The practical range of the radio station is determined by the transmitter power and antenna characteristics. The radio station is totally automated, and will run 24x7x365 without intervention if no content changes are required.

The skills required to complete this project are fairly simple, and won't be difficult for the typical hobbyist familiar with the Raspberry Pi3 computer. It can easily be accomplished in a day, unless your Internet access is very slow. It's even easier if you use a purchased antenna, or use a simple whip antenna that comes with many transmitters.

This project requires very few additions to a standard, off-the-self Raspberry Pi3 micro computer. The micro SD-card may be as small as 8GB. The operating system (OS) used is Raspbian, migrated from Debian 9 (code named "Stretch"). The scheduler is written in version 3 of the Python programming language which is included with the Raspbian OS. Only 4 additional OS packages (mpc, mpd, festival and tmux) and 4 python3 modules (soundcloud, BeautifulSoup, requests and html5lib) are required. A setup.bash install script handles most of the installation details.

The scheduler program is comprised of approximately 350 lines of python3 code. The scheduler is a text based console program which is run from a terminal. Tmux is used to allow a user to attach and detach from the scheduler which runs continuously. The setup script configures the Pi to launch tmux and the scheduler whenever the system is powered on. No login is required. Access to monitor the scheduler and change broadcast programming is possible using ssh (or VNC if the Pi's X Window system is not disabled).