Radio Sputnik, Live from D.C.

Sleep is about the only thing most of us can do for eight hours straight, and some of us can’t even do that. How, then, does Radio Sputnik produce a live transatlantic broadcast for eight hours every day? There’s no music to speak of, just straight up talk and news from Radio Sputnik’s news bureau in Washington, D.C., to the mothership in Moscow. 

That’s eight solid hours, live between Washington and Moscow, every single day – except for that remote they did from Cuba a while back. And, by the way, how is that even possible: a live remote from Havana by way of Moscow’s Radio Sputnik through the news bureau in Washington, D.C.?

It helps to break it down. Live programming goes from Sputnik’s Washington, D.C., news bureau on K Street, across the Internet and into the Sputnik studio headquarters in Moscow. The live signal is then sent via STL or uplinked to satellite for redistribution to the Sputnik broadcast network or run out again on the Internet for pickup by listeners wherever they happen to be on the planet. On either side of the Atlantic are WheatNet-IP audio network ecosystems with control surfaces, mic processors, and in the case of the Washington bureau, live camera control. The two studios automatically coordinate around the inevitable latency due to internet connectivity, along with the occasional help from operators who count down to air. 

So it goes, a continual stream of news and talk in the four-plus years since the Kremlin-funded Radio Moscow morphed into Radio Sputnik, which has stations all across the global (including D.C.’s 105.5 FM and 1390 AM) as well as online content and a Sputnik app for smartphones. Radio Sputnik has studios in Washington, Edinburgh and Moscow, which broadcast in eight-hour shifts around the clock. 

But what happens when you add another dot on the map, as was the case when Radio Sputnik D.C. reporters flew into Havana, Cuba, to cover the funeral of the late Fidel Castro? 

Aside from the challenge of finding adequate Internet access, not much. “We can record from just about anywhere and immediately drop it into the studio and then go live within minutes,” said Sputnik U.S. Editor-In-Chief Mindia Gavasheli. The Washington bureau’s two studios – a main studio with the LXE console surface for live broadcasts and a production studio with an L-8 console surface for pre-recording interviews and shows – are fully IP networked. The main studio is set up for live broadcast with call-ins from listeners as well as daily Facebook Live streams. “Here in the Bureau, we have people working on content for the news wire, for social media and Internet sites, and for radio, but they all share information,” explained Gavasheli. 

Everything is tied together with IP. For those daily Facebook Live feeds, for example, studio cameras are slaved to microphones using camera automation software integrated into the WheatNet-IP audio network. With this, the studio can automatically control camera switching based on whether a mic is on, the mic fader is up, and audio from the mic is coming across as meter data.

The news and talk continue to flow out of Sputnik Radio’s U.S. News Bureau, eight hours every day, adding to the more than 10,000 hours of live programming streamed across the Atlantic so far. 

From Single- to Multi-Purpose News Studio

If your television station still has a single-purpose news studio that’s only used part of the day, there are a few simple things you can do to put that studio to work 24/7.

One is to change out your audio console to an IP audio routed surface.

Going from a fixed-I/O audio console to an IP audio routed console will give you the flexibility to quickly change mic feeds, configure IFB connections and reset settings going from one show or newscast to the next. 

All routing and control for the console is handled by the IP audio network, which gives you many more options to setting up the console and connecting to the resources you need. If it’s on the network, it’s routable, programmable and accessible – often automatically. For example, when a field reporter’s mic turns on, our WheatNet-IP audio network can automatically send a mix minus back to the field reporter’s headset for IFB. 

And because everything routing and logic related is moved to the network, IP audio consoles are extremely compact. For example, our Strata 32 IP audio console making its debut at the NAB show packs 64 channels and all that IP audio capability into a 40” frame. 

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