A rollout in Launceston would be simpler then the Gold Coast wouldn’t it?
It’s good to see the ABC interested in rollout though
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Don’t know if I’m supposed to tell this or not, the ABC is kinda interested in DAB on the Gold Coast, there’s works behind the scenes about it, but cost is a big factor, they need 6 or 7 translator sites to cover the Gold Coast, especially the M1 between the North & South ends of it, a couple of the translator site locations are being argued about, do they need them or not & costs, some of the sites will only have very small coverage footprints.
Costs vs gain is the game here, the existing commercial DAB stations need these same translators, but they’ve decided to not worry about them, just use the main Mt Tambourine site, the ABC isn’t going to do half a job, they want full good coverage or won’t bother doing anything DAB.
Spend a lot of money, to build half a network, get complaints about reception issues/coverage = not worth the money or hassle.
I’m guessing this ABC DAB test/rollout in Launceston might be a test port for what they want to do on the Gold Coast to see how much/many they can get away with using flee powered translator sites & costs to do it? I haven’t looked deeply into all the Launceston details. Launceston will be a smaller scale & cost over doing it on the Gold Coast.
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Yeah it’s weird.
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Ah interesting.
Although it seems like overkill. The commercial DAB stations seem to cover the Gold Coast fine to me.
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Has the main ABC/SBS transmitter at Artarmon been replaced as yet? I remember reading here that it was in a bad way some time ago.
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Agree, I’ve never seen any issues along the coastal strip… Perhaps inland around Nerang or Tallebudgera where it’s a bit hillier could be an issue.
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Nope & won’t be anytime soon, still barely hanging on.
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As a sidebar to this I am sure they are kind of not at all interested in DAB in Mandurah. Still to date that has only 4 commercial stations: The Wave and CoastFM (both are on FM from West Coast Radio), SEN Sports Radio, and KIX Country SW. Since Perth DAB reaches into Mandurah there is no incentive for anybody to have stations running there (certainly not the ABC I am sure). I pity people in Bunbury who have only two FM stations (Hit and JJJ), they would kill to get these 4 stations, and on high-quality DAB (at 96 kbps for the West Coast Radio stations).
I wonder how long Mandurah DAB+ will last? Until it goes under, I will keep enjoying The Wave and CoastFM on my Panasonic hifi, it just sounds so much better than any of the Perth DAB stations.
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Seems a bit strange that the ABC are looking at extending DAB into smaller markets when the TX in the countries biggest market is just holding on🤔
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In the early stages of dab and repeaters the ABC didn’t transmit in Sydney , only commercial stations did. In fairly recent times that changed.
The logic has appeared to change on the GC in the total opposite direction. All or nothing.
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ABC could switch on DAB+ from their North Road, Lower Beechmont site at EEP-1A and sufficiently cover Coomera to Currumbin at 25kW ERP, all they need to do is be realistic with expectations of coverage.
Their allocation would remain a clear channel for many years, if not forever (as the rest of DAB+ rollout has been slower than glacial) and remember, national broadcasters manage their own interference, so would only be another national multiplex a few hundred kilometres away, heavily attenuated by the Macpherson Range behind Lower Beechmont.
Many generous Mediaspy people have used, is it the Nautel coverage simulator to draw maps, the OD requirement of the simulator more or less is a reliably practical coverage area of the main eastern beam at 25kW ERP for decent coverage Coomera and south.
Remember, ABC digital radio on the Gold Coast is all for the sake of getting just one station, ABC Gold Coast (the once wonderful music based 91.7 Coast FM) onto digital alongside commercial and community.
All the national ABCs are on FM or/and DTV/abc listen app. It’s only ABC Gold Coast not on digital radio or DTV.
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Wouldn’t the logical thing to do is put ABC Gold Coast on the Commercial multiplex, then extend the Brisbane multiplex as a SFN?
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They would have to take ABC Radio Brisbane as well if they also use 9C.
Unless that gets moved to a commercial MPX in BNE on 9A or 9B.
