Radio Broadcasting from Online Stream

Thank you for the warm welcome colporteur, yes I'm new to the community.

Greatly appreciate both of your comments and apologies for the lack of clarity. That question was overly simplified and vague.

It would certainly be amateur radio and I feared there could be some local law broadcast violations which I'd look into individually. 

In short, we often attend live sporting events where either there are no RF commentary broadcasts, (but there is online audio commentary available via an app) or there is an RF broadcast in a local language (and the English commentary is available via an app).

Where wifi is available at these events, the signal strength is often poor and it's heavily over subscribed. 4/5g connections are also unstable simply due to the number of mobile phones in the vicinity. Therefore the online audio commentary is inaccessible. 

In theory, I thought "perhaps" it was possible to acquire/configure a device that could take audio from a live online audio stream, and transmit it through a RF to a small group of receivers/headsets.

I appreciate there may be broadcast licences involved and local law also, but wanted to understand how complex this would be to setup.

Thanks again for your comments and quick responses.

Thank you for the warm welcome colporteur, yes I'm new to the community.

Greatly appreciate both of your comments and apologies for the lack of clarity. That question was overly simplified and vague.

It would certainly be amateur radio and I feared there could be some local law broadcast violations which I'd look into individually. 

In short, we often attend live sporting events where either there are no RF commentary broadcasts, (but there is online audio commentary available via an app) or there is an RF broadcast in a local language (and the English commentary is available via an app).

Where wifi is available at these events, the signal strength is often poor and it's heavily over subscribed. 4/5g connections are also unstable simply due to the number of mobile phones in the vicinity. Therefore the online audio commentary is inaccessible. 

In theory, I thought "perhaps" it was possible to acquire/configure a device that could take audio from a live online audio stream, and transmit it through a RF to a small group of receivers/headsets.

I appreciate there may be broadcast licences involved and local law also, but wanted to understand how complex this would be to setup.

Thanks again for your comments and quick responses.

To clarify, I'm talking about race events where attendance is between 200,000-300,000 people in attendance.

Hi,

Unfortunately the amateur radio licenses explicitly forbid broadcasting. Any communication via amateur radio licence has to be licensed user to licensed user (apart from a request for a contact). However, there could be the possibility of licenses for events perhaps (but this wouldn't fall under amateur radio).

Some unlicensed methods of transmission are possible, but often they are low power, on specific bands. Low power isn't necessarily a problem especially with fixed installs, or if it is just going to be broadcast to nearby people. But it wouldn't be something receivable on broadcast frequencies (i.e. AM or FM broadcast bands), since that is not possible unlicensed (although some people do use devices that transmit at extremely low power, e.g. in cars to play music from their phones with the FM radio). That could be an option if it's just a small group of friends very close by at a show perhaps, since it would just use off-the-shelf equipment (a music FM sender, and a bunch of cheap FM receivers with headphones). 

However as baldengineer says, usually WiFi can be an excellent solution for events (there are some orgs which specifically advertise their WiFi installs in stadiums etc). 

I'm thinking you are describing a problem most of us have experienced. I have problems with wifi at my local sporting event with less than 100 fans in attendance. Heck my daughter at here home has the problem on wifi and streaming. I moved her TV service from wifi to CAT5 and she has never complained since.

The Canadian Football league has some RF broadcasts for games. I would sit with an AM transistor radio in my ear to hear commentary while watching the game. That is a commercial broadcast service.

I might understand your problem but not sure I can provide a workable solution.

Until you said this is an event with 200,000+ people attending, I thought you were trying to accomplish something practical for a small event. There is zero doubt in my mind that whatever stream you want to re-broadcast has some form of copyright. And while I can only speak about US amateur radio licensing laws, I know many other countries share core rules. And a major one is that you cannot do broadcasting--and certainly not of copyrighted content. It is meant to be (primarily) person-to-person communication.

However, to directly answer the question, it is not difficult to take audio and broadcast via RF with a software-defined radio. PC software could receive the internet-based stream and then convert to some suitable audio format that SDR-software could then transmit. An SDR alone would not have enough transmit power for more than a few meters, however.

There are, of course, many technical details in there.Including, how does a listener receive it? Commercial radios would require a commercial license to broadcast.

Even if your goal was to transmit the audio to yourself, you would have to find some frequency band in your local region that allows such usage. And I doubt there is anything suitable with enough allowable transmit power.

Bring your own WiFi in your car. 

Depending on your budget and whether or not this is an outdoor event, then you could perhaps take a look at some of the satellite phone data services such as Iridium GO. Looks like they can achieve 88kbps download, which is enough for an audio commentary, especially if you transrate the audio stream first before accessing it via satellite link. Voice data can be heavily compressed and thus  reduce the data rates required over expensive comms links.

If you are doing a group booking and can get enough space for the group at the event then there is the likes of Starlink Roam for satellite broadband. May also be an option if you have a campervan parked nearby.

You could perhaps use a PMSE license to do short audio links between two points, especially using directional antennas with line of site. This might be tricky however as different countries use different frequency allocations and licensing.

On-site this might be a use case for Bluetooth Auracast for public locations allowing the receiving device to broadcast to a number of local listening devices.

Other approaches may be to try improving your WiFi/mobile set-up for better reach. Directional external antennas and/or cellular multiplexing can sometimes help you reach beyond the main crowd.

About 10 years ago, I used to have a rig similar to this one: 

which bonded up to 6 external 3G cellular modems together using external mobile providers to be able to live stream video from sites with poor access to the Internet.

With the right USB modems, it was possible to add external antennas to get further range as described in the higher profile setup here:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xovEfYqNPG8&t=180s 

I seem to recall at the time you could get more generic 'cellmux' boxes to create ad-hoc Wi-Fi hotspots for similar reasons. Might be worth a look to see what there is these days.