Studio/Office Move in the DR

Joe Barker and Ivan Statia recently travelled from Bonaire, to the Dominican Republic, to help set up a new office and radio production studio for our TWR partner there. It will be a nice birthday present for Radio Trans Mundial Dominicana, which will be celebrating its 20th anniversary on November 11.

The old office and studios were on the middle floor of a three story building that they shared with some rather noisy commercial tenants, like a laundry. The team in the DR often had to come in at all sorts of weird hours in search of peace and quiet to record their radio programs. The new facility is in a converted single family house, which should be much quieter. From left to right in the above photo, you can see Georgina Thompson, the director of RTM-DR, Joe Barker and Ivan Statia-from Bonaire, and Helmut Menzel-TWR's globetrotting design engineer.

They had two weeks to convert the house into an office and studio complex as well as completely move every last computer, document, microphone and paper clip from the old facility to the new one.
I the above photo, we see Ivan and Joe working on the sound treatment for the walls of the new studio.
Check out that carpeting on that door. It appears that Joe and Ivan's previous career doing van conversions for hippies in the 70's was perfect preparation for radio studio construction. ha-ha If enough of you ask, I'll post of picture of Ivan from that era.
Here the control room of the studio is beginning to take on a recognisable form. I hope that air conditioner unit is quiet. The old studio had a fan in it that we could sometimes hear in the background on some of the programs the produced for us to air on Bonaire. I could remove the noise with Adobe Audition, but a quiet room is always better, of course.
Hooray, it's moving day. The TWR staff, contractors, and volunteers were able to complete the two week project on time. Thank you, Georgina, for sending us these pictures.

By they way TWR's Spanish language Web site has been re-done since the last time I saw it. There is even a link to streaming audio from TWR in Uruguay, and it looks like audio from Venezuela will be coming soon. I got some Javascript errors when I browsed the pages but I could still read them, but hopefully all that will be fixed soon.