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   station directory latest radio news air today feedback features  | |  Feedback archive An archived selection of comments and e-mails can be found below. Please be patient while the page loads. |
13th November 2002 Radio 4 Longwave on DAB Hello, I'm a French girl who'd like to hear BBC radio stations. I live in the South-East of France, near Toulon. I have a worldwide radio. Unfortunately, I can receive only BBC World and BBC News. The reception is really bad. I'd like to be able to listen to the BBC nationals. Can you help? Laurence Hi, I'm an English bloke who... (that's enough of that methinks. Ed). Alas, unless anyone else can come up with any suggestions, I think the internet would be the best place to listen to BBC stations from the South of France. At least, though, you can use the "listen on demand" feature to choose shows from the last 7 days. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No Kissing here There appears to be a problem with connecting to Kiss 100. I can listen to any other station but your site won't stream Kiss 100. Please can you fix this. Joel At time of writing, the stream for Kiss 100 has been unavailable for ages on the Kiss site too. They must be having problems with their streaming. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GWR's localness What is going on with British Radio today? It has been destroyed by GWR. They have bought so many Good stations and have made them dull and boring. Where once we had a good choice of overlapping local stations, so you could choose. GWR has taken them over and play the same music, at exactly the same time on these stations, with just a different voice introducing the songs. When we are led to believe that some one has phoned in requesting a song, how strange it is, that the same so called requested song, is playing on all the other stations they have bought, with no mention of a request. Try listening to 2-Ten FM, then tune to GWR, a few moments after. I happen to live in Swindon, which unfortunatelly is the home of this "destroyer of good radio" GWR. Why do the licencing authorities constantly allow them to buy stations and take away the listeners' choice? Swindon really lacks a good all round music station, that plays hits and memories. Come on licencing authority, give the people of Swindon something different and not another talk station or GWR owned station. Hits and Memories, good DJs and jingles is what we want. Mart I'm bound to say that the views of our visitors that provide feedback are not necessarily those of the editor or radio-now. Mart may be interested to learn of a number of new stations that launch on DAB digital radio in January 2003, as part of the local DAB digital radio multiplex for the area. One of these new stations is Swindon Radio, aka Swindon 107FM as an RSL. It will be a full-time 24/7 station playing current and classic hits, and may just be what you have been waiting for, Mart. With any luck, there will be more stock of DAB radios on which to listen to all of these new services. For a list of stations to come, see our listings for Swindon. My personal favourite DAB station is The Storm - modern rock radio - Shock! Horror! it's a GWR Group station. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aerial woes Please could you advise. I've just purchased a Cambridge Audio DAB300 tuner. Prior to purchasing I checked what reception and stations I could expect for the Southport, Merseyside area. All looked fine, a good reception area and a choice of stations. I connected up the tuner and followed the advice for the basic aerial set up. I got nothing, just the message, "no available stations". After experimenting with the aerial I managed to get just the 10 BBC national stations, no sign of local or commercial broadcasts. The aerial is taped to a 7ft bamboo cane in the back garden and has to be in a precise position - a couple of inches either way and the stations disappear. Well, it looks as though I'm now going to have to invest in a better aerial but which will give me the full range of reception? Loft or roof, directional or multi directional? I waited for a budget tuner to become available and now it looks as though I might have to spend almost as much again to get the full benefits of DAB. John Oh dear, we've hit upon the subject of aerials again - not my specialised subject, as regular visitors to this page will know. I wouldn't have thought you would need to spend a lot of cash to get a decent signal for DAB digital radio, unless you live in a particularly built-up area. You don't mention the kind of aerial that comes with the Cambridge Audio - it's usually just a piece of wire, so I think any improvement on this is worth a go. I know Maplin Electronics have some DAB aerials in stock for around GBP15 Pounds. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footy audio Can you please explain why I am unable to receive Liverpool local radio here in Hereford if it is being broadcast on the internet. I want to listen to commentary on Liverpool games without subscribing to a pay service. Is there any way to do this? Nigel Nah, the football clubs have figured out they can make money by offering a subscription service for match audio. Most audio feeds were free last year, as part of a service offered by Premium TV - an offshoot of NTL. Liverpool has its own internet TV station, so charges visitors for match audio and highlights, and other premium content. This year, most clubs are offering live match commentary through a subsciption-based service, again set-up through a deal with NTL. Amazingly, up until a few weeks ago, the audio feeds for most stations were freely available if you could figure out the URL, or web address, that the feeds used. We managed to figure them all out and would have posted them all up, but I felt this wasn't morally, if not legally, the right thing to do. In any case, the audio feed URLs have since been changed. