For half a century, the Marti remote pickup unit was the gold standard for doing a radio broadcast from anywhere other than your studio. It was reliable, it was rugged, and it required an antenna, an FCC license, a trained operator, and a good chunk of your equipment budget. Times have changed.
If you’ve been in radio long enough, the name Marti lands with a certain weight. Marti Electronics, founded in the 1950s, made the remote pickup units that defined what a radio remote broadcast was for generations. The Marti RPU — a transmitter in a rugged case, paired with a directional antenna, operating in the 161–170 MHz band — was the piece of gear that got you on the air from the car dealership, the county fair, the football stadium, and the Fourth of July concert in the park.
It worked. Reliably, for decades. Stations that bought a Marti in 1975 were still using it in 2000. That kind of track record earns its reputation.
Running a Marti remote wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t simple either. You needed the transmitter unit, which was built like a tank and weighed accordingly. You needed an antenna — typically a yagi or a whip — aimed at a receive point back at the station, which required a clear line of sight or close to it. You needed an FCC Remote Pickup Broadcast license, which meant paperwork, a license fee, and an assigned frequency. You needed someone back at the station to receive your feed and put you on the air. And you needed to test everything in advance, because a Marti remote that didn’t work at the auto show parking lot at 9 AM was a bad morning for everyone.
None of that is a complaint. For what it was designed to do — send a reliable audio feed over RF from a remote location — the Marti was superb. The problem is that the world it was designed for has changed.
Most stations today, particularly community stations, LPFM stations, and smaller market operations, don’t have a remote pickup license. They don’t have an engineer on staff. They may not have anyone at the station during a remote broadcast at all. And they definitely don’t have room in the budget for professional-grade RF gear. The Marti is the right tool for a world that, for many stations, no longer quite exists.
TuneTracker’s CastAway is built for the way radio actually works now. No transmitter. No antenna. No FCC remote pickup license. No line-of-sight requirement. No one back at the station required to put you on the air.
What CastAway requires is a Wi-Fi connection and a laptop. That’s it.
CastAway is a web-based application, which means it runs in a browser on whatever laptop you have with you. Mac or PC — it doesn’t matter. When you open CastAway, you’re looking at a live, two-way connection to your station’s AutoCast system. The same interface. The same program log. The same controls. Everything that AutoCast can do at the studio, CastAway puts in front of you at the car dealership, the county fair, the football stadium, or the concert in the park.
The integration is handled behind the scenes by TuneTracker Go! — a lightweight helper app that runs on your station’s Mac and bridges the CastAway web interface with AutoCast’s playback engine. TuneTracker Go! comes standard with any TuneTracker System 7 installation. CastAway itself is a one-time-purchase add-on that unlocks instantly through TuneTracker Go! — no license key, no email round-trip, just one click and you’re set.
One of the things that made Marti remotes occasionally stressful was the communication gap. Your audio was going to the station, but information going the other way — is my feed coming in cleanly? is the level right? can you hear me? — required a phone call, a text, or a two-radio walkie-talkie setup. It worked, but it was one more thing to manage.
CastAway includes built-in two-way chat between the remote broadcaster and staff back at the station. You can see each other’s messages in real time alongside the broadcast interface. No juggling a phone. No pulling off headphones to take a call. Just a quick message if something needs attention.
More significantly: because CastAway shows you the live AutoCast interface, you can see exactly what’s on the air. You can see what’s coming up next. You can adjust the program log, add a spot, extend a break — everything you could do sitting at the studio console.
This is perhaps the most important shift from the Marti era. With a traditional RPU setup, someone had to be at the station receiving your feed and putting it on the air. For a small station doing a Saturday remote with a skeleton crew, that meant pulling someone in on their day off just to operate the console.
CastAway eliminates that dependency entirely. Because you’re connected directly to AutoCast, you are the operator. You put yourself on the air, you manage the breaks, you handle the log. The station doesn’t need to be staffed during your remote. That’s not just a convenience — for a lot of stations, it’s the difference between being able to do remotes at all or not.
The Marti deserves its legendary status. For the era it was built for, it was exactly the right tool, and it served radio stations faithfully for a very long time. What CastAway represents is the same ethos — reliable, purpose-built, getting you on the air from wherever the story is — updated for a world where Wi-Fi is everywhere and the “transmitter” is a browser tab on a laptop you already own.
It won’t replace a Marti in a situation that genuinely calls for dedicated RF gear — a mountainside broadcast with no Wi-Fi, for instance. But for the vast majority of community radio remotes, CastAway gets you on the air faster, with less gear, less setup, and less dependency on everyone coming together perfectly at the same moment.
Marti, meet your match.