The Latrobe Valley is actually within the Warragul RA1 licence area, in which it has a huge overlap with the Sale RA1 licence area. It’s part of the reason why 3GG & Gold 1242 are ineligible for an AM-FM conversion, along with the fact that Warragul RA1 is not a solus market, due to its two stations having different ownership from one another. Therefore, having 3GG on DAB+ is the best compromise to having an FM service in that case.
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I was in a Mitsubishi hire car this afternoon, which happened to have DAB in it. Surprisingly, it had already been rescanned for 9A. I listened to Easy Hits briefly in it (48kbps AAC), and it sounded amazing!! A whole lot better than what it sounds like on portable radios. Perhaps the Frontier Sillicon chips just aren’t great at decoding?
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Portable radios don’t have great in built speakers, but they still sound okay if you have some good headphones. Though at the same time, you notice even more how the sound quality is generally inferior to FM, and obviously higher bit rate sources such as an iTunes download.
I’m mean its ability to decode AAC correctly rather than speaker/headphone quality 
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Geelong should just be included in the Melbourne digital radio broadcasts. Chuck Bay and Krock in there plus The Pulse and 96three
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The Melbourne stations would obviously complain about that.
Difficult to totally eliminate DAB overspill into Geelong because of the location of Mt Dandenong and the water path (lack of terrain to shield it).
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All of the ABC’s audio (all stations) on the Sydney 9C channel mux when down at around 2am this morning. SBS operation was normal.
All okay at breakfast
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It’s a bit disappointing to see that the new Mitsubishi DAB+ radios don’t display DAB+ slideshow images, and you can’t aggregate presets from AM, FM and DAB+ onto the one list, like most modern car radios. 
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My Focus is the same, I only get 3 screens of 6 presets on FM and the same on DAB.
I don’t miss the slideshow images on the car radio, which is probably a good thing actually, one less distraction when driving.
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You’ve got Sync 3 in yours right? Mine is only Sync 2
Yes, mine is Sync3.
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I listened to DAB+ 9A stations on my way from Kingston (south of Hobart) to Oatlands (half way between Hobart and Launceston) today. Very impressed! The only place it dropped out was a little patch of highway in Jericho for a few seconds, but even the FMs are pretty much unlistenable in that same area. Reception was in a 2018 Holden Colorado.
I switched between Triple M, 7HO and Easy Hits all on DAB. All are currently using the same FEC (3A) and bitrate (48kbps DAB+). Even at 48kbps, they sounded great! I think cars are much better at decoding parametric stereo (and AAC in general) than the Frontier Sillicon chips in the off the shelf DAB+ radios. I did notice that the Holden radio seems to stretch the slideshow image in a bit.
I do think that the processing 7HO is way too ‘bright’, though.
I have a feeling they have switched the FM to their old CRL processing chain and are just using their primary processor (Omnia 6) on DAB only at the moment, with a very treble-heavy sounding preset on their Omnia 6, to make DAB sound ‘better’ to the average joe. 7HO on DAB+ is hard to have running at low volume levels in the car at the moment when you’re talking with someone etc, due to the extreme highs.
7HO on 101.7 FM sounds very ‘muddy’ at the moment, when they usually sound good on FM. My understanding is that KIX Country are using the free ‘Sonos’ audio processing software. KIX sounds very underprocessed at the moment, but it’s difficult to tell what they’re using and which preset, as it’s in software, so it’s not visible in the rack like 7HO.
I would assume the SCA digital stations (which sound great) are using Omnia Z/IP stream processing on DAB+, just like their web stream. Although, perhaps HIT and Triple M’s DAB feed come out of the AES output on the FM Optimod for each station on Mt Wellington? Either which way, the SCA suite of stations are sounding great.
My suggestion for Grant Broadcasters is to switch the FM and the DAB back to their original Omnia 6 preset, which sounded great. They should look at using Breakaway One for KIX Country (I have mentioned it to the technician for KIX, he is investigating it). Breakaway One would sound heaps better than Sonos. Another suggestion for Grant would be to use PNG compression on their DAB PAD image instead of JPEG, as they currently look very overcompressed!
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That’s the same stock radio that my rental in NZ had. I obviously didn’t get to try the DAB section but funnily enough, it had the Sydney stations scanned in.
I managed to receive the ABC/SBS mux at 2/5 bars at Campbell Town last year. This was on a handheld Sangean DPR-34. I noticed the analogue FMs were strong there which prompted the stop; I’m not sure if this is the absolute northern limit but it would be fairly close, as the analogue goes to pot before reaching Lonny.
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I’m pondering if there is some slideshow feed problems to the mux feeds to the Artarmon DAB+ transmitters atm?
I’ve noted last night & today no slideshows for the following stations:
2SM, 2CH, 2GB, Southern Cross Austereo stations, The 90’s, CW Remix.
These stations still have their slideshow images: ABC, SBS , Fine Music, Mac Sports Radio, Hope, Nova, FBi, 2SER, Muslim DR, WS FM, Sky Racing.
Does anyone know anything?
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It’s odd that The 90s doesn’t have images, but WS does since they’re on the same network.
90’s did have a slideshow image many months ago, but 80’s didn’t or not in the last 18 months that I’ve ever observed.
Seams odd that so many radio station slideshows are all out of action at the same time. Could be more?
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I’m in Blacktown and have had poor reception issues the last couple of days. Someone else had the same complaint on Whirlpool Forums. Maybe they are working on the TX or tower and are at reduced power / functionality?
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I’m working at another site today, but no works on the Artarmon Tower, no works on the TX’s to my knowledge & I just checked all DAB+ services are at full power with all normal signal specs.
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On weekend I went for a walk down to Thornleigh in a bit of a valley and I had a brief drop out, also at Carlingford it broke up on Sunday. Just in my pocket Sangean radio with headphone jack. Nothing major but I did notice too. Maybe it was fixed today?