Wouldn’t Winmalee also pickup the RDS signal on 101.7 and rebroadcast it on 99.1, unless the current radio receiver is not RDS compatible?
I wonder if the replacement setup the ARN tech is talking about will reactivate RDS?
Basically the WS repeaters and the Lithgow Blue Mountains translators are the only stations in greater Sydney that are not broadcasting an RDS signal.
No because you’re decoding the L-R & L+R audio out of the MPX baseband & sending that as a left & right stereo audio channel to the transmitter, you can’t pass RDS sub carrier data through line audio channels out of a receiver, same as you don’t get RDS out of your radio speakers.
If you were passing the entire non-decoded MPX baseband signal though then yes the RDS would be retransmitted.
The replacement setup they’re looking at is to be a baseband setup, so will probably feed the transmitter with a MPX signal sent to site over 5G or microwave link, which would probably include RDS.
Thanks for clearing that up, do they have plans to upgrade Razorback too, or just Winmalee?
Strange they wouldn’t use a real off air receiver and get an MPX output to translate the full composite baseband (inc RDS)? That’d make this issue nearly impossible.
Not expensive - the Elan boxes that do it are only $1k…
Both I’d imagine?
They are using a real off air receiver, it & the transmitter are BW Broadcast.
While it’s mostly pretty good, there’s very little Elan stuff used in commercial radio anymore, it’s mostly community radio quality now, in fact in most cases, Elan stuff doesn’t even get looked at in commercial radio anymore, commercial radio who have a big budget use much better stuff than Elan, & I don’t think much has changed at this site since it was built back in the 2WS 1224 AM days.
There’s no way personally if I was the tech manager at a metro commercial FM station, I’d be spending $1k on anything Elan, even if it’s only a translator site that might have 100 listeners regularly.
They have a BW offair tuner into a BW Tx at Winmalee. I believe it’s AES out of the tuner into the TX unless recently changed. So L-R only as @anon71206228 said. Not sure why they dont just use the MPX out and rebroadcast the RDS as they used to.
I could be wrong, but don’t they use AF on the 101.7 RDS, & I don’t think you can have an AF frequency set in RDS as the same frequency it’s actually transmitting on, it’s called Alternate Frequency for a reason. If they were to pass through the RDS, rebroadcasting the MPX from 101.7, it’d probably cause issues with receivers?
I do remember back around 2001??? when 99.1 had RDS it had AF to 101.7, and 101.7 back to 99.1.
The aftermarket Kenwood car radio I had installed in my old Lancer had RDS AF.
I do remember at the time then when I was still living at Oatley tuning to 99.1 and it would switch back to 101.7. 88.3 was too weak at Oatley to decode RDS to see if it also switched back to 101.7.
I assume when that equipment was replaced they went to the current setup, RDS was really only in its infancy stage in Australia back then. RDS adoption has increased massively since, hopefully they consider RDS AF again with these site upgrades.
I had a listen to it on the way home, and the audio is slightly better then before but as @Ant5476 says the audio is still favouring the left channel and sound a bit duller the 101.7.
Though I wonder how many listeners to 99.1 (that are NOT on Media Spy!) would notice?
Probably none at all, it sounds very good compared to 99.5.
I wonder if ARN has any estimates of how many of their listeners tune in to WS fm through the translators?
I sneezed once and it sounded better then 99.5 
I’ve been streaming Channel X from NZ and it’s a good alternative/ indie station. MW has done a good job with this format. A more mainstream alt format than Double J. It would be good to see Double J adopt this type of format as it can be too alternative at times IMO.
I agree. Double J is just too random and obscure. It’s pretty unlistenable.
One technical Q - possibly one that @anon71206228 might know in relation to the potential Southern Cross Austereo takeover.
Assuming this all goes ahead, and that Triple M relocates to the ARN studios at North Ryde and ACP inherits the World Square site and moves WSFM there…
On the technical side, would it simply be a matter of ARN and ACP swapping the frequencies over on their TXs, so the ARN one broadcasts 104.9 instead of 101.7 and vice versa on the ACP side? Is that a simple thing to do?
Or is it more complicated than that? Or is there a better way?
There’s nothing stopping them from just swapping frequencies on the transmitters, that’s easily done.
The problem lies with the combiner filters, they are tuned to specific frequencies & it’s not a simple job to change, specialist techs in doing that & special test equipment is needed, luckily TXA have both, but it still would take a couple of days at least, to retune & even then they might not be perfect as they were originally built & tuned to filter a particular frequency, physically swapping the filters is an even bigger job.
Combiner filtering is a black magic art, the filters are just a metal box filled with air & a few metal rods inside of variable length, which interact with each other through the air, to only let through a particular narrow band frequency block.
Triple M wouldn’t be moving to North Ryde studios, by the time all this goes through assuming it does, ARN will be in their new North Sydney Studios, so Triple M would move there.
SCA & ARN (in Sydney) both have multiple links between studios & transmitters via microwave & fibre, the simplest way to change would be change the receive links to get their source from a different studio location, as ARN will do anyway when they move from North Ryde to North Sydney.
The biggest problem is going to be that BAI own all the SCA transmitters & associated PIE Rack equipment, so a new deal will have to be done with ARN or ACP to “transmit” the programs or spend money to build their own new transmitter facilities.
I can’t say why, but can’t see any deals between BAI & ARN happening, so guess they’ll have to build out a new transmission facility for any SCA stations they take over, not sure what ACP would do?
Thanks! Great response! It’s never that simple, is it!?
I had just assumed they would eventually co-locate the ARN and ACP stations to the one location in the capitals.