Engineering
Studio Engineering Rack
WREK Atlanta has its roots in engineering. Georgia Tech is an engineering school, after all, and WREK was born in the Van Leer building, the home of the electrical engineering department. From the very beginning, engineering students have built equipment and speakers, tinkered with transmitters, and helped build a great college radio station in the heart of Atlanta.
Today, WREK engineers continue the tradition of our student run station. Although we get plenty of help from our alumni, engineering students fix equipment in our station, install professional-grade broadcast equipment, and maintain our FM transmitters. These days, we do a lot of software engineering to manage our station as well. Many of the systems at WREK were written by students maintain everything from our staff database, live streaming system, online playlist, transmitter monitoring scripts, and many many more.
Outside the WREK transmitter shack
WREK’s transmitter is located on the west side of the Georgia Tech campus, near the Woodruff and ULC dormitories. This makes it easy for engineers to maintain the transmitter equipment.
Our main transmitter is a Harris HT-HD+ (named “Janice”). We currently run at 20 kW TPO (transmitter power out) into our antenna and end up with 100,000 Watts ERP (effective radiated power). This is the maximum power allowed for an FM station by the FCC. Additionally, we also broadcast in HD Radio, a digital IBOC (in-band on-carrier) signal that has better audio quality and allows for a digital HD-2 “sub-channel”. WREK takes pride in being one of very few college stations to engineer a station this powerful and technologically advanced.
Inside the transmitter shack
If you’re a student at Georgia Tech and you’re interested in broadcast engineering, or writing software to solve real world problems, join us! We’re always looking for new people to get excited about the engineering challenges involved in running an FM radio station.
