[cma-l] Streaming audio problem

[Gordon Sharpe, TMCR 95.3 FM]

Guys, I have an issue with hospital radio, rather than community, but hope someone can help as it may solve another issue for me.

Trust AM serves the Bassetlaw (Worksop in N Notts, if you need to ask) and Doncaster hospitals. It's main base is Bassetlaw and from there there has been a Band 1 FM link for the last 6 years to feed audio to the remote hospital in Doncaster, a tad over 13 miles as the crow flies. Except it broke last week, the antenna fell apart. Thats been fixed but now Ofcom want to check the link transmitter and it could be a while before service can be restored. 

So, to try and make sure the patients could still listen I set up a PC to use Winamp to listen to streaming audio feed sent out from Bassetlaw using Shoutcast. It works fine for me at home, I could listen all day - and have done. Not so at the Doncaster studio though. It's been breaking up very badly, stop/start and sometimes showing [Buffer: 0%] 

I've read up about adjusting this that and the other settings and have tried just about everything I could find on the topic, it still does it. Except, when I connect via VNC to have a look at the log files or whatever. As long as there's a connection the stream remains stable. The stream is 'private' and had a password, which I took off to allow it to reconnect during these troubles. I often listen from home, to check that everything is up and running as I live in Doncaster too and can't hear the AM signal.

The router has already been set to a 'nailed up' connection, it's on TalkTalk Business. Checking the speed via ThinkBroadband.com says they're getting roughly 4.6 down and 0.7 up . I'm on a Virgin Cable 10Mb connection at home (9.6/1.0). 

I have a silence detector module running on the PC itself, it triggers after 16 seconds of silence. It kills Winamp and restarts it, taking it that the program itself has got stuck. Any blip in the meantime resets the counter, so the stop/start issue isn't always being detected. The resets are being logged at 4-5 per hour, except between 11pm and 7am when it seems to run smoothly ?

I have had an active connection via VNC for the last hour and a half and the stream has remained up and stable during that time. Having noted the 11pm to 7am window when all runs with no problem I had suspected some sort of blocking by TalkTalk, but by having something else connected it sorts itself out...?

Ideally I want to use the stream to feed the audio to the Doncaster studio 24/7, rather than have the FM link. OK, so the audio would be 40 seconds behind real time but who's bothered about that when you're laid up in a hospital bed? 

I had planned to have a haircut later this week, I just hope I've got some left by then as this one has me puzzled.

Any ideas?

Gordon Sharpe, TMCR FM
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