The DC-IMC streamed Democracy Now! (the radical/progressive radio show hosted by Amy Goodman banned from the Pacifica radio network) live to a demonstration in front of Pacifica HQ / WPFW 89.3FM using 802.11b. We were also able to stream realvideo of the demonstration to the Internet. Unfortunately, a combination of connectivity and the police made it difficult to be able to stream reliably.

We had a car in front of the station with a public address (PA) system connected to a car battery. We fed the PA system its audio input from a laptop connected to a 13dbi yagi. DN! is streamed on the Internet by a couple of radio stations that carry it live, we picked up KFCF in Fresno which sends a 24kbps mp3 stream. We didn't have line of site to the base station, so we were hoping that having directional antennas at each end would allow us to
overcome the obstructions. Scouting the day before had indicated better signal strength than we experienced the day of, we're not sure why this happened.

In addition to receiving DN! and playing it for the demo we also had a Digi8 camera going into an analog -> USB converter that was streamed out by the laptop w/ Realproducer. The stream that we were sending out was
multirate 225/34kpbs. We had a nice long SVHS cable that allowed the person with the camera to roam around quite a bit. We also had the humorous experience of someone accidentally flipping the camera into
negative mode :)

We had some connectivity problems which got worse when the police told us to get out the car forcing us to relocate. This was preceded by us being apparently effective enough for the police to tell us to turn off the PA system. When were were out of the car people had to cluster around the laptop to be able to hear from the builtin speakers since we no longer had access to the PA system.

Since DN! has been picked up by Free Speech TV on the Dish satellite network it has added a video component. We were hoping that they would be able to show some of the demonstration by playing our realvideo stream on a computer with an LCD screen and just film that. Unfortunately, by the time we were able to get to work through the chaos of the police telling us to get out the car, move to one side of the street and then the other and get to a position with a reliable enough signal and get through to the producers to pick us up the laptop battery ran out. Doh!

Some thoughts on making things run better in the future: