Gone D.J.
By: Doug Bittinger - May 24, 2009

Things have been a bit slow around here lately, what with the economy being in a slump and all.  But that's OK, it's given me time to get caught up on a few projects I've had sitting around for a while, keep the lawn mowed and get into something new.  I'm now a Radio Personality.

Well, sort of.  My voice is heard on the radio, but no one knows my name ('cause I don't tell 'em), so I'm not really a Personality.  But that's fine with me!

The church Marie and I attend records the Sunday sermons and I am turning them into radio programs which are aired every Sunday evening on WGSN radio - 90.7 FM.  They also have a Listen Live On-Line do-hickey at their web site.

Now, I have NEVER claimed to be an orator or public speaker and I still lay no claim to this.  But so far, I have not been able to get anyone else to step in as announcer.  I am getting pretty good with the technical stuff as I learn how to use the software I bought to do this; editing files, trimming out clips, adding in clips, laying in a musical background track, normalizing the volume, all that sound man stuff.  And I'm doing better with the vocals; I'm not sounding quite so much like I'm reading it off a script.  Which of course I am.

Some of us think the program has a lot of potential for our church as an outreach tool, and for Christian Education.  Dr. Metcalf has a lot of knowledge and is a good speaker.  We are hoping this venue will succeed.

If you have any interest in checking out our work, you will find the list of productions [HERE]:

This is in an optimized format (96 bps) to it downloads quickly as opposed to the CD quality (320 bps) file we send to the radio station, so the sound here is not as crisp as on the radio, but for our listeners who have a slower connection speed, this should play without skipping.

Our web site traffic report shows that the Audio Sermons Archive as well as the scrapbook of Dr. Metcalf's newspaper clippings are well visited areas of the site.  And traffic through the web site has doubled since we began the radio broadcasts.  We hope the radio broadcasts will do well also, but it is much harder to know if anyone is listening to radio, other than through indicators like the web site traffic reports.

The church has dedicated funding to pay for radio air time for several months.  Every program includes a request for people to drop us a note to let us know they're listening.  We will use these responses to determine whether the program is accomplishing anything.

So, now Doug-Bob the furniture maker / web designer / lawn maintenance engineer is now a radio show producer as well.  I wonder what opportunity will present itself next?