How to send a greeting to the studio and hear it on air

Hearing your own name on the radio is a small thing that has never stopped being a big thing. For years the way to do it in Berbice was to telephone the studio and hope somebody picked up.

The Rock Room is the replacement. It is 88.5 Rock FM’s own greetings wall — a live page where you post a greeting, the announcers see it on a screen in the studio, and when one of them reads it out, your phone tells you.

It is free to join and free to post. Here is how it works.

What the Rock Room actually is

A public wall, at lrtvs.gy/rockroom.

Greetings appear on it as people post them — the newest slide in at the top, live, without refreshing. Anyone can read the wall without signing up. You only need an account to post.

Behind it, in the studio, the announcers have a live board showing the same greetings as they come in, with the ones marked “read this on air” pushed to the front of the queue.

Joining — about twenty seconds

1. Open lrtvs.gy/rockroom on your phone and tap Join.
2. Enter your phone number, your email address, or your GYAFF number. One Little Rock account works across the family — 88.5, Channel 10, NewsWatch, RockYard and Syomen Says. If you already use GYAFF or Syomen Says, sign in with the PIN you already have. There is no separate registration.
3. Pick a name, a four-digit PIN, and a room: 88.5 Rock FM, Channel 10, NewsWatch or the Suites.
4. You get a tag — something like `naomi@rockfmradio`. That is your handle on the wall.

That is the whole sign-up. No documents, no photograph, no fee.

Posting a greeting

A greeting is up to 280 characters. You can add a photograph and a song request.

Then the important part: tick “🎙️ Read this on air.” That is what puts your greeting into the studio queue rather than leaving it on the wall.

When a DJ reads it out, two things happen. Your greeting gets a gold badge on the wall, and your phone buzzes with a message telling you who read it and at what time — “Your greeting was read on air by DJ X at 10:42.”

That last part is the difference between this and calling the studio. You do not have to be listening at the exact moment to know it happened.

Writing one that actually gets read

Announcers are reading these live between records, so the ones that work are the ones that read well aloud.

• Name the person. “To my mother Beverley in Angoy’s Avenue” is a greeting. “Big up everybody” is not.
• Give the occasion. A birthday, an anniversary, a graduation, a safe arrival, a recovery. Occasions get read first.
• Keep it short. Two sentences. If you write a paragraph, the announcer will cut it — and they may cut the part you cared about.
• Spell unusual names phonetically in brackets if you want them said correctly.
• Add a song request. It gives the announcer somewhere to go after reading you out.
• Post while a show is on. Timing matters more than anything else — see below.

Timing: post while somebody is in the studio

A greeting posted at three in the morning sits in the queue until the morning show. If you want it read quickly, post during a live show.

The busiest reading blocks are Morning Spice (7:30–10:00 a.m.), Lunch Munch (11:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.) and Get Loose (6:00–9:00 p.m.) on weekdays. The full schedule is in the programme guide.

If you are sending a greeting for a specific day — a birthday, an arrival — post it the evening before or first thing that morning, and say the date in the greeting itself.

Listening for it

Open the live player on this website, or the 88.5 app, or tune to 88.5 FM in Berbice. The stream plays in the background on a phone, so you can leave it running while you work.

If you miss it, the notification will still tell you it happened.

Greetings on television

Greetings marked “read on air” can also be put on screen on Channel 10 as lower-thirds — the gold-on-navy strips along the bottom of the picture. So a greeting posted from a phone in Canada can end up read on the radio in New Amsterdam and shown on Berbice television the same evening.

The rules

The Rock Room is moderated, and the rules are short:

• 16 and over. For younger listeners, a parent posts on their behalf.
• One greeting every thirty seconds, twenty a day. Photographs under 2 MB.
• It is a public wall. There are no private messages. Replies go one level deep.
• A profanity and slur filter runs on every name, greeting, song request and reply.
• Anyone can report a post. Three reports hide it automatically until a moderator looks at it. Moderators can hide, ban and pin.
• Be kind. These are read out loud, on the radio, by a person, to a county.

The full terms and privacy notice are at lrtvs.gy/rockroom/terms. Questions go to littlerockgy@gmail.com.

Installing it

The Rock Room installs like an app. Open it in your phone’s browser and choose Add to Home Screen. After that it opens full-screen from your home screen and updates live, without a browser bar.

A note for the diaspora

The single most common use of the Rock Room is somebody abroad sending a greeting home. It costs nothing, it needs no phone credit in Guyana, and the person it is for hears their name read out on the station they grew up with.

If that is why you are here: open lrtvs.gy/rockroom, join, pick the 88.5 room, write two sentences, tick “read this on air”, and put the live stream on.