Our Story
Built by a broadcast engineer who got tired of expensive, overcomplicated monitoring.
From Frustration to Innovation
I'm Rob Johnstone, and I've spent years as Chief Engineer for multiple radio stations in the Poconos while also running Stroud Media, the fiber ISP my wife Jill and I founded in 2020.
Every broadcast engineer knows the pain: transmitter sites go down at 2 AM, traditional monitoring equipment costs $5,000-10,000 per site, and most solutions are overengineered for what we actually need.
I started tinkering with RTL-SDR dongles and Raspberry Pis to monitor our stations' off-air signals. Then I added the Sequent Microsystems industrial HAT for real telemetry inputs. Before long, I had a complete monitoring system that integrated perfectly with MikroTik Dude—the tool we were already using for network management.
Why BroadWatch Exists
What started as a side project to solve my own problems became something other engineers wanted. The question kept coming up: "Can I buy one of those?"
BroadWatch is the monitoring platform I wish existed when I started in broadcast engineering. It's affordable, it's turnkey, and it speaks SNMP natively so it works with tools you already use. No proprietary software. No recurring fees (unless you want our cloud service). Just solid, reliable monitoring.
Every unit is assembled, configured, and tested right here in Stroudsburg, PA. When you call support, you're talking to the guy who designed it.
— Rob Johnstone, Founder & Chief Engineer