Can someone with more technical knowledge than me explain why 1701 AM Islamic Voice Radio in Melbourne sounds so bad? I want to get in touch with them and tell them to fix it
In layman’s terms what it sounds like to me is that its just clipping like crazy, way too loud for no reason. I thought it was just AM being AM but it’s not, I found an online stream of their station and it sounds the same
For context I am Muslim and would like it if we had a better local station, we don’t unfortunately, it’s just this narrowcast one with a bafflingly bad setup. Like I have no idea how they’ve ended up with it sounding so bad. I wish we had a “The Light” equivalent on FM that played nasheeds
A lot of the MF NAS services sound awful. Greek Radio 1683 in Sydney comes to mind…they aren’t even exactly on the nominal frequency, maybe a couple of hundred hertz higher like 1683.2.
Sometimes these stations are not well maintained technically. I know the local narrowcast Muslim station here in Sydney “The Voice of Islam” has one of their stations on 87.6 feeding of their VHF station and it sounds like exactly what you would expect it to sound if you were listening to it via VHF.
I even did a redesign of their logo and send it to them for free but didn’t hear back.
It’s been like that for many years! At Oatley I could get two VOI transmitters on 87.6, that one and another that had full wide audio.
Does anyone remember the tourist info station at Cronulla? I remember picking that up on 87.6 in the 90s. Not sure if there were any others in Sydney such as in the CBD or Bondi/Manly.
Yeah I can only recall it being Bondi FM, perhaps with some ownership changes.
Not to say it wasn’t initially a tourist FM station & with that sign you’d have to assume that frequency @ Bondi did begin life as a tourist radio station. Perhaps others know more.
Nothing heard from there when last there, but I did hear on o/c on that frequency last Sunday.
I assumed it was Raw FM Collaroy on 88.0MHz that was o/c, as Faith FM in western Sydney was still heard with programming.
Found this article from 2006: BondiFM has iBurst out of its studio
“The 10-year-old station, grown from a tourist radio licence, still broadcasts information on Australia’s most famous beach precinct, as well as contemporary independent music from all over the world.”
Surfers Paradise area used to have a great Beach Radio on 88 FM. It started I believe as a loudspeaker on the beach itself from the 1960 to early 2000s.
Wasn’t there also a Japanese language tourist station on the Cold Ghost in the 90s?
I much prefer tourist info stations to horse racing or the God Squad. There aren’t that many still going. Braidwood used to have one but that’s been running an open carrier for several years now.
As with many things consigned to the past over east, WA is the place to find a robust tourist information radio network.
I’m pretty sure SEN have owned that licence at that site for a while but leased it to Vision, that site will cease to exist soon anyway, if it hasn’t already has gone, so it doesn’t matter if the licence expires at the end of the year, that site is more or less at the end of the runway at Sydney’s new Western Sydney Airport & I think the site is or has become part of the Airport precinct or is for the expansion/widening of Elizabeth Drive.
It has been discussed in here or in the SEN thread before.
783kHz is actually a community licence not a narrowcast licence & it was moved from the Katoomba LAP at Wentworth Falls to the Sydney LAP at Homebush Bay, a couple of years after 2KA vacated the frequency. Given it’s a Sydney wide Community Licence, it’ll probably stay vacant now, as it would be cost prohibitive for any community station to build/setup a Sydney wide high power AM site at Homebush Bay, it might have passed 15 years ago, but would cost probably well over $1 million to setup before you even started broadcasting now.
Quite possible, as has been said, their previous 1611 site just up the road is scheduled for demolition if it hasn’t already been demolished, so they had no choice but to give that one up, they might have found it easiest to move to this new site just down the road, at a better frequency? There used to be an AM site at or very near this location years ago, but the mast was removed somewhere between 2014 & 2019, I don’t remember the exact timing & I don’t remember the frequency it used to broadcast on?
I last noted it in mono. I can’t recall it transmitting a stereo pilot, that’s not to say it did so in the past.
Radio Northern Beaches not transmitting a stereo pilot either.
I decided to map out some of the Christian LPON networks using ACMA data. It’s surprising how extensive they are – though I’m not sure how many of the sites are actually active.
Faith FM – came up with 644 sites, with transmitters even in remote sites like Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island and Boigu Island (right next to Papua New Guinea):
