Digital Radio - Technical

Very pleased. Any news on the Brisbane tunnels? There are some long ones here too. 7km Airport Link and a couple of 5km ones. The only times I have to switch to AM or FM. It’s annoying.

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Now put CADA in them, and the Central Coast stations in the northern tunnels.

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I think a moment of radio silence is warranted. Tunnels are made for boring after all.

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They probably should. River 94.9 is in the western tunnel in Brisbane heading to Ipswich.

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Wouldn’t that be outside their licence area?

Same reason why I don’t think CADA or any other out of town stations should be in NorthConnex etc.

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I think it also has Logan 101.1, so that’s also outside the licence area.

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Yes it is. But I don’t see the problem really. The tunnel leads to the Western Freeway which is heavily used by Ipswich and western suburbs commuters who are within the licence area. I think commuters should be able to listen to their local station within reason when going into the city. They can hear it above ground :slight_smile:

River are already up against it as the Brisbane LAP covers Ipswich in its entirety but not the other way around. So River has to directly compete with all 8 commercial Brisbane stations in its own licence area. So allowing commuters to stay on 94.9 in the tunnel seems reasonable to me. Ipswich centre is only 39km to the Brisbane CBD. A lot closer than Katoomba/Penrith is to the Sydney CBD for example.

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Funnily enough, you get better reception of 94.9 in the tunnel than you do once you come out onto the Western Freeway - that section in behind Mt Coot-tha is a real deadspot for 94.9, probably the worst area for it in western Brisbane, presumably due to it being in a signal shadow of said mountain.

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It could potentially become something of a ‘free for all’ if you allow out of area stations to rebroadcast … As then Rebel, Breeze and even Hit 100.7 could probably then say they should be allowed to broadcast in the tunnel too.

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Potentially, but it doesn’t seem to have.

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The tunnel retransmissions aren’t allocated or monitored by the ACMA.
So really it’s up to the tunnel operators to choose what they want to broadcast.
That’s why my 89.7 which is technically in the Brisbane RA1 isn’t in any of the tunnels.

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It was something of a “wow” moment here on the Gold Coast doing a full rescan and seeing… 94 stations! (BNE as well as the local GC MPX).

Though some of them are the same on BNE and GC eg. MMM 80s…

Which made me wonder if DAB+ could have the ability to switch between BNE and GC transmissions of eg. MMM 80s when driving between the 2 cities as there is definitely overlap in the in car coverage.

I have a feeling this may have been discussed before and the answer was no… ???

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It’s a good question. I had assumed they would just switch from Brisbane to the Gold Coast station, but I’ve never tried it. I’m sure it does in the UK.

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I think the multiplex would need to be on the same physical channel as the BNE one for it to work that way.

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It’s very possible, called Service Linking. It can even be done to an FM frequency.

Main things are an identical service ID, some Service Linking data and the radio to be configured to support it, some might have it disabled by default. The Gold Coast stations all have different service IDs to the Brisbane ones, so it wouldn’t work.

In the UK implementation is sporadic - for example “Capital UK” shares a common ID on most multiplexes, but “Capital Yorkshre” (yes, spelt like that) is a separate ID and shared on 4 multiplexes - so a radio will switch you between different stations on the same national feed, but you wouldn’t switch to the Yorkshire feed once you got in range.

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Fairly sure some (if not all) Capital locals share the same service ID: have had Capital Liverpool flip to Capital Lancashire while driving up the M6.

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Have ARN changed the audio compression technology on it’s DAB stations recently?

As I’m listening to WSFM 80s right now, and whilst it’s still 32 kbps, it’s sounding better than I remember it before.

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All the ARN stations have been sounding great in Sydney for about a month now.

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Since mid last week ive had DAB dropouts while driving around the Campbelltown /Macarthur area.
Is the Badgally Antenna site having issues?
Losing signal from Appin now also on the way to the 'Gong

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