Despite the drizzly rain and generally cold conditions, some 30 folks made the effort to attend the club meeting where Nikki Reece the station manager at FM 96.9 gave her talk.
Plains FM has been broadcasting in Christchurch and throughout the surrounding Canterbury district since the 29th of February 1988.
Nikki Reece started with the station the following year. That means the radio station has only had five birthdays, although Nikki’s been there since 1989 and she’s had 20 birthdays. (Think about that for a moment folks !)
Originally they started out using Revox reel-to-reel tape decks, record turntables and “Carts” (cartridges), using an old donated 18 channel analogue sound mixing desk. Now, well into the digital age, they use a ProSound 12 channel digital system with AKG microphones. Their main recording engineer is Peter Rattray who uses Adobe Audition editing software, for their pre-recorded items.
The building they’re in was previously an old foundry and was in the midst of a major internal re-fit during the time of the February 2011 Earthquake. Fortunately some work had already been completed, but they were still forced out of the building for five weeks. During those difficult post-quake days, Christchurch’s non-English speaking migrant and refugee communities were particularly disadvantaged.
NZ On Air does provide some funding towards programming in Languages Other Than English and enabling refugees, and women to get their voices, songs and stories on the air. There is also some other fundraising the station does to supplement that.
Plains FM in Christchurch is one of a loose confederation of 12 Community Access radio stations stretching the length of New Zealand. NZ On Air funding guidelines require a minimum potential audience pool of 50,000 population, so that does limit those stations to the main centres and several of the provincial cities.
In the 2018 Access Sector Review, (a government led survey and audit) it was found that they were indeed “valuable, unique and delivering bespoke programming” very much as the community needed.
Moving with the times, Plains FM is now available on the smartphone App as Access Internet Radio, both stored podcasts and Livestream.
Plains FM also likes to get out into the community and record locals, so have several pieces of modern kit. The Reeloop S-podpro plugs into any computer’s USB and allows quality audio to be recorded easily. Plus they have a new tiny recorder used in conjunction with a lapel mic the Tascam DR 10 L can record squillions of hours of audio (well heaps, anyway) onto a memory card and its rechargeable battery lasts for yonks.
Listener numbers are hard to calculate exactly although the website does count podcast and livestreams accessed. In all, over one hundred different radio programs are produced in 16 languages. They are then shared across other Community Access radio stations NZ-wide.
Plains FM livestream and podcasts totals 500,000 downloads or accesses annually. The most popular programmes in the April to June 2019 period were the Alcoholics Anonymous at 58,000 with the Nepalese language programme coming in distant second at some 4,900.
A new project since the Canterbury Earthquakes has been to pre-record a bunch of emergency announcements in various languages. Stored as computer audio files, these are going to be shared with other radio stations, for use in the event of future major emergencies.
Transmitting from Sugarloaf with one kilowatt, but allowing for antenna gain making about 4kw equivalent, they can usually be heard from Ashburton to Waipara. Despite limited finances, Plains FM does well to service the needs of those Cantabrians who might otherwise not have access to radio resources.
Author Catherine ZL3CATH
