Due to the technical issues worldwide
Gold Coast - SCA + Hot Tomato dead on DAB Hot Tomato Gold working… Main streams are there but no content while many of the extra stations don’t even exist. Community ok.
Brisbane - most of the SCA streams don’t exist on DAB on Brisbane 2
On Brisbane 1 the streams are there but all dead air.
Here in Melbourne as of 5:45 PM:
That explains why all my presets have vanished.
Some SCA stations are back, while others, including FOX FM and Triple M are still silent.
iHeart stations are back.
The new low-power Community radio mux is on in Sydney, near Surry Hills on 201.072 mhz, using the 8D channel.
It shows 5 services at 64kbps each. However, it is currently dead air but it’s good to see it up and running.
It will be interesting to see which suburban community stations end up using this spectrum.
It’s strange seeing on radcom that it’s on mixed polarisation when all others are vertical.
The transmitter site is The Elan building at the top of the hill at Kings Cross, same site as the DTV & 2RPH FM translator.
I believe they have 3 different antennas to test with this service, a Vertical, a Horizontal & a Slant Polarised antenna, (not all used at the same time). Normal DAB is Vertically polarised.
Will be interesting to see what coverage they get & which antenna polarisation is best, but as a tech who operates the normal DAB transmitters & TXA Engineering we are more interested/concerned about any interference this might cause to the Sydney Tower 9A, 9B & 9C transmitters around the city.
Theoretically shouldn’t be any, but being at different specification & at a different location to the others, there could be intermod issues, also don’t know if or how it’ll affect the off air input for 9A Sydney Tower if it bleeds outside the 8D channel?
I should note, TXA is not operating this DAB transmitter, it’s being operated by the CBAA, possibly with some help from BAI? That’s why the TXA concerns as TXA has no control over it.
Dang, just about to head off to QLD, back on 30th… Hopefully it’ll be on air for a few weeks so i can test any reception here when i get back… I think I’ll be too far away, but i might get a bar of it if I’m lucky.
This is the first I’ve heard anything regarding sub metro on DAB? I’m guessing the inner suburban stations might get a guernsey first such as Skid Row and Northside. It would be great to have SWR on DAB, though the FM signal is close to ‘all city’ anyway.
You would think Radio Northern Beaches would be on there. Possibly also 2RDJ.
Eastside Radio is already on Sydney-wide DAB.
As an update there’s some test tones currently randomly happening one service at a time on the 8D DAB+ band.
Will be interesting to see how far the decodable signal travels.
Service 1 to 5 have SId’s of C100 to C104 respectively
Been two months or more since using QIRX to look at the bitrate of the various DAB+ stations.
So many DAB+ stations using 32kbps & amongst the worst offenders are SCA & ARN downgrading their mainstream stations like 2DAY & WSFM to 32kbps. I seriously can’t listen to 32kbps bit rate DAB+ broadcasters - does my ears in. Whilst the engineers are beholden to to the will of their management masters I can only think that either the above two large broadcasters want people listening to their FM outlets rather than DAB+ for the ratings, &/or would rather fit in as many DAB+ stations as possible to maximize profit & simply would rather quantity over audio quality.
If CRA are serious about DAB+ they are killing it with low quality crap bit rates.
Little wonder I’m listening to more podcasts these days. 
For me 32kbps bit rate audio quality is intolerable & 48kbps is only tolerable for brief periods.
Were there any issues with the repeaters and the crowdstrike issue? Notice some dropouts going for a drive out Box Hill way. It might be “normal” but was curious is the BSOD may of affected the repeaters. It felt like it was “off” although I am not sure. Was listening to 2UE the classic countdown this morning.
Edit:
Maybe this answered my question. My gut feel was correct.
There was some discussion earlier on in this thread: Digital Radio - Technical - #1673 by RFBurns
No, there were no DAB or FM transmission issues with the Crowdstrike problem that are operated by TX Australia, none of them have that installed, none run Windows OS & all the Transmitters & associated are not connected to the open internet.
There were stations that were off the air due to Crowdstrike, but those were studio issues, not transmission.
Yes, your question has been answered as you’ve found. 
Thanks @RFBurns was able to still get dab with my dpr-39 (pocket radio)but in parts it did fall off the dab cliff. It was around here.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/9Rf8qiARHht48ew29?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy
To be honest I am not sure if the repeater makes it there any better. I could mostly tell in the car driving there. The consistency of reception wasnt there as what I remembered.
