Maybe @RFBurns might know if or when it was activated. The site is located near Woronora in the middle of the Burnum Burnum sanctuary.
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Will have to remember to fire up the portable DAB radio when I next visit O-town. It wasn’t on air last year when there was talk on here about switching it on.
Wonder when Arthurs Seat in Victoria will be on-air?
I can’t tell you the exact date, but Como/Woronora DAB site was turned on about 6 - 10 weeks ago.
I believe there are some issues with getting Arthurs Seat built & on air, I think they are hoping before Christmas, but maybe early next year?
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There is now a placeholder channel called 1170 SEN(using 40kbps).Currently not broadcasting any audio(until 6am tomorrow i suspect)
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For what it’s worth, here’s a screencap of DAB Player showing 1170 SEN:
It’ll be interesting to see if the bitrate of 2CH via DAB+ is reduced after tomorrow’s relaunch of 1170AM, because you’d think SEN would want their main sports station to have the highest quality audio despite 2CH music benefiting more from a higher bitrate…
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So in CUs that’s 30 + 32 + 16 + 16 + 24 = 118. Or 22CUs over their 96CU allocation from owning 2CH.
So they’d need to be getting something off someone else to be doing that. Presumably it’d have to be 2SM? Has anything there vanished or reduced?
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Sky Sports Radio 2 is no longer on air, so perhaps that’s where SEN got the extra bits from?
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Well that’d be out of left field if it was - surely SEN is competing pretty much head to head with Sky Sports Radio - both with SENTrack and SEN itself competing and probably wanting to steal all the audience from their breakfast show.
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Didn’t SEN lease some space from Nine Radio using some of 2UE’s space? Or did someone else do that?
Nahh 2ue and GB are both on 9B. 2ch / SEN are on 9A. Nine Radio are now using the FEC of 2A now. It explains the bit reduction of UE/GB.
Was this a necessary change? While I obviously can’t speak for everyone, I personally had no major problems with receiving the Nine Radio stations with whatever codecs were being used before which allowed for the higher bitrates.
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I don’t know why they changed. Have not been in a fringe area for dab to really test. You can definitely hear a difference for 2ch on 4a, in the car and the pocket radio…
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Ahhhh right. I must’ve misread it then.
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Perhaps in Bris, Melb or Perth, Nine could try 1A error correction for the talk station whilst Sydney is on 2A?
4BC is 104kbps at 3A
72kbps at 2A
48kbps at 1A
You could reduce bitrates of NTS for higher bitrate, likewise, borrow from BH or Magic in Melb or keep same and increase the error correction.
Being OCRs, 2A at the Sydney fringe sites too?
To WA:
I’ll say it again and perhaps one day email Mandurah to trial 1A for Coast and Wave.
If it’s still Coast and Wave only on the loneliest mux in Australia, their full allocation of 128kbps at 3A reduces to 64kbps at 1A. Easily reinstated to 128kbps when they pay their reserve to themselves for the ‘auction’ of excess capacity of which they’re the only bidder.
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Wonder what might happen in Mandurah going forward - did they want digital just for the equal placement on a receiver to those getting Perth DAB?
Being on FM for both stations and having no added content there’s currently not much reason for anyone who can only receive the Mandurah signal to bother.
Especially as the table above shows that the ABC repeater on 9C isn’t in operation - so some DAB receivers in the area might get exactly two stations.
Makes sense in that context to either attempt to improve robustness into weak signal areas, or try and add additional services to block Perth formats to avoid out of area listening.
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The Wave is currently running 2A.
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I notice the ACMA consultation for the Gold Coast DAB plan closes today. It’s quite an interesting read and talks a bit about the potential over spill with Brisbane and vice versa. Looks like they are changing the specs for Brisbane to include higher power. I think they’re just going to have to accept overspill at both ends. The paper points out the continuous nature of the urban areas of Brisbane and Gold Coast. It’s very true. Basically uninterrupted suburbs between the two these days. Much more contiguous than say Melbourne and Geelong or Sydney and Central Coast or Wollongong.
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I pondered putting a submission in, but the ACMA were beyond useless in providing additional background information - especially given how half of their website vanished, so there’s no point.
They nominally invite members of the public to ‘consult’ but there’s no doubt it’s only the commercial broadcasters who have a real voice in the process, rather than having to respond to ‘these things were decided’.
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It’s true, and that website is an absolute shocker. One of the worst I’ve ever seen and it looks like it’s designed for a primary school child.
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