on radiomonash.online and put guardrails in place. Auto-renew. Shared credentials. Renewal timers. Clear handover notes. The boring stuff that saves you from those late nights trying to recover a whole decade's worth of work.

Building the Future

Understanding our history made one thing clear. Getting the stream back was only the beginning. The real challenge is building systems that outlive any single team. 

The next stage is about presence. We want live to airs to be regular, not rare. We want the mobile app to earn a place on people’s phones because it makes listening and participating easier from day one. And we want to take a real on-air slot in time, working with community stations where it makes sense. Our visit to PBS showed how much we can learn from peers who have done this longer than we have.

I keep old radios and PCs on purpose for that very reason. They teach students how to maintain, repair, and service gear instead of throwing it away. The right to repair is not just a policy idea. It is how a student station survives. We still use older CDJ decks and vinyl players because they show how signal flow works when the screen goes dark. Everything we add gets the same test. Will this make the show easier to run next week? Will it still work when a new team takes over next year?

Through the Ages

Our latest and greated mixing desk thats been thorugh 4 iterations to finally work seamlessly!

Sometimes, late at night in the empty studio, I think about all the voices that have passed through these microphones. In fixing what previous generations left behind, I've come to understand not just how Radio Monash works, but why it matters.

Moving through my roles, Tech Director to Head of Studios and Technology to Treasury to General Representative gave me a unique perspective. I watched ideas become working systems, saw them maintained with minimal resources, learned how to justify technology when every dollar counts, and now understand Radio Monash as a living organism needing constant care.

The station stands as proof that technology isn't about the newest equipment or cleanest code. It's a testbed for emerging broadcast technologies, pushing into territories commercial stations won't touch because for us, every failure is a learning opportunity, every successful hack becomes part of the station's technical DNA. I want to thank the original executive team (Nick Lazzara, Sarah Stancombe, Imy Layfield and Shak Dias) for fostering a place for me at Radio Monash and our current executives and directors (Georgie Mccolm, Denny Niu, Noah Martin, Jackson Norris, Rahul Pejathaya) for getting me though the toughest of times!

When I hand over the keys, the next generation will inherit more than equipment and documentation. They'll inherit a culture of technical experimentation where "that's impossible" is just the starting point. They'll find their own crises, their own creative solutions, their own 4AM emergencies that become stories told years later. The rule I give future leads is this. Keep heritage when it teaches or stabilises. Let it go when it steals time you do not have. The choice is not new versus old. It is value versus bandwidth.

That's the beauty of Radio Monash. It's never finished, never perfect, always evolving. Each generation leaves their mark in code, in wiring, in strange workarounds that somehow keep everything running. Somewhere in those layers of history and hope, in the hum of old machines and the satisfaction of a stream going live, you can hear what we've all been building together.