Episode 135: Our First Live Broadcast

This is an idea that I had been kicking around for quite some time. Last Friday night, I produced my very first Google+ “Hangouts On-Air”. It’s available now on our homepage as well as social media. For the first time, our listeners can now “see and hear” what goes on behind the microphone inside the Happy Camper Radio studio during one of our shows.

I’m amazed at what we can do these days over the Internet. I think back to my broadcast days at a time when home computers were found on the shelf at your local Radio Shack. The World Wide Web wasn’t even thought about or talked about an any form of conversation. I can also remember purchasing my very first home computer with an massive 8 gigabyte hard drive and being told I had more drive space than I’d every need. I quickly went out and purchased a small package of 1.44 megabyte floppy disks so I could store my documents. Wow, how the digital world have evolved in such a short time, and continues to do so as each and every day.

When I left radio back in the mid eighties, I never dreamed that someday I would have a professionally equipped broadcast studio of my own, with the capabilities of delivering my show to the entire world. It’s been three years now that I’ve been entering the studio once a week to record Happy Camper Radio. With the popularity of YouTube, and the ability to invite guests on the show with a simple click of a mouse, I can definitely wrap my arms around this exciting and entertaining form of media. Having all the necessary tools at hand, and less than one week before our next episode I decided to send out a handful of invitations to Friday’s show on very short notice. In all honesty, I didn’t expect a single response before our scheduled 9 p.m. broadcast. In the end, everything transpired relatively well. In fact, I look forward to scheduling additional On-Air Hangouts, and inviting awesome people, like yourself, to join me on the show.

Campers are some of the most wonderful people you ever want to meet. What a great place this world would be if everyone took the time to engage themselves in nature, and took the time to appreciate this natural resource that’s available to us.