How to contribute ?

Well, it's quite easy... if you find something in your own collection, that is not present here, then mail it to me. This can be a recording of better quality than the soundclip already on board, it may be a different version, or it may be a recording of a station where there is no recording yet, or even a recording of a station that is not yet listed here. The same is with pictures - if it is a QSL, a leaflet on stations' history, or a photo from the station, it is all welcome to share with others via this site.

When you analyze the 'multimedia-files' on this website, you will note, that they mostly have some technical aspects in common. After some experimenting, I found the best relation between quality and space-consumption to be like this:

Sound clips: .mp3, 24kbps, 22kHz, mono (of course...). A sound clip should give a clear identification of the station or the callsign. If it's a digital transmission, a decoder screenshot would be great.

Pictures: scanned with 100dpi resolution, .jpg with 70% compression. For double-sided pictures, I first scan each side in lossless bitmap format (.bmp), then I put them together to one picture, and thereafter they are changed to .jpg - when you work with a jpg file, every step means a loss in quality, and changing to jpg from bmp should always be the last step.

The above is just a suggestion, when you start digitalizing your collection for the web. For me, it means no extra work on the incoming file, except finding out the correct station-number, and placing it in the appropriate folder. When you have different formats, it's not a big problem, as I have a lot of tools to change between them.

If you mail your files to me ( rainer at utilityradio com ), please be aware, that most mailboxes have a size limit. Anything larger than the actual limit will be rejected, and might get lost - which means, you do not know, that delivery failed, and I do not know, that I missed something. So start with less attachments, or -for large amounts- send them in on a CD.

After your files have reached me - please be patient... you know, I work on this site in my free time, but this time is limited: I have a family to live with, a house and a garden and a cat and a bicycle and friends and and and... so it might take some time for your file to appear on 'utilityradio'. It may even happen, that your file will not be used, maybe someone else has sent in a file of better quality, or the file is unusuable for some other reason - don't worry!

As a contributor, it would be nice to have a little page from you as an introduction - who are you, what made you listening to these crazy stations, and so on. Add a picture, or a link to your personal website - great!