With the help of students and club advisor Dr. Joel Nathan Rosen, MoCo Radio will soon be back up and running, again broadcasting the “Sounds of the Hounds.”  

In September 2017, Rosen called a meeting with Nathaniel Rhoads, Ed Harbison, Charlie Peeke, and Marc Bernal, all past members of MoCo Radio. Rosen explained that he wanted the radio station to be streaming again as soon as possible, because it had been over a year since MoCo Radio had been reliably on the air and playing across campus.

Back in the spring of 2016, those running MoCo Radio had discovered that the station was live but not broadcasting a signal. After investigating the issue, the executive board discovered that the web player on the station’s site was outdated.

Charlie Peeke ’19, former programming director and current co-director, said the immediate solution was to “rebuild the website” on which the station streamed its content. An attempt to overhaul the website failed, however, due to the outdated web player, making it a matter of time before streaming support stopped completely.  

The new strategy, then, was to focus on finding a “reliable, not outdated streaming service,” Peeke said. Yet this proved to be an arduous process as well.

Permanent solutions were few and far between, but temporary solutions abounded, including using Twitch, a streaming service commonly used for video games. Shortly afterward, the station was blocked from Twitch because of copyright infringement.

The executive board eventually decided to focus on the outdated hardware, which provided the station with a signal to broadcast but one that was unreliable.

Changing the hardware became MoCo Radio’s first victory. This hardware fix provided “a more reliable connection, even if it was not the be-all end-all” solution, Peeke said.  

With the hardware fixed, there was no choice but to return to the website and find a way to stream audio. Ed Harbison ’19  was chosen to build a stream and website with help from Moravian’s IT Department.  

As before, fixing the stream proved difficult. For unknown reasons, depending on the device used to listen and the web browser, listeners would either hear the station loud and clear or just get dead air.

Improving the website became easier, but continued streaming problems forced MoCo Radio to make the difficult decision in the spring 2017 semester to shut down until further notice.

After Rosen tasked a new temporary executive board with rebuilding the station this semester, the board contracted with a professional streaming service called Airtime Pro.

Along with providing a website for MoCo Radio, Airtime Pro allows for the posting of station schedules and widgets on the site.  

With the station soon to go live, MoCo Radio plans to undertake different campaigns designed to generate interest and excitement in it. Through these campaigns, MoCo Radio hopes to make the “Sound of the Hounds” louder and farther-reaching than ever.