That makes 2 of us
The on air branding changed a week or two ago.
It’s the 2nd brand change in less than 2 years.
I still prefer Mix 80s.
I believe that the station names are simply “The 80s” and “The 90s” here in Sydney at least.
There’s still that oddity of slideshow images running on The 80s (which of course have been updated) but not The 90s as well.
I’ve heard a rumour that there are going to become one station… not sure if that means they will merge into an 80s & 90s format, or one of them will just be dropped.
I also understand that ARN have upgraded their systems to allow national playout. Not sure if it’s been full implemented yet, but up until now all the ARN Digtal stations have been running networked log but with local playout.
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[quote=Radioinfo.com.au reports]
There was a major outage this afternoon which took many Sydney digital radio services off air in prime time for about an hour.
Various commercial and community radio services are known to have been affected by the failure, which began just after 5pm.
The issue was traced back to Telstra, which had a major equipment failure inside the North Sydney exchange.
[…]
Telstra remotely reset its equipment and stations were reported to be back on air some time after 6pm.[/quote]
https://www.radioinfo.com.au/news/major-outage-sydney-digital-stations
Apologies if this is old news, but since when did Hope 103.2 start (resuming?) a broadcast of it’s main station on DAB+ in Sydney? Station name is “HOPE” and at 48kbps stereo.
Inspire Digital is still running at 64kbps stereo, presumably Hope Media have brought some additional bandwidth. Maybe the same slice of the pie that’s used for “Christmas Hope” during the festive season, who knows…
Good to see Hope’s main channel on DAB+
They were the only Sydney wide outlet that weren’t, so we now have the full complement of metro wide AM/FM on DAB+ in Sydney (excluding HPONs).
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Well there’s also FBi Radio who aren’t on DAB+ (they used to have simulcast of the main FM station, but it was replaced with digital only-offering FBi Click a while back) but apart from that you’re right!
I must have forgotten about FBi / Click. 
It’s odd that it’s just Hope doing it - given that 2MFM even bid on commercial spectrum in the digital auction (insert rant about unused auctioned spectrum…), but seemingly don’t/can’t do whatever Hope did to get more.
In Melbourne it’s just Vision Australia Radio that have two channels, though it’s split over two multiplexes and neither are 64k. This (and presumably the Sydney changes) come from being able to use different error correction levels to get different amounts of data in the same capacity on the multiplex.
I certainly think a simulcast should be the first thing. If community radio stations want to multichannel, they should get in a queue behind all the aspirant stations that can’t get on any broadcast platform.
I agree that the analogue station should be on DAB+ before any community station can start multi channelling.
As for aspirant broadcasters, that raises an interesting point… Obviously there’s really NO spare spectrum left on AM and FM these days in the mainland capitals for that…
One option that could have been worth trialling, is have 256 Kbps available on rotation to say 4 aspirants (64 Kbps each) whereby they could be permitted to operate 1 station for up to 90 days at a time.
Or maybe something similar for suburban community radio to rotate to gauge the level of interest out there for DAB+ for their listeners, again for up to 90 days.
This is still possible in Adelaide and Perth where I believe there’s still an entire “block” of channels (one of 9A, 9B and 9C - not sure which) available.
As for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, it will probably have to wait until DVB-T2 comes along to make that space available in the VHF band
A further update on the Hope 103.2 on Digital Radio situation, apparently they’re currently doing a text run of that this week which may explain the short station name and lack of any additional data (such as additional text or slideshow images) on DAB+ at the moment.
At last check there is no reference to a Sydney DAB+ broadcast of Hope’s main station on the website at the moment, but I daresay that we’ll probably hear some sort of official announcement about Hope 103.2 on Digital Radio in the coming weeks.
I did a factory reset on my Sangean DPR-67 to get rid of those stations that no longer existed which still had a ? mark still in front of it.
That did the trick, but also meant having to redo my presets again, on both FM and DAB+ (which was mostly expected).
As for my 5 DAB+ presets I have
(1) 702 ABC Sydney
(2) Classic Rock (Triple M)
(3) The 80s
(4) Triple M
(5) WSFM
Part of the reason for the choice of presets is have stations somewhat evenly spread across the list eg. to get from Triple M to say CW Remix, I just hit Preset 2 and go up or down a station rather than scrolling through the whole list to get there.
Isn’t VHF-9 (DAB blocks 8A, 8B, 8C, 8D) as well as DAB block 9D on VHF-9A still available?
I was under the impression that VHF 9 was going to be used in adjacent areas, like Newcastle or the Gold Coast, though i’m pretty certain that no decision has been made on this yet.
I didn’t know there was a 9D? If so, they should utilise it to fix up those horrible bitrates on the 32-48 Kbps music stations, it’s almost like listening to AM radio, it’s that bad!
