For more than 50 years the broadcast industry was content with a telephone line or a remote pickup transmitter. Today remote broadcast technology is a moving target that changes year to year as digital audio technology develops.

An interesting technology that has become more popular with radio stations is the satellite phone and digital satellite uplink for remote broadcasts. If you can see the sky, the phone is operational. The cost has come down to less than $500 for a handheld phone, and the cost of satellite time can be as low as 17 cents per minute. Why would a station use a satellite phone? Say your station wants to do a remote from inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Like many of the national parks, it is a vast remote area, and there are no cell towers in the park. In the west, satellite phones are popular with radio stations that make treks into the desert or into the mountains. Satellite phones also work great from boats at sea or beaches. A remote satellite uplink is capable of sending ISDN studio-quality audio back to the radio station.

As GSM cell phone service becomes available in more markets, you can expect to see a larger number of radio stations using the global service cell phones to transmit audio via a digital audio codec tied into the GSM phone. Some telephone companies, though, have been very slow to activate the data transmission capabilities of the GSM service.

Finally, a few stations are playing with wireless Internet service to file news stories to send audio files back to the radio station from a remote site using a laptop computer or PDA/recorder with wireless service.