I thought I’d separate the discussions about the Australian FM DX Webservers to avoid cluttering up the DXing thread as sometimes there are technical discussions about the servers that aren’t so much about DXing.
I’ll start by announcing that the third Sydney TEF FM DX webserver (TVCL Radio 3) is now live and listed in the FM-DX-Webserver directory: https://servers.fmdx.org/
I’ve also gone through and done updates to the servers’ plug-ins and added a few more (e.g. Stream, and Screenshot).
So which tuner is best to use?
TVCL2 is generally the best to use as it has the highest gain aerial of the three (roof-mounted 3-el. FM Yagi mounted vertically and pointed northwest). It gets the most stations, including the most DX catches. It also works on local Sydney AM stations. It’s not as good for stations from the south, however, because of the direction it’s pointed in.
TVCL3 (S type dipole, vertically mounted – lower in height) works better with stations from the south and southwest – namely, 107.1 Highland FM, 106.9 Vox FM, 105.3 Kix Country, 102.9 2ST, 94.1 Pulse FM and 88.7 Vintage FM. 87.6 River FM is also kind of audible (co-channeled with Voice of Islam).
TVCL1 (ring type dipole on the roof, horizontally mounted) gets some additional stations from the south that aren’t receivable on TVCL2 or TVCL3. These are Power FM Nowra on 94.9 (instead of the Rhema Gosford on TVCL2 and TVCL3) and 2RPH Wollongong on 93.3 (instead of Easy FM Gosford on TVCL2 and TVCL3).
Tropo catches from the south usually come in more strongly on TVCL1 and TVCL3.
I find the Melbourne tuner doesn’t seem to like that I have a VPN, but if I pause it/turn it off it seems to connect me fine.
And I love the Sunny Coast one @Rob2144 - you receive a lot more north up the coast than I can here. And please accept my apologies if it was ever me in the past that left it on 89.5…
Maybe this question is better suited for the Discord group, but I’ll ask here for starters in any case.
I note within the Australian webserver listing, of which there are presently 6 remote webservers as I type this msg, that there doesn’t appear to be any list order that I can determine.
Ideally it would be nice to at least have the list structured in alphabetical order per country, such that, for example, TVCLs webservers are listed sequentially down the list, eg
TVCL 1
TVCL 2
TVCL 3
rather than scattered amongst the list.
Any thoughts?
So there’s something strange going on with my third TEF tuner (it’s the reason why I got a replacement TEF for TVCL2 initially). The left and right audio channels are inverted so the waveforms are essentially cancelling one another out causing it to sound like there’s no bass. I’m not really sure what’s causing it or how to resolve it.
I’ve heard the same effect on a few other servers. It could be a certain model/batch with the headphone jack incorrectly wired?
It sounds the same as wiring one speaker with correct -/+ polarity, while wiring the other in reverse, hence “out of phase”.
The headless TEFs are assembled in the Netherlands, and they take great care to ensure everything operates as expected, but with these radios mass-produced in China, I wouldn’t put it past them to overlook something like this.
Is there any way to invert one of the channels using software? Maybe FFMPEG can do it while encoding the MP3 stream?
I’ve ordered a headless TEF from Sjef back in the end of September. Don’t know how long it’ll take him to put it together and send it out though. Once the headless TEF comes, I’ll use the headless TEF on TVCL2 and replace TVCL3 with the one that’s currently on TVCL2.
Perhaps it could just be an option – e.g. default is sort by token, but you can change it to sort it alphabetically, if you wish.
It’d be nice to add a ‘city’ field to FM-DX-Webserver identification information to allow for sorting alphabetically by city also (or maybe this can be done automatically based on the receiver location information).
I’ve also experienced this on the Cheltenham FM webserver during its test run, I noticed a sound difference between that and the main Melbourne FM-DX tuner that’s currently up and running (paging @AustraliaRadio232). So you’re not alone.
I tried making the MP3 stream mono to see what it’d sound, but that sounds strange also, because it looks like there’s a time offset between the L and R channels also — visible if you look at the waveform I attached earlier. I guess there’s probably no easy solution :.
I guess the easiest & most obvious thing to do would be to open the TEF check the wiring to the audio out socket; tip, ring, sleeve within the tuner & compare to your other TEF tuners. If that appears okay I guess you have a choice of asking for advice in Discord group or returning the unit from where you purchased.
For anybody who wants it for their webserver logo file. Nova 96.9 White Frequency Variant - Transparent background for legibility.
This hi-res variant should solve the legibility issue of the frequency within the webserver GUI.
I’ve noticed that the logo plug-in allows for SVG files, which allows for unlimited resolution at small file sizes. I’ve replicated the white version of the logo you did in vector SVG format and it’s only 5KB so if/when I have time and can find SVG versions of stations’ logos, I’ll convert them over to SVG format.
I’ve also redrawn Move FM’s logo from scratch since I couldn’t find a good quality version of it online or as a vector format:
Thanks so much for your time with the logo files & improving on them too @tvcl .
Good to know that the plug-in allows for SVG files. I’ve just been educating myself briefly on the SVG file format too - definitely the way to go.
The Orange coloured SBS Radio 2 logo is a current logo too. I didn’t know it could look so good (sharp), being a small file, but that’s what the SVG format is all about.
Good work with the 2MFM, Easy FM & Move FM (etc) files too.
I too prefer to maximize the logo with it taking more of the usable space within the rectangle as you’ve recently done with 2MFM etc.
I’ll have to determine if Google Sheets allows me to store the image files as SVG, as I want to improve on some of the images there too as time permits.
Sometimes there’s slim pickings available for some radio station logos. It surprises me even for some community radio station websites the poor low res over cropped images that they use, like they’ve lost their original master image files.
Keep up the great work. Much appreciated this end.
Yep, you could scale it up to even 20,000px wide or any ridiculous size and it’ll still look good.
Yes, if I can’t find something good and it’s not too complex of a logo, I just redraw it from scratch in Illustrator so that I can save an SVG format version for the server.
Another benefit of SVGs, if you can find a copy in SVG, is that you can edit the colours easily.
. Alphabetical order would be great.