Initially, 9D overlapped with the old analogue VHF-10, but VHF-10 was moved up 1 MHz so 9D no longer overlaps VHF-10. This shows the DAB blocks vs the Australian VHF channel numbers:
http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib100059/geninfo.pdf (Page 7 in the PDF)
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So when do we think the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast will get DAB?
I had to drive to Hervey Bay last weekend and listened to DAB in the car perfectly and without any drop outs at all until just before the Calounrda exit then BAM(!) disappeared :). It was quite defined. But I was impressed that I had no problem with DAB for almost 80km or so north of the CBD.
The problem is there just seem to be no signs that anyone is moving towards actually doing something - the government got a report mid last year and haven’t done anything, with the industry reaction seemingly just to ask for money to pay for the rollout.
They would have to do a channel plan for pretty much all of SEQ and NSW to be able to launch services in any area there.
One of the big problems for regional DAB is the ABC/SBS - there’s not enough space to give them their own block like in metro areas, and there’s too many channels to squeeze it down significantly.
I think we’d be looking at a designation that regional DAB would operate in EEP-4A mode, which increases capacity per block from 1.152Mbps to 1.728Mbps at the risk of overall coverage - this can be done per channel (community radio is already doing this), but I suspect the goal would be to allocate on the basis of kbps to the broadcasters - so maintaining the 128kbps per analogue commercial licence, but increasing the overall available space.
1728kbps would make 13.5 lots of 128kbps. The currently possible licence gives 5 lots of 128kbps to commercial broadcasting, 2 lots to community broadcasting and 1 each to ABC and SBS.
That takes you to 9 lots, leaving 4.5, which can go 3 to the ABC and 1.5 to SBS. Giving the ABC 512kbps and SBS 320.
So to more helpfully put that into numbers, take the Gold Coast, based on including only those stations licensed to Gold Coast RA1 (which is how I would expect it to work), this is what you could fit onto one block with reduced error correction levels -
SeaFM - 56kbps
GoldFM - 56kbps
TripleM Classic Rock - 48kbps
More Digital - 48kbps
Kinderling Kids or Buddha - 48kbps
Hot Tomato - 128kbps (or divided into whatever they would add)
Radio Metro - 64kbps
Jazz Radio - 64kbps
Juice107.3 - 64kbps
4CRB - 64kbps
ABC Gold Coast - 56kbps
ABC Classic FM - 64kbps
ABC Country - 48kbps
ABC Grandstand - 32kbps
ABC jazz - 48kbps
ABC NewsRadio - 32kbps
ABC Radio National - 56kbps
Double J - 56kbps
triple j - 64kbps
triple j unearthed - 56kbps
SBS Radio 1 - 48kbps
SBS Radio 2 - 48kbps
SBS Radio 3 - 48kbps
SBS Arabic24 - 48kbps
SBS PopAsia - 64kbps
SBS PopDesi - 64kbps
For the commercials - as there’s only 3 licensed broadcasters in GC RA1, there would be 256kbps to auction - so likely SCA could complete their extra services, and maybe even Hot Tomato could get more space.
From the ABC: Lots of reduced bitrates, but ABC Extra the only service dropped.
From SBS: Dropped Chill and Radio 4. SBS Chill is often simulcast on Radio 3, and Radio 4 is mostly a BBC World Service replay.
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Of all the stations on the ABC/SBS mux, only one station is localised. So to alleviate the limited spectrum issues, can’t the ABC/SBS mux run as a state-wide SFN and have the ABC Local Radio service on the commercial/community mux instead?
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I was thinking about DAB on the Gold and Sunshine Coast today. If you take GC there are 12 high power stations serving the area ALL on FM. I was wondering what is the point of reproducing all those stations on DAB+. Most will end up sounding worse than their FM counterpart. I thought that the idea of DAB was to improve the quality of reception particularly for AM stations and to add more diversity for listeners.
Even if you just take the ABC - the area is served by a full suite of stations all with FM quality sound. Why not just put the digital-only ABC services on DAB.
The Sunshine Coast is in a similar situation with all the licences for Nambour on FM. The difference is that there is no Radio National broadcast there.
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Yes - that would be another solution, though it would probably have to be national rather than state wide - as they would otherwise need two frequencies for it near the borders - which there’s no space for in SEQ.
I’ve not seen it floated anywhere as a suggestion - the options seem to be centred around just squeezing them all in one multiplex - hence the Canberra trial including FEC testing, to see if the above strategy of using the higher bandwidth mode was practical.
To feed the fantasy that DAB+ is a replacement technology and not a supplemental one?
I’ve also not seen a radio that is good at switching - I’d ideally like something where I could put Triple M FM on one preset button, and Triple M Classic Rock from DAB on another one, and just switch between them with one button press - but I instead end up listening occasionally to the worse sounding DAB version of Triple M just because it’s easier.