A Star FM/Edge Wangaratta update re infills following FM conversion of 3NE.
90.1 Myrtleford Star FM now on air. No RDS, stereo favouring the right channel heavily.
91.3 Bright: Star FM now on air, same as above
89.3 Mt Hotham and 99.1 Mt Buffalo also have the same stereo sound issue. 89.3 does have RDS though.
Only 93.7 Edge FM Bright has balanced stereo and RDS as it should.
Don’t know how/why it’s so bad.
Mt Buffalo was previously (and presumably still is) fed by STL via the AM site at Bowser, so it there’s probably some part of that link that is mono. The other 3NE FM repeaters were fed off-air from Mt Buffalo so the same would apply. My guess would be that the source for those repeaters hasn’t been updated to take 92.1 and in the case of Bright may have been set to be tue same.
Thanks, makes more sense now. Is still a shame that it’s so poorly set up like that for FM.
I wonder why Mt Buffalo wasn’t changed to take 92.1 off air, that sounds like it would have been pretty easy to do?
In general it’s disappointing how inconsistent engineering is at Ace across Victoria. Many of the repeaters and infills are like this.
They’re a smaller company lacking quality techs maybe? Something SCA with scale across regional areas doesn’t have a problem with. I’ve never heard a bad sounding Hit or Triple M FM station across regional Victoria and NSW. They always sound as good as the metros.
I presume ARN’s regional stations would have fairly consistent engineering being a large company too.
SCA have invested heavily in upgrading and making their entire on air path from studio to transmitter similar across all markets.
ACE inherited the Wangaratta setup from the previous owners (although that was 8 years ago now) who ran pretty close to the bone. I was inspecting the Mt Beauty site not long ago which you can walk right up to the building and I’ve seen small community stations with a more “professional” setup.
ACE typically operate in smaller markets which seem to have more repeaters than the SCA markets. I guess the smaller markets are more limited in power to prevent overspill and have had to fight harder to expand their footprint as much as possible.
I wouldn’t be too hopeful about ARN regional’s setup. The Camerons didn’t like spending money and ARN don’t seem particularly interested in their regional network.
What I have picked up with the regional ARN FM stations is the sound quality is poor compared to SCA stations. Triple M sounds the best of the three FM stations we have up here. They have a more of a deep clearer sound to them.
The ARN AM music stations sound crap. I remembered my wife saying, it sounds like they are playing the music under water.
It honestly depends on how much love their previous owners gave them. All of the ARN regionals in range of me (River 1467, 801 5RM, 765 5CC and 1044 5CS at night) sound quite good for AM, with receiver differences in play.
For my personal anecdote in my area, both 5RM and 5CC have gotten noticeably better on their sound quality since their main focus shifted to FM, with the AM simulcast on both sounding better than before.
River and 5CS both seem to have stagnated somewhat and could benefit from a soft transition also. River especially could get rid of the 1467 frequency as the groundwave coverage in recent times has degraded so much its worse than the commercial SCA FMs in overall coverage.
When listening to 4CC, 4RO, 4BU and 4HI. I find 4HI has a better sound to the other 3 while 4CC on 1566 has the worst. Also at this time of year we get a lot of interference with our AM stations up here in Central Queensland.
In light of the cancellation of commercial radio’s night of nights, the ACRAs, earlier this year, The ACE Radio Network decided it would initiate its own inaugural ACE Awards, recognising excellence not only on-air but across content, digital, sales, scheduling and and culture within the organisation.
There were well over 100 nominations, with ACE staff gathering across the Country to watch the awards presentation and celebrate with their local teams.
Congratulations to Ace Radio for taking out a record number of awards at the inaugural Ace Awards.
I actually don’t mind the new look logos 
Wonder if they have a variant of the 2QN logo with frequencies - their previous usage, which is still on their website of the double stacked logo treating the FM repeater like a different station was strange, but this goes too far the other way in not mentioning it.
I guess the plan is to give all of their existing AM stations that haven’t converted to FM the 3MP-esque Easy Music treatment. Those that are in the process of or are about to convert to FM will become Star.
Temu Hit Network branding will spread to more ACE Radio Hit Music stations like MIXX and TRFM. A carbon copy of Southern Cross Austereo’s core network, its Hit Music network, i.e the Hit Network.
They’re far better than the old Ace network logos in my view.
Surprised? I’m not.
The big players have all reached agreement with each other.
The remote licensees are considered outliers and not afforded the cronyism of CRA.
The comments are hilarious and all lack current knowledge of the region, signal strength and the laughable regional survey methodology.
When done right.
The flagrant breach of the commercial service on thei HPON in Deni and ACMA affirming this as an FM commercial allocation with no effort to reach the edge of the licence area shows ACMA are captured by CRA.
The Deni s.39 has never been at full ERP or it would reach the edges of the licence area. It doesn’t.
ACE should be upgrading for the widest coverage possible yet aren’t.
Try WA with the rudimentary engineering inherited from various acquisitions. Mono FM of stations designed to be stereo from satellite decades ago.
