Exactly in relation to cost, and would also involve an alteration to the Sydney Radio Lap for the change of transmitting site to Artarmon too.
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Is 2BACâs bandwidth too wide? It looks wider than all the other stations on the waterfall and I get interference from it on 2WOW and 2LT either side of it.
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Iâd certainly gain a better signal from them with a move to Artarmon.
Anyway they are now back on air this morning.
I usually experience a wider bandwidth from them compared to many of the other community broadcasters. And some multipath too. When I last looked on Google Maps at their TX antenna is was located very close to a tree, that would be bad for their transmitting antenna radiation pattern.
If looking at signals with SDR#, take a look at 99.5 & 101.1 with the Audio Spectrum display. Not sure why they are notching out ~ 11-13 & 10-12kHz respectively. BTW thereâs some brief audio drop outs on 99.5
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Perhaps theyâre using a low-bandwidth link that only has a 22,050 Hz sampling rate? (Giving an effective frequency response of up to 11 kHz) 107.9 doesnât seem to have the same issue.
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If this is the case you would soon notice it as it would sound just slightly better then AM radio quality
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I do â the audio on 99.5 and 101.1 is noticeably sub-par to me and the absence of treble is immediately apparent.
Whilst AM transmissions can be wider, most AM receivers tend to be set to a narrower bandwidth resulting in audio response considerably lower than 11 kHz - e.g. the highest my XHDATA radio will do is 6 kHz bandwidth on AM, so 99.5/101.1 is a fair bit better than AM, but still quite noticeable for me.
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2HHH 100.1 seam to be having some technical issues of recent days.
Have noted a couple of times in the early morning that thereâs just an open carrier.
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100.7 2WOW off air this evening.
Was it as a result of the storms this arvo?
UPDATE: (Next day): They appear to be back on air, but with feeble power output.
UPDATE 2: Two hours later. 2WOW is back on air at full power.
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After talking to a friend, I was going through stations on my foobar 2000, got to harmony 89.9 Richmond; there was this oldish chap in his mid 70s talking and talking and talking, and it sounded like a cheap KMart microphone from about ten years ago. Every fifth word he said distorted like hell, and then proceeded to a track, which he badly edited the intro into the vocals (tennessee waltz), and just for the pudding on the cake, the guy at the end of the song gets rapidly into a spontaneous laughing comment, where he literally accidently drops the âFâ bomb. Bloddy awesome! And theyâre trying for a TCBL?
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I happened to tune in the same station whilst doing a band scan around 5pm I think & also noted that same severe distortion & thought to myself - WTF!
Thanks for the rest of the story, one really has to wonderâŚ
By the way has Radio Northern Beaches 90.3 reduced their 19kHz stereo pilot carrier level? My car tuner caught a reasonable signal, but it wasnât being detected as or switching to stereo. The SDR seams to be indicating a lower pilot level than normal.
In other news looks like 2WOW 100.7 has transmitter problems again, signal extremely weak.
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Seem to be a station copying everyone elses ideas as well. When I broadcasted several years ago, I played an entire top 40 countdown everynight from a past year, corresponding to the current week. Tonight flicking through the stations, Harmony is playing the top 40 from this week in November 1980. Having said that though, Iâm enjoying it, and hearing all these songs in the exact order as they were 40 years ago this week is really giving me that warm and fuzzy feeling, the music that was in the charts, right at the threshold of creations best decade ever⌠okay, getting a bit carried away I know, but it was a great time being 12 years old in 1980. 
Program presentation though is very very choppy, she announces at the end of every song, and the edits are rather hard and harsh, very very amateur, like someones first show, but then I guess thatâs community radio. 
Just a slight post edit; seems theyâre playing most of their tracks from either low bitrate mp3s (64kbs), and youtube audio stream rips, uh, so professional, uh, lmfao.
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Itâd be hard to get a professional sounding copy of some of those obscure early 80 hits. I suppose getting a lo-fi copy is better than not hearing them at all.
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Although when I briefly listened last Sunday I didnât hear an ID & we seaming heard the same broadcast, I thought Harmony FM only broadcasted on Wednesday? Thought it would have been Hawksbury Gold on a Sunday, unless thereâs been a schedule change recently.
No need to apologize. I can identify with that era too.
Look at the success of Stranger Things & Gardians of The Galaxy with the 80âs music & themes.
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True, I forget that Iâve been buying records and discs for 40 years, so for me itâs been relatively easy to buy and download much of this stuff losslessly, but I guess if Harmony have just started off, and theyâve had to just grab all those songs on the fly, I guess they most probably got a hard drive copy of someoneâs hard drive. One of my cousins often boasts on how much music he has, 200,000 songs on a hard-drive, but then thatâs easy if all your after is 64k and 128k mp3s. Someone else I knew out in Gunnedah had every single that entered the top 40 and top 100 singles charts since the 1950s, but he too grabbed most of his music from youtube ripping software. I spose if they enjoy it, power to them, but for me, I wouldnât enjoy music at all. In the case of Harmony and some of these other stations that play mp3s, their saving grace is at least some good compression and equalisation processing that at least takes the harshness out of the lossy file sound. When listening to the 1980 countdown the other night, it was what one could describe as casual listening; I was having dinner at the time, and thus sound quality wasnât really an issue.
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I recommend the billy bob show on Braidwood FM on a Tuesday night he picks a countdown and plays tracks from it⌠@dxnerd The streaming quality is pretty good. 1pm Wednesday.
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and thatâs what I think most radio listeners are like ⌠not with a high end receiver and speakers tuning in to hear high fidelityâŚ
Though FM radio can produce some really good sound, but will never match vinyl or CDs for outright quality.
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Problems still evident.
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Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 & 90.3 transmitting with very narrow bandwidth at the moment. Measured for best fidelity at 9kHz, thatâs about the same as MW, but worse!
Pilot Stereo carrier, well down. All the signs of very low modulation level. I see this sometimes with Radio Skid Row. But has been a frequent occurrence with 2MWM.
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If you were around in the 80s, youâd be quite surprised how good FM radio sounded back then, this was when radio stations looked after their record collections, and CDs were just making there debut. I remember taping quite a bit of 2Day and Triple M on to Maxell UDI and TDK AD and SAs and the results were rather pleasing. This thread being community radio, 2Blu in Katoomba sounded great when they got their transmitter issues sorted around the mid nineties, and 2SSR in the shire was likewise when I moved down there, until about 2007 when they had some issues with their STL, 2SSR still sounds okay, but has an audible high pitched sound through all of its programming. When I volunteered for SWR FM during the 1990s, they done their best to have the finest equipment for broadcasting the highest quality sound possible, but internal bickering/politics and problems meant they were always issues with the outgoing signal.
Iâm not sure, but another part to the equation is nowadays, many stations have an mp3 stream going from the studio to the transmitter, not sure if this is always the case, but is part of the evolving technology of radio, so this would also be why some stations wouldnât sound as good.
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Braidwood FM is fortunate enough to have an IT guru as the station manager, so problems are generally fixed fairly quickly. Hands on technical stuff sadly isnât my forte; I only know the theory.
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