There was a discussion recently about the prospect of talkback AM stations in BNE/ADL/PER moving to a Smooth format. Along with other metro music stations on AM eg. 2UE, Magic, this made me wonder whether the ACMA should allow metro AM commercial stations (plus possibly ABC Local Radio) to negotiate with a metro wide high power community FM licence to swap frequencies for a fee (as they negotiate) eg. $5 million…
Community stations would be under no obligation to accept the offer and could remain on FM if they wish. They would remain on DAB and stream, it would be interesting to see if community stations would be open to/accept such offers.
I have had the Spitfire version for many years and it works well for testing audio and how it sounds on AM, works ok, it does tend to not allow the lows through so makes the audio quite mid and high based, but overall works ok
It’s not a bad idea, but I’m sure ACMA would have some obscure objection… Anything to stop change or slow it to a snails pace.
The ACMA should already be working on restacking FM and moving sub metro community stations around to enable more FM conversions in metro areas. But of course, they’re not
oh I’m sure they will! BUT they have had no new competition on FM for over 20 years now, they can’t expect that to last forever… And if they see that the AM stations have to pay to move to FM (and not be given FM frequencies for free as might happen down the track), they might not scream as loudly?
There’s no legislative framework for stations to privately agree to swap frequencies. The FM license is quite specific for only community. If there was some way to do it, the community licence broadcast parameters would be different to the other commercials in the market with potentially lower power and/or different directional characteristics etc= so would put the station at a disadvantage, though one it might be willing to accept.
Ideally, it would with a community station whose frequency can be used at the same power as the other FM commercials… Should work in most cases, only city that might have such a challenge is Sydney, whereby some of those community radio frequencies are also used on places such as the South Coast eg. 93.7, 98.5, 102.5… Could mean the Sydney commercial stations might need to compensate them to change frequencies as well.
The Adelaide ones might miss out on a Foothills relay though, probably no spare frequencies there since the community stations don’t retransmit to the Foothills.
I can’t see community stations go from FM to AM in order to let commercial stations go the other way. If anything, they shouls either be restacking all station to get everyone bar ABC local onto the FM band (or only allowing ABC Local to simulcast on AM/FM in case of emergency) or pushing digital radio and getting everyone off AM AND FM radio.
Do you see either happening? I’ve got a better chance of seeing a Knights/Jets/Swans/Kings-Flames/Pride/Waratahs/Thunder sweep of all their comps in the one calendar year in my lifetime than seeing any of that happening.
there needs to be a restack in general. Give all the ABC stations one block of frequencies to broadcast on that’s the same nationally (eg 88 to 94 fm for classic FM, Triple J, coast fm, newsradio, etc). than have a band for sub metros, one for community and one for commerical.
that way you know that 107.7 (for example) is JJJ nationally.