Remote Radio Monitoring System

Application Scenarios

  • Copyright protection monitoring

  • Advertisement and music monitoring and tracking
  • Entire FM and DAB+ retransmission in Internet or LAN
  • Technical monitoring
  • Hybrid broadcasting support
  • Interactive advertisement forms
  • Live channel detection and synchronisation

  • Regional programm insertions

Why Remote Realtime Radio Monitoring?

  • Web-streaming and broadcast content could be different, e.g. server-side Ad serving by Internet streaming
  • Local and regional stations or regional content inserts may not be online.
  • Controlling and access to the broadcast signals of regional partners
  • Regional restrictions for the content access via Internet
  • Significant audio delays on the web-streams ->not acceptable for hybrid radio or channel detection and synchronisation
  • Different standards and protocols for content access
  • Law-requirements: monitoring should be on the broadcast audio and not on the internet streams
  • Broadcast monitoring system cannot be easily blocked or manipulated
  • Innovative radio advertisement forms using the second screen
  • Access to the broadcasting meta-data, e.g. RDS

Who uses Monitoring Services?

  • Radio broadcasters and networks
  • Advertising agencies and ad monitoring companies
  • Governmental organisations and regulators
  • Music monitoring and licensing authorities
  • News agencies
  • Content distribution networks and organisations
  • Media analysis and monitoring companies
  • Governmental organization

Entire FM/DAB+ or Airband in one device

  • scalable multichannel system

  • remote realtime radio monitoring
  • capturing, transcoding and streaming of audio signals and accompanying metadata

  • entire FM/DAB+ in one device

  • AM, DRM, DRM+, HD  on request

Technical Characteristics

Item Value
Hardware
FM operating frequency range, MHz 76…108
DAB+ operating frequency range, MHz 168…240
Active Splitter Yes
Sensitivity of the receiving part, mV 70
Minimum number of simultaneously received FM / DAB+ channels 8
Maximum number of simultaneously received FM / DAB+ channels 62 or 93 (>93 on request)
Decoding related digital data (Program Associated Data (PAD)) RDS, RBDS, MOT
Measuring ratio, SNR Yes
Input level measurement, RSSI Yes
Audio content encoding bit depth 16
Modes of one audio channel operation Stereo or Mono
Coding rate, kHz 48
Audio stream compression formats (software) MP3, AAC
Audio stream bitrate, kbps (software setting) 64, 128, 256, VBR
USB HDD/SSD any size (optional on request)
Power supply 220V 50 Hz
Power consumption, W 120
Network Ethernet 100 / 1000
Number of Ethernet ports, 100/1000Base-TX 1
Antenna type F-type
Antenna inputs 1
Power connectors 1
Enclosure dimensions, mm 421х330х44
Weight, kg 4,2
Software
OS Linux
REST API Support Yes
Embedded Web Server (open source) Yes
Embedded Streaming Server (open source) Yes
ROOT Access Yes

Embedded Server

Integrated mini-PC with full root access

Functions of embedded server

  • Power management
  • Tuner management and tuner configuration
  • Software decoding of broadcasting audio signals to any format, sample and bit rate
  • Processing, compression and analysis of digital audio signals from tuners, local network or Internet
  • Transmission of digital audio signals through a local network or remotely via Internet
  • Processing and transmission of accompanying digital data, e.g. RDS (Radio Data System)
  • Processing and distribution of signal- and metadata for real time monitoring or archived content analysis
  • Control, retrieval and distribution of I/Q data from a single-channel SDR module
  • Network and security
  • Low-level REST API

Optional SDR Receiver

Additional SDR receiver for the spectrum monitoring or signal analysis, e.g. RTL-SDR or LimeSDR Mini. Data can be visualized using open source or freeware tools from local or remote SDR receivers and import to the main system via flexible API interfaces.

iROKS Mini and iROKS GPU

iROKS Mini

SDR (Software Defined Radio) only version for a limited number of channels. Complete decoding is done in the software on the processor.

iROKS GPU

SDR (Software Defined Radio) version with a GPU decoding. Entire FM decoding is done in the software on the GPU.

Cloud Server

Real-time monitoring or archive analysis of radio stations and Internet streams using open source observability platform

Flexible threshold configuration. Single view on channels and units from different locations

Single station monitoring and analysis

Real-time view of main metrics

Combination of data from different sources in a single dashboard

  • broadcast data
  • online streaming data
  • metrics from audio analysis programms
  • audience measurements

Direct access, export and publication of audio data using our software or 3rd party tools

Combination of text and numerical data

Combination of text and numerical data

Music recognition using 3rd party services, stream metadata or RDS RT data

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Our software can be integrated with an offline open source speech recognition toolkit that currently enables speech recognition for 16 languages and dialects – English, Indian English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Italian, Dutch, Catalan, Arabic, Greek, Farsi. We have tested English and German. This is not perfect but still very impressive. All data can be added to the database for further retrieval and analysis. It is also possible to translate the text into any other language. Text-to-speech (TTS) engine can be used to provide a spoken translated version of the stream that can be mixed to the original stream.

Alerting

Integrated alert systems with flexible rules

DTMF decoding

DTMF stands for Dual Tone Multi Frequency and used by broadcasters to mark different program sections, e.g. begin / end of news, traffic, weather or advertisement. Our system supports the DTMF decoding simultaneously on all channels. It is also thinkable to divide the listeners in groups and generates different content (e.g. news or advertisement) for the distribution in real-time for all channels.

Analytics

Listener and streaming anayltics in Google Analytics or open observability platform

  • Google Analytics or Open Observability platform support
  • Multi-servers, multi-streams
  • Flexible metrics
  • Icecast integration; HLS or DASH integration on request
  • Tracking pixel for web-users
  • Geolocation, geotargeting and geofencing
  • Flexible proxy based on Netflix Zuul for dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency and security

Please see our section Brodcasting Statistics in Google Analytics or Open Observability Platform for more details.

Stirlitz Media Logger Integration

Successfully tested with Stirlitz Media Logger

62 FM and DAB+ channels in parallel

Interested?

This is our latest datasheet:

FMDAB-Monitoring-General

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any question.

We’d love to help!