There must have been issues beyond the studio. Here in Melbourne, all SCA DAB+ stations (including FOX and Triple M) were silent, but FOX FM and Triple M were still on the air on FM. Meanwhile Gold and KIIS were on both FM and DAB+, but the other iHeart DAB+ only stations were silent.
The Winmalee &/or the Mt Badgally translators would have some affect around that area, both make it further & have more impact that you would think.
TXA know from a transmission timing issue a couple of years ago, that the Mt Badgally translator has a reception affect in scattered areas but quite large areas all the way along the M7/M2 until about Macquarie Park, where it’s slightly shadowed & Artarmon comes in very strong.
As Winmalee & Mt Badgally are microwave link fed SFN’s they are unaffected with any issues out of the Artarmon main transmitter, TXA does know & has received reception from them (but haven’t tested which one or if it’s both) at the Artarmon transmission site when we’ve had the Artarmon transmitter turned off.
TXA also know that all DAB transmitters across Sydney are receivable at the original CRA’s DAB Network design & installation engineer’s home at Dural, he monitors them from there & can tell exactly which signal is coming from which site.
So while listeners may not notice, which is the purpose of the design, they all travel quite a distance & interact with one another right across Sydney, so if one site or more goes down, there will be patches with lower than normal reception signal strength &/or quality on DAB & listeners may or may not notice it.
If something happens at the studio the FM’s have a backup program located at the transmitter site, this came into effect for a period on Friday afternoon after the Crowdstrike issue hit everyone.
The DAB transmissions don’t have any backup if the studio goes down, technically they are very different systems of transmission (not just one being analogue & one being digital), the DAB is extremely complex for what it outputs compared to FM, to put a transmitter backup program on DAB is/would be extremely expensive & almost impossible to do, given how it all works behind the scenes & it’s complexity & not just how many different networks but how many different individual services/radio stations would need a backup program injected into the final multiplexer, & then when, if 1 or 2 services go down or a whole network or the entire multiplex loses inputs from studios.
What happened on Friday afternoon was those studios who don’t run Crowdstrike & weren’t affected kept running as normal on FM & DAB, SCA, ARN & Nova went down right across Australia, & due to the studios going down, their DAB stations went dead, the FM’s went onto transmitter backup tapes, until they could get something running again at the studios, priority was to get a program back to FM whichever way they could.
All 3 of those networks got a crude studio play-out setup running to air on the FM’s & most likely switched the FM feed to the DAB studio encoder for the main stations only, until they could get the computers running the normal DAB feeds back up & running. I’m not sure if you got it in Melbourne, but Nova Sydney had the drive program running on FM & DAB using someone’s unaffected laptop, playing music off it until they could get the normal play-out up & running, they got Nova 969 back on DAB but Smooth was still off DAB until later, the other Nova & Smooth DAB stations came back much later.
The DAB services don’t always come from the local studio. I think most of the secondary ARN DAB stations come out of Melbourne, with some from Sydney, same with SCA, most Nova/Smooth secondary DAB stations come out of Brisbane I think, they are then sent to the local studios in each area to be injected into the local studio multiplexer/encoder, which then sends that multiplex out to the local DAB main transmitter site to be injected into the main multiplexer along with all the other stations from every other network & the community stations to be transmitted.
On Friday afternoon the studios would’ve got the FM’s back up first, then bought back the local DAB main stations even if they had to bypass everything to do with the DAB studio equipment & put the raw FM feed into the studio DAB encoder/multiplexer, then any local secondary DAB stations, then got the remote/networked secondary DAB stations back.
I wasn’t really paying close attention to what everyone was doing on Friday afternoon late, but I think a lot of the DAB main stations from the 3 aforementioned networks went to air as raw unprocessed audio until they could get the studios back up & running normally?
I can pick up this 8D CBAA mux from an old Frontier Silicon based DAB+ radio at my place in Hills Shire (20-something kms from the TX site). Coverage indoors is a bit patchy so I get some audio drop-outs, but honestly I’m pleasantly surprised it works at all.
As mentioned, 5x services (named ‘Service 1’ to ‘Service 5’), each 64Kbps, all playing a 1kHz test tone. No DLS. Mux is called ‘Sydney Extra’.
Further to this, could someone with a SDR hooked up check the date/time settings on this new mux? After listening to the CBAA tones for a while, my radio suspiciously started showing the time as 10hrs behind.
Mux is likely set to UTC-0
