Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

No - it seems today that the GHR UK feed (labelled Rescan to GHR) is now carrying the Plymouth feed as well, so I’m assuming they’ve swapped the feeds over. Both seem to be less than 80kbit mono. The Cornwall feed is still taking the UK-wide programmes. Not sure if we’ll get Country Hits... I’d rather GHR Plymouth was updated to 128k stereo. Ipswich have GHR in 192k stereo on DAB

The switch to Country Hits in Plymouth has been applied for according to Ofcom. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/manage-your-licence/radio-broadcast-licensing/monthly-updates/radio-broadcast-update-october-2020
Of course, Ofcom no longer publish the technical details (multiplex variation request), so you'll have to wait and see how/if the bitrates change.

GHR Ipswich is in a unique situation where the multiplex owner is one of the co-owners of Ipswich 102 Ltd (along with Nation Broadcasting and Bauer) who operate GHR Ipswich and Suffolk under a brand franchise licence. Presumably as one of the owners, they've gifted space on the mux.

Since today, Ipswich 102 Ltd is now providing the East of England regional programme from Norwich on behalf of Bauer as a loophole, so that Ipswich doesn't have to have a local drive programme.

Clever thinking there

It’s not been completely smooth sailing - certainly in Plymouth anyway. On the school run on the morning last week I noticed there was at least 2 or 3 news updates at 8:30 that didn’t fire off so we just got the news bed.

Today, instead of news at 10am we got a travel update, then silence until the “emergency tape” kicked in with Queens “Somebody to Love” for about 90 seconds then Mark Goodier crashed in. I’m sure it’ll smooth out over time but they need to iron the bugs out quite quickly.

It seems like Cornwall is still yet to receive any local news or jingles...

Not sure if Pirate will handle GHR Cornwall or it’ll be dealt with by Plymouth... would make sense if they’ve kept the Plymouth news hub operating.

I think it'd be good for the Plymouth news hub to stay open. However, for GHR Cornwall, I think Pirate would be better handling them. They always seem to have very good coverage whenever I listen to Pirate.

I’ve no idea what’s going on with the Plymouth DAB version... still sounds tinny and terrible plus it’s now 27 seconds behind the Cornwall (UK) version. It’s almost like they’re taking an internet stream to the transmitters

EDIT: Country Hits seems to be live now as well. Using the old GHR UK space.

They probably are taking the internet stream. There are many DAB stations, especially smaller ones, that are delivered to the mux/transmitters as online streams, be it a dedicated feed or more often the public stream.

It was never that delayed before.... wonder if Bauer have reconfigured things?

Internet streams can get a bit laggy over time.

I remember in December 2015 when the BT exchange in York was affected by major flooding in the city, Minster FM and Radio York's kilostream links to the main FM transmitters were knocked out. Minster's web stream was unaffected though, so this was fed to the transmitter instead from a computer at Eagle Radio in Guildford. After a few days, the station's FM output ended up about 5 minutes behind DAB. I presume this must have been due to slightly slow processing, or maybe a bit of buffering, on the computer feeding out the web stream to the transmitter.

Fresh Radio also used to use an internet stream to feed its AM transmitters across the Yorkshire Dales. You'd often hear their news bulletins going