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My understanding here is that the ABC don’t like this approach because they are worried about being made to fund a commercial multiplex - in some smaller markets their cost to pay for their usage on the commercial multiplex would be close to paying half the broadcast costs, in addition to still paying for their own full multiplex.
It would make the most sense and be the best use of spectrum, especially in SEQ where they need to also find space for an ABC/SBS multiplex on NSW time, but every commercial license thus far - even the proposed Launceston one - has been planned as Category 1, and there’s no current mechanism to swap them later or allow the ABC to purchase space on a Category 1 multiplex.
I have to guess at this point that the ABC assume that either DAB windowing works in the real world, or they’d simply carry all the various ABC Local services for the regions that are included in the SFN if they ever got to that point.
This is already the scenario on digital TV, and honestly a good outcome, might encourage the regional ABCs to provide more opt-out local programming if the metro service was readily available alongside it on DAB.
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May appear logical @Appen, however no provision possible for national broadcasters on the category 1 licence. If it began as a cat 2, sure, however commercial broadcasters aren’t likely to forego spectrum and ABC have their reasons against this too (some listed here).
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They don’t necessarily need to, we’ve (TX Australia DAB Transmission) learnt a few things lately & one of them is that ABC/SBS can have an SFN with Brisbane/GC or anywhere else for that matter & still have both Brisbane & GC stations in the same SFN mux.
Unlike DTV, the DAB receivers don’t exactly look at the mux as a whole, needing every data packet to be the same in an SFN, they look at it on a service by service way, so as long as the Brisbane ABC & GC ABC have different service numbers, theoretically it should work, note we don’t actually know if this is in operation or even been trialled anywhere in the world, but theoretically it should be possible?
DAB is a really old technology that predates DVB-T, when they started to make the DVB-T standards they looked at the DAB standards & said this won’t work, that’s stupid, we’ll change that & make this different, DAB & DVB-T are somewhat related, but DVB-T is much more refined, & better engineered than DAB, DAB+ only really differs from DAB in the way it does error correction & the compression type it uses, the underlying basic way it operates is exactly the same, that’s why a DAB SFN & DTV SFN works differently.
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If it is a problem, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to put ABC Brisbane and ABC Gold Coast on both Brisbane and Gold Coast muxes.
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This is what I think they should be doing in Launceston/Hobart and running the whole state on either 9C or 8B (I imagine 9C could cause interference to Melbourne). ABC Hobart is already on TV25 in the north.
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Hi all,
I’ve been reading through this thread with interest. I’m in the UK but I’ve ended up having responsibility for updating the DABLIST data for Australia after I found the transmitter details including those for the in-fill transmitters on the ACMA site. I’ve seen a couple of mentions of DABLIST on here, and FMList/FMSCAN which use the same data - that data is mainly maintained and used by hobby DXers (with a European bias in terms of data sources/contributors).
In any case, I’ve tried to update the data for Australian DAB+ with the sites, ERPs and directional antenna properties provided by the ACMA documentation.
I saw mention by @Informer above about trying out QIRX and seeing all the TII codes for the transmitters in Perth. These are mainly missing from the data I have and so it would be very useful would be if anyone knows and could share these for any of the transmitters across the various mpxs with me - then I can update the DABLIST data! This will also mean the transmitters will show on the map in QIRX as it uses the DABLIST data as its source.
As an aside, I guess any of the transmitters that are on-channel repeaters won’t have these? They’ll just rebroadcast the codes of whatever transmitters they’re receiving off air as part of the rebroadcast signal. This is interesting and something I’ve not heard of happening over here - as far as I know everything here in the UK is fed either by satellite, fibre optic or microwave, with every transmitter sending its own TII code with each mux it transmits (for the national and main commercial muxes in any case).
Cheers
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I can help you with that! I can receive Perth and Mandurah DAB+ multiplexs. I’ll post up some QIRX screensnaps when I get back to my computer.
You’ll have to guide me in to tell me if I capture the information you’re chasing. I do need to understand all the information QIRX provides, so happy to help. 
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