Micro radios provide useful information to travelers

In the information age, the challenge isn’t gathering or disseminating information, but packaging it in the most useful forms for targeted audiences with specific needs.

One such audience is comprised of long distance highway travelers, who often are frustrated by the difficulty of gathering information about the communities and states through which they pass – the lowdown on such things as weather, food and lodging, tourist attractions, local events and travel amenities. Studying maps or travel guides takes time and sometimes is fruitless.

A solution may be at hand in Vermont. Two entrepreneurs, Bill Peters and Vic Burke, have invested thousands of hours to bring about a network of digital FM micro radio stations beaming the latest local weather bulletins, road conditions, news and local events to motorists.

Their firm, Essex Junction, Vt.-based Martek Communication, hopes to locate these micro radio transmitters at every interstate highway rest area in America, controlling and monitoring them from their mountain village via the Internet.

Peters says he got the idea in 1984 while traveling with his family in New England. “I noticed that there was no easy way to find out what was happening off the highway at the time we were passing through,” he says. “I knew that if I was having trouble easily checking out local events, looking for a great campground or state park, many other travelers must be facing the same problem.”

Peters approached his friend Burke, a software and systems expert, with his idea, and the pair then suggested the concept to the Vermont Travel and Marketing Department, which agreed to help set up a pilot program at a single rest area on Interstate 89. A local college marketing class conducted an on-site survey to solicit motorists’ input, and more than half those who responded said they were tuning in to the broadcast and found the five-minute program to be informative and useful.

About two years ago, the Vermont Tourism Radio Network was expanded to 15 sites and has since performed more than 99 percent of the time in greatly varying climatic conditions, Peters says.

The Internet is used for all radio program updating of a station or groups of station “from geographically dispersed input sources,” says Burke. “The powerful and cost-effective combination of the Internet and digital micro radio can easily take our system to a national level.”

Current users of the network include the Department of Travel and Marketing, Governor’s Highway Safety Commission, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation and Vermont Lodging and Restaurant Association.

“Vermont Tourism Radio has been a very effective addition to our effort to promote a variety of safety messages to motorists all year long,” says Jeanne Johnson of the Highway Safety Commission.

Plans call for Peters and Burke to install their computer/transmitter package and Internet connectivity all along the eastern seaboard, providing the technology at below-market cost to the agency in each state responsible for rest area/travel information operations.

This would enable each state to control a portion of the local broadcast message with the remaining air-time available to one or more travel-oriented corporate sponsors.