Hei alle sammen,
The end of the year is fast approaching and we thought this would be a pretty interesting way to show our statistics over the last year. We are also entering a time where we need to drastically cut our expenses which are currently too high!
Brace yourselves for lots of charts and graphs 🙂
As you can see, since last year we have worked on addressing our Norwegian centric balance and, while we do still see some countries being under-represented; most notably Finland and Ireland, there is a big improvement and we are going in the right direction!
Our next chart shows genre balance of our musical choices on the main show (excluding Mamma’s Mest Metal and Stephens Feature) in 2021:
We can see in March we featured no smaller artists. We will strive to make sure every show in 2022 features many smaller artists’ songs. Our “under 2 million stream on the song” target on the main RNEI show might need some tweaking to make sure smaller artists aren’t being overshadowed by a lesser known song from a big artist!
Next we shall have a look at our expenses over the course of 2021 starting with the cost of the music we’ve played RNEI (first 30 minutes):
January is omitted because it was a “best of” repeating a lot of already purchased music.
We can see that the switch from only buying FLAC lossless to choosing 320kbps AAC & MP3 in the last 2 months of the year will make a noticeable saving on a yearly basis.
Next is a look at extra expenses encountered this year:
Most of the extra expense comes from our purchase of a new, low noise microphone which has greatly increased the quality of RNEI and M3! We also donated 100EUR to Channel 292 when their beam got damaged in a storm.
Next we’ll have a look at our broadcast expenses over the past year:
The new Winter 2022 schedule, detailed below, will greatly lower our broadcasting costs for the foreseeable future.
The final graph on costs will be the total cost per month including the QSL cards, broadcast, email & web server, music and extras:
In November we have decided to only send 6 envelopes a month. Each envelope can contain multiple QSL cards. This will save on the most expensive part of QSL cards: the postage.
Next we shall have a look at listener interaction with RNEI over the course of 2021.
We can see a healthy, mostly consistent number of engaged listeners with the exception of some technical difficulties during some of the broadcasts in November.
And lastly we will look at which broadcasts achieved the most engagement from our listeners:
It is clear to us that the 6070 and WRMI broadcasts are the most engaged-with broadcasts of RNEI and should be the key focus for us while we need to cutback on expenses.
With all of these statistics we have decided to revise our shortwave output to the following:
It looks a little sparse compared to the Summer 2021 schedule but in changing to this Winter 2022 schedule we should continue to achieve similar listener engagement while achieving a significant cost saving which will secure our ability to continue broadcasting for the foreseeable future.
| TX# & Day of Month | Time | Frequency | Az |
| 1 – Week 1 Sunday | 11:00 UTC | 6070KHz | ND |
| 2 – Week 2 Saturday | 19:00UTC | 6070KHz | ND |
| 3 – Week 4 Saturday | 21:00 UTC | 6070KHz | ND |
| Every Thursday | 01:00 UTC | 5850KHz | 315° |
| Every Thursday | 01:00 UTC | 7780KHz | 44° |
ND = non directional. Click ° to see details of the azimuth / direction.
If you’d like to support RNEI, we have a Patreon over at Patreon.com/rnei. If we raise enough money we can start re-instating the broadcasts we have sadly currently had to cut!
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading the statistics and inside information into our station in this report and we hope you continue to listen to RNEI with us throughout 2022!
We wish you a fantastic holiday season,
Roseanna