Radio Broadcasting from Online Stream

By your points total you are new to the community. Welcome.

Can you provide (a lot) more details?

You may be in violation of some laws doing an RF broadcast. That is if my assumption of Radio you mean RF.

Sorry, but your question does not make sense as stated.

As colporteur asks, what do you mean by radio? Do you mean on commercial or amateur audio-based radio? Because both require licenses.

But it isn't clear to me what you are ultimately trying to do.

Are you trying to broadcast a live event via radio? Or are you trying to take an existing internet-based live stream and convert that to a radio broadcast? (Because now that gets into copyright issues.)

Or something else?

Your comment that "In a highly populated area, wifi bandwidth is insufficient to allow for live streaming" is absolutely baffling. Many people stream live events via WiFi (or cellular) on both Twitch and YouTube. They do it from concerts, bars, city parks, conferences, and many other highly populated areas/events. And if all you care about is "commentary" or audio, then it requires way less bandwidth than video.

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.

In some countries you are allowed to broadcast license-free at very low power levels in some bands. (but not in the UK) With good equipment and no noise nearby, you might get 100 feet of broadcast range at these field strength levels.

Another possibility is something like CB radio which is unlicensed, but only allows 5 minutes of broadcast and then requires 1 minute off before you can broadcast again.  If your races are less than 5 minutes long and more than 1 minute apart maybe you could work something out - but read the radio regulations carefully first.

In Europe, things like a babyphone and toy walky talky are the limits without license.

A phone patch on a conference call?