Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

Update: Unfortunately, we did not have enough sponsors to host the Glow Golf Fundraiser, so we have postponed it until August 14.

On July 17th, from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM, KLIK Radio will be setup right outside Glow Golf selling tickets!  We’re going to be having a glow-in-the-dark outfit contest, a dark-in-the-dark outfit contest, hole-in-one prizes, door prizes, cool music, and much more!  Plus, it doesn’t cost any extra to get in – but additional donations are greatly appreciated. 🙂

In case you don’t know, Glow Golf is located in some awkward corner of the Foothills Fashion Mall, located at the corner-ish of College and Foothills.  Just follow the noise, and I’ll bet you can find us.

Adults and teens are $7, kids are $5, little kids are $3, seniors are $3, a 3-pack of tix is $20, and a 4-pack is $27.

See you there!

Want to see something fun?!?  Go to http://www.klikradio.org/summer/ – there is a tree with apples! For every pledge we get, an apple goes on the tree!  Isn’t that sweet??

So here’s how our summer pledge drive is working.  It’s pretty substantial, so please bare with us – $20/month for 3 months.  That’s like $20/month over the course of the summer.  We hope to get 60 people to commit to this, which will raise a whooping $3,600 for us!  That’s like 3,600 hours of airtime!

In total, all 60 people will be donating $60.  Over the course of 3 months, though, we’re hoping it’ll be a bit more bearable.

Interested in pledging?  Visit the aforementioned link and click on “Make a Pledge.”  You can then make your pledges automatically deduct from your bank account or credit card with PayPal, or you can mail us a check every month.

Thank you for your support!

I honestly have no idea how Qwest noticed our blog post about our DSL outage, but Team Qwest commented on it – it sat in our comments queue for awhile – and we finally noticed it.  As we hopefully made clear, it was not an issue with Qwest’s service, but instead was a local modem issue.  We’ve had the modem for several years now, and I suppose it finally just died.  We swapped it out, and all is well!

Unfortunately, Qwest then decided to increase our rate from $51.45/month to some $75/month.  YIKES!  While that may not seem like much at first glance, that’s a $240/year increase – a pretty significant amount to our tiny non-profit.  (That’s like a 3% increase in our annual budget).  So much for upgrading to the 7 mbps DSL. 🙁

If you participate on our pledge drive, though (next post), maybe we can still upgrade! 🙂

Unfortunately, the City of Fort Collins does not believe we fall under their definition of a charity, which is “…an organization which exclusively, and in a manner consistent with existing laws and for the benefit of an indefinite number of persons, freely and voluntarily ministers to the physical, mental or spiritual needs of persons, and which thereby lessens the burdens of government.”

In all fairness, we do not spend that much money in the local community.  In fact, virtually all of our major equipment purchases are made from specialized, out-of-state vendors such as Broadcast Supply Warehouse.  That being said, we’re not losing too much money by not having this license, and the city isn’t losing much, either.  Our largest expense, rent, isn’t taxed – and who knows if there are any city taxes in our phone bill.

Overall, we don’t consider it to be a significant loss.  Best of luck to any other non-profits who are hoping to receive an exemption!

It may have never been posted to this blog before, but our toll-free number (1-888-212-KLIK), which has been maintained by RingCentral for years, is being transfered to a wholesale VoIP termination provider.  This is due to the fact that RingCentral will not forward to numbers when they are currently in use.  (For example, our local phone number had multiple lines, but RingCentral assumes that this isn’t the case, and there is no apparent way to override this).

As such…we decided to implement our own IP-PBX in the studio and transfer our number to a wholesale provider.  The carrier transfer was officially completed today, and calls will ring to our VoIP.ms account.

This now means that we have to finalize the settings in both our PBX software, as well as our carrier’s account settings.  Depending on the circumstances, we may actually decide to drop our PBX software and strictly use carrier-provided systems.  For example, our PBX software (3CX) does not have call queues enabled unless you purchase a commercial subscription.  Since call queues are included with our VoIP.ms account, we may simply have our ATA’s connect directly to VoIP.ms and use built-in call queuing.  But we shall see how things work out!

All of this, of course, is dependent on the studio’s Internet connection being restored.

So, as you may have noticed (or not), KLIK Radio has been down for the past..oh..24 hours or so.  We’ve narrowed down the problem to our Qwest modem, and are currently investigating the root issues.  Here’s what we know:

• The modem is not sustaining a connection to the network
• The modem is not assigning IP addresses to local computers
• The modem will connect to the Qwest network, but will not receive an IP address
• The modem is inaccessible via web browser
• The modem cannot be pinged

Here are some possibilities that we’re thinking may be happening:

• The modem is overheating
• The modem has already overheated to the point that it’s now damaged
• Firmware issues

And…lastly…here are our options for recovery:

• Cool the modem down, then…
• Performing a hard, factory reset of the modem
• Still not working?  Purchase a new one.

Since we’re volunteer-based, the recovery process is significantly slower than usual.  But…we’re going to get started with the general process around 5:45.  Wish us luck 🙂

We just got our new mixer!   Special thanks to our grant from the Bohemian Foundation, we’re now able to do way more on-air than ever before, including conference calls (phone calls in general, actually), the addition of two microphones, fully off-air recording of our young, local musicians, cue speakers, a built-in talkback microphone, the return of our electronic “on air” sign, and more!  Here’s a picture of it:

You can find even more pictures on our Facebook page.  We’ll also be making a cool video, which is coming soon!

Today, we picked up a desk at a garage sale for $20.  It was heavy, obnoxiously so.  If we ever move, I highly doubt this desk is coming with us.  If it is, we’re sawing it into little pieces first.  Phase 2 is going to include the installation of the new mixing console and re-painting the back wall (there are smudges from who knows what), and phase 3 is the installation of the VoIP phone lines.  I’m sort of making that up as I go…but that’s the general idea.

The board of directors have been elected!  Starting June 6th, these people will be taking over the board of directors of KLIK Radio:

• Jordan Fisher – President
• Peter McFeeley – Vice President
• Amy Keith – Secretary
• Jacob Wood – Treasurer
• Nathan Bobb – Director

Not many changes, other than the addition of Nathan and Peter.  Hopefully the experience of the incumbent students combined with the new direction and ideas from Nathan will allow for another successful year at KLIK!

We now have a new, dedicated phone line for administrative purposes!  We like to call it the “office” line.  (Even though it’s not really an office).  The number is 970-449-1636.  So, if you need to talk business, that’s the number to call.  The studio/requests line continues to stay at 1-888-212-KLIK.