I'm looking into costs and feasibility of moving a live feed from a FM radio station from the station to a point that's past the usable range of their radio signal. It's a rural location and Internet service is not available at the station. If the destination was closer or their transmitter was more powerful, I could avoid this step and just plug in a radio, but....
My best idea so far is to rent a dedicated phone line from the station to the point where we need the feed, then get some kind of on-the-fly audio compressor to hook up to the main board in the station, push it out over the phone line, then decompress it at the destination.
I'm pretty sure there is dedicated hardware to do the compression/decompression (whatever they use to do those "radio remotes" from Sally's Sofa Sales without sounding like they are broadcasting from the bottom of a rain barrel) and I'm currently looking into that angle too, but I'm wondering if it would be cheaper/easier/better to have something running on Linux at both ends of the connection to handle the audio compression/decompression. Especially since I'm planning to run a Centos server at the destination end for other aspects of this project if we proceed with it.