For most of the past 25 years (last year was an exception for obvious reasons), WGMU, our radio station, has run a summer camp for middle and high school students.

Even though Coronavirus seems to be diminishing in the United States (knock on wood), our University still has restrictions in place for summer camps since the majority of people under 18 are not vaccinated.

One of the restrictions in place is social distancing. Given the small size of our three radio studios, we can only fit two campers per studio, for a total of six campers.

Unfortunately, that is a big problem since the radio station relies on the revenue from the camp to sustain their operations. And we can’t absorb less revenue given the massive hits our budget has taken. Once again, we had to get creative.

The solution:

Temp Studio for Radio Camp

I set up a temporary radio studio in our conference room using equipment we use for remotes, equipment from the TV station and equipment from our “graveyard”.

The graveyard is where I keep older, but still functional, equipment in case I have to replace newer equipment that fails. Occasionally, the equipment gets a second lease on life if I can find a new use for it. I pull equipment from the graveyard all the time. Good thing I’m a hoarder!

The equipment:

• 1x Sennheiser MD 421 on the beige OC White Mic arm.
• 2x Shure SM58 on the black MXL arms.
• 1x Yamaha MG102C Mixer
• 1x Rolls RA53b Headphone Amplifier
• 1x Logitech X140 Speakers
• 1x Dell Latitude E6430 Laptop

The Yamaha mixer is part of our remote setup. The Shure SM58’s and laptop are from the TV station. Everything else is from the graveyard.