The jobs you can help with

Every member of the station plays an important role at CHR, be it in fornt of the mic or behind. A brief outline of some of the jobs that you could help with are given below:

Each ward is assigned one or more visitors or "Ward Reps". These people are the public face of CHR and they are also the people who promote CHR on the wards. The ward rep. performs a number of vital tasks, including: distribution and collection of request forms, talking to patients/staff and general liaison with our audience.

Our PA's provide vital assistance to our presenters in the studio. Typical tasks include finding records that have been requested, filing them away (in the correct place!) and answering the phones. Other duties may include: making sure programme "inserts" are played at the right time, filling in programme broadcast sheets and preparing (and sometimes reading) the news. It is the PA's job to manage the behind-the-scenes operation of the broadcast - even down to making the coffee - but not in the studio! Most of our members who wish to progress towards having their own show will spend at least a couple of months acting as a PA for an existing presenter.

Having moved into our new studios reasonably recently, we're lucky that we don't need to call on our engineers very often at present! Our members that specialise in engineering handle all equipment repairs, PC maintenance and networking, software development. Our engineers were responsbile for outfitting our premises at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital to broadcast quality standards. If you have experience in any of these areas, or would like to learn, get in touch.

Apart from the Ward Rep., the Presenter is the only other regular contact that CHR has with our audience. Presenters must be able to speak clearly, of course, but most of all, their on-air personality must be happy and sincere. At present all of our presenters operate the studio themselves ("self-op"), so we require our presenters to be technically competent with the studio equipment. We also expect our presenters to have regular first hand contact of our audience - obtained by visiting the wards to collect requests each week.

Being able to find a record by a particular artist at a moment's notice (while a patient is on the phone) necessitates maintaining a well ordered record library. With the launch of our current website, the database is now fully on-line for searches and addition. Our chief librarian (and the team of helpers) is responsible for keeping the database up to date.