Oh yeah, now you mention it - Australia Today is gone. I don’t know for sure if that was today, but it would be recent.
Those bits have gone back to get most of the stations back up to 40kbps not 32.
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Yes, there Thursday yet gone Friday without any notification to audience.
Their social media remains current, indicating the program continues. It would have to for the regional post Hadley stations.
I am surprised as SCA were keen to own and control the talk content. That requires a long term commitment.
The show only began April 2021.
To last only 15mths is short sighted.
The hybrid format of 7-9am digital and Listnr followed by simulcast 9-11am on post Hadley regionals worked well and sounded great as looped content over a three hour span.
Four stations gone from 32 to 40kbps is it?
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Yep - if anything I’m surprised they didn’t lean into it further with some podcast replays from other talk focused shows
Yep. SoundCloud is still 32k, but otherwise all of the 9B stations from SCA are 40kbps. Blank, Blank, MMM 80s, MMM Classic Rock and MMM Country on 9A are all 32kbps.
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Yes I am quite surprised, maybe Steven Price could do Breakfast on 2sm. Make some deal with 2sm. Although with John Laws there that probably won’t happen. I did from time to time tune in, an alternative to 2gb.
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What’s going on with the DRM at the Moment for Regional Australia?
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So JAZZ and Hard and Heavy are fixed - with Triple M 80s and Triple M Classic Rock now broken instead.
My alarm clock doesn’t seem to have an issue with them - a rescan still shows labels on those stations - but I haven’t tried factory resetting it in case it’s keeping them in memory.
Part of me thinks Australia Today wasn’t intentionally removed, just whatever’s got the other multiplex in a mess means they are running some failsafe setup?
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What is this ‘Jazz’ station?
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The only one of the “Listenr” station streams that is in Melbourne. Jazz
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Interesting. Didn’t know that made it to DAB
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They’re still advertising Steve Price’s show as part of MMM regional (hard to know if it’s just automated though - looking at 2RG and 2WG’s sites, there’s a big blank in the show list between 9 and 12) and the podcast suggests it’s still strong on Listnr so it seems to be just the DAB slot gone - maybe the deal for that part didn’t stretch past June 30.
I can’t imagine the DAB slot to have been worth much, certainly not as much as having a captive audience in their solus regions in place of Hadley, much like John Laws has at the BOG stations.
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It’s still on LISTNR and you can hear it live 9:00-11:00 AEST weekdays. Highlights of new episodes are still being added to LISTNR and various podcast platforms.
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All of SCA’s stations on 9A in Melbourne seem to now be properly broken - they don’t work at all on either my standalone radio or in the DAB Player app on my PC.
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Yes, same here for those Southern Cross Austereo channels on 9A (e.g. Jazz and some of the Triple M subchannels). I’m also in Melbourne.
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They are moving premises in South Melbourne at the moment. But still disappointing that DAB is getting this treatment.
Obviously they’ve managed to keep 101.9 and 105.1 FM on air but clearly who cares if DAB goes off air…
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SCA and ARN treat DAB like kings compared to BOG in Sydney. I checked their DAB only stations tonight eg. FUN, ZOO and they are ALL off air, some of them have been like that for most of this year.
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Hmm, maybe just caught them at a bad time - they are all back now and functional. Hopefully it stays that way, I’d echo the disappointment that outages on DAB seem to just get treated as much lower importance to AM/FM.
While I also back it up with my phone - I use DAB for my alarm clock in the morning, I’d assume the radio would have acted the same as it did while it was out, be tuned to it but silent - rather than detecting a missing service and bumping to something else.
At least AM/FM you’d just get static noise if the transmitter was out. But I’ve long learned to never trust alarms. Two is one, one is none.
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I doubt faultfinding a DAB+ issue would be much fun: Encoder at studio is possibly locally managed, MUX is managed by a provider such as Telstra or Mediahub and transmitter possibly on a TxA site and maintained by BAI. Sounds like a recipe for a lot of ‘not at my end’ type of indifference.
With AM or FM if you spend long enough off the air the ACMA will ask you for the licence back. Obviously with DAB+ that isn’t happening because the licence is held by a different entity.
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For the Nationals, yes that’s pretty much how it goes, for the commercials, speaking from experience as one of those who had to fault find DAB+ issues, it’s pretty much your worst nightmare.
Commercial DAB+, encoder/multiplexer at the studio is locally managed (but TXA know all the details of it, so can fault find back to there, but will only do so if somethings taking the entire multiplex off air, or if asked by the networks), links between the studios & transmitter site are just normal digital STL’s. A lot of the networks are using a Telstra fibre line (mostly through the Telstra DVN2 Network), or the likes of a TPG, Vocus or Optus fibre line.
Everything post the transmitter site incoming networks (stations) router, is owned & maintained by TXA.
I guarantee everyone on here, including techs that have never had anything to do with DAB+, would have their minds blown beyond comprehension, knowing/seeing how convolutedly technical the DAB+ network is & how it all operates, purely by luck on many occasions.
Everything after the audio program leaves the studio playout computer, has dual redundancy, right through until it leaves the transmission antenna, with auto monitoring & auto changeover between paths in multiple places, where a few of these places the paths are monitored & changed over if necessary packet by packet of data transfer.
The DAB+ audio chain is nothing like the audio chain for AM/FM, the DAB+ audio chain is so complex I’m surprised it even works, it’s even more complex than the broadcast chain for DTV.
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Thanks for the technical detail - DAB+ is a bit after my time in radio. It’s probably not worth BOG’s time to get their DAB+ back on air when faults are so complex. Without a skilled tech on the case who has heaps of time to put into it, you probably have no hope of sorting it.
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I’m not 100% certain on this, but as far as BOG DAB+ is concerned, I don’t think it’s any sort of technical issue why they go off & stay off for a significant period of time regularly.
I think it’s as simple as the computer playing out the stations like Zoo, Fun, etc simply stop playing the music & no one bothers to start them again?
They might have logs programmed to run for 4 weeks for example & at the end of that time the playout computer runs out of music logs, so stops, until someone either puts the log on repeat & starts the playout again, or programs a new set of logs for the playout to play?
I’ve come to this conclusion, because when you look at the various DAB point logs in the transmission chain, 2SM main station is generally still running (most of the time) & all the data for the other stations is still there, it’s just there’s no audio information in the data.
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