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15th October 2002 Radio 4 Longwave on DAB Will I be able to pick up the Radio 4 longwave transmission on a DAB radio? I'm mainly interested in listening to the live cricket commentary. Tim Most BBC Radio 4 longwave programmes are broadcast as a 'secondary service' on the BBC national DAB digital radio multiplex, so - yes - you can pick up programmes that are unique to longwave (they just reduce the bitrate for BBC Radio 4 FM on DAB in the meantime). However, the cricket is broadcast on BBC Five Live Sports Extra - the additional sports channel on the same multiplex. Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2nd October 2002 Cry Wolf? I would like to express what an excellent job that Virgin 107 are doing during their RSL in Wolverhampton. I have not heard such a s**t hot station as this one is at the moment and is far better than our local station that broadcasts from just across the block. The trouble is in this country is that a lot of these "groups" have become complacent with their broadcasting format and have not put enough effort into their stations' sound, for example: production and sound quality. They just assume that people will listen because it is there! I think Chrysalis should have learned by now that people only listen to a station if it sounds good but obviously, they haven't got the point quick enough! It's sad to see Galaxy 101 go, considering its long history. Lets hope GWR don't destroy it like they did with Galaxy's original network! Again, well done to Virgin on such a fantastic RSL in Wolverhampton - Keep up the good work, I hope Virgin gets the licence! Simon I think it is sad to see Galaxy 101 go, if only because it's the 'original' from which the brand was built, and it will be difficult for people 'round here to stop referring to it as Galaxy Radio (or, sometimes, even Radio Galaxy!). It's worth pointing out GWR now have a stake in the station alongside Scottish Radio Holdings. Whilst GWR sales company Opus will be selling airtime for the station, SRH may well have as much programming control as its partner. The playlist at Galaxy 101 can seem very similar to Red Dragon FM and, to a lesser extent, GWR FM during the weekdays. In order to attract more - and different - listeners and advertisers, both in Bristol and Cardiff, its new owners may well want to 'reposition' the station. It wouldn't make sense for the station to compete with GWR FM for the same listeners, so its music style will probably be tweaked: Look at The Storm on DAB - it has a completely different output to GWR FM. GWR Group had no hand in shaping Galaxy 101 when they acquired Chiltern Radio Group's portfolio of stations - they had to sell it very quickly due to ownership rules, as stated in our news story. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aerial runaway I am trying to find a way of getting Radio 4 on longwave at my house in South-West France. I tried connecting my radio to the TV ariel on the roof which helped, but still gives a very noisy signal. I suppose I am asking where can I get an ariel which will do the job better? Micheal I think you may be expecting a bit much from the longwave signals! Shortwave signals may well reach that far, but you're into the realms of DXing, Michael. Not my specialist subject, I'm afraid. My knowledge of aerials extends thus: If you were trying to listen on FM in a strong signal area, you wouldn't notice much difference between a TV aerial and an FM dipole aerial for receiving signals. In weaker areas, however, a dipole may suit you better. This is basically a long, straight pole of 1.2 metres in length or longer, made up of two aerials pointing in opposite directions (hence dipole), with the wire connection to your tuner about halfway along the pole. You can position it vertically or horizontally, as transmitters use both verical and horizontal polarisation, although usually a better signal can be found by fixing it vertically. Dipoles are fairly common to buy - Maplin would almost certainly have them, as would a hi-fi store. Does anyone have any advice for longwave listeners, though? Usually the stubby AM/LW aerial is built into a humble tranny. Would a Dipole be of any use? Ed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A divided island I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and recently bought an Pure Evoke-1 DAB radio from my local Hi-Fi store. While impressed with the quality of reception and choice, I was disappointed to learn that we in Northern Ireland only have half the number of stations available in the rest of the UK. I have been told by Score Digital (the commercial DAB provider in Northern Ireland) that this is because the DAB spectrum allocation for Ireland has been split in two, with half being available to UK broadcasters in Northern Ireland and the other half given over to broadcasters based in the Republic of Ireland. This wouldn't be a problem if the southern multiplexes (when they are up and running) were going to be available in the north, but I understand this will only be the case in border areas where southern transmitter signals overlap. I don't understand why the full spectrum could not be offered to both parts of the island. Surely it would have been better if special arrangements could have been made for the border areas where frequencies clashed, rather than halving the choice for the vast majority of Irish listeners, north and south. Neal As DAB uses a single frequency network (SFN), only one block or channel is actually used for the national DAB multiplex in Northern Ireland, to carry all of those stations. Similarly, I think only one channel is presently used for Eire's national services multiplex, which includes stations such as RTE Radio 1 and Lyric FM. Since there are a further 5 channels which could, in theory, be used to broadcast DAB services, it would be interesting to where (if at all) the other channels have been allocated, or why they cannot be used. I'm not totally sure why the SFN's couldn't be extended to cover the whole of the island. Perhaps they will when digital radio uptake improves? Certainly, the Republic's multiplex is in a state of limbo as broadcasters wait until more DAB receivers are purchased. Can anyone offer more insight? Ed. |