Digital Radio - Technical

What is The Wave using? When I was testing The Wave vs Coast the difference only became apparent at the margins, very weak both are off the air, just weak both are OK, it has to be quite weak!

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4BC, 4BH & NTS are all silent on digital.

Guessing this was planned as part of the move.

Wonder how many hours they will be off air?

Analogue remains on air.

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Amazing @Informer, thank you for doing such experiments.

Perth & Mandurah are interesting as there are at least four levels of error protection to compare.

How does this software compare to what @TV.Cynic uses? Have you used it and @TV.Cynic, have you used QIRX?

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NO. I looked at the instructions and the setup looked really complicated. So I haven’t had time to try it.

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All three still missing this morning including after rescan.

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morning folks, In Brisbane i cannot hear 4bc on digital radio…is anyone else having issues?
i did a re-scan at 01.30am this morn as it wasent any sound. then it would not even find the likes of 4bc nor 4zzz… Scan only found 48 stations. Just now at 07.40am did me a re-scan found 68 stations but 4bc still no sound.

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good too know thanks you Tv Cynic

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Pretty poor that the stations are off so so long from digital considering how many radios now are only FM/DAB without AM.

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How have there techs not noticed or been alerted
Back when I worked there they had off air alerts even on DAB

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4BC, 4BH and NTS have been restored.

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And it is more interesting when you compare the bit rates of the commercial stations: Wave/Coast in Mandurah on 96 kbps vs the rest in Perth on 32/48 kbps. On good hifi gear you can tell the difference in audio quality, clarity and consistency.

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Indeed @TV.Cynic, I had a radio running that suddenly burst into song on 4BH. Had it up a bit loud!

Outage seems to have been over 12hrs, off some time after the sport show ended at 7pm on 4BC.

Despite not being in the null of either the Wynnum West to Warrnambool null, 882 4BC is a weaker signal, easier to null than the compromised output of 1116 4BH with its severe null from Nudgee towards Melbourne.

Great to have digital back on air, sounds much better.

What’s also interesting is no one has commented on any station’s social media or any local Brisbane radio discussion pages.

Nor was there any notice from either station. Unless I missed it on air, away from radio yesterday.

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Yeah quite frankly it’s p#ss poor.

4BH on 1116 was running promos this morning saying they were having problems with their DAB service.

Luckily my FM/DAB alarm clock (yes I still use one!) defaults to buzzing if it can’t pick up a signal, so I woke up to a buzz alarm this morning.

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@Brianc68 agree, p#ss poor indeed.

Good that 4BH made mention of it. Scott Menz was on air last night, even if voice tracked, I gather he would’ve become aware of digital being off air.

Ace I guess are beholden to what Nine do as lessor. Both Nine and Ace push digital radio, Ace more, so you’d think advance notice would be given.

Perhaps there was a technical reason preventing an uninterrupted digital service due to the work at Cannon Hill?

A clever radio @Brianc68 to sense the silence of the digital service. From what I could see, the stations were still listed on digital, carrier signal still going out as multiplex on for all others on 9B, however no input from the station.

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Yes it’s a good feature on the alarm clock for a relatively inexpensive one. It’s a Pure brand and I can’t remember what I paid for it but it was quite cheap I recall. If you lose power it also resets the time and alarms when the power comes back on.

4BH on AM was even a bit glitchy this morning with quite a few seconds of dead air between commercials at times. Not sure if that was related.

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The Wave uses EEP 3A at the moment. They’ve also previously experimented with 2A and 1A.

Looks like TV.Cynic uses “DAB Player”. I haven’t tried it. I don’t think it supports my SDRPlay dongle. I think QIRX is more feature rich, but yes, is finicky to set up.

I originally tried QIRX because i believe it can differentiate which DAB transmitter, with in a Single Frequency Network, it is recieving and plot it on a map. So far it seams to be able to identify the 3 Perth DAB transmitters at the same time. Waiting for some tropospheric propagation to play with it some more.

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Comparing the news bulletin and the audio of 4BC and 4BH couldn’t be more different.

4BC is softer and thinner, muffled & difficult to listen to.

Conversely, 4BH sounds like radio should; easy on the ear, makes you want to listen longer.

Same on AM.

Can only hope once Nine complete the internal move, the audio sounds better. It’s worse than ever prior to the new studios.

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Agree. 4BC sounds absolutely awful on both DAB and AM. I thought the whole point of them moving to 882 was to improve the experience.

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I’m assuming “experience” relates to better reception across the majority of Brisbane, but yeah, a better sounding station with a bit of static would be easier to listen to than a static free but muddy sounding station.

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where are they moving to? Are they moving the radio stations to Mount Cootha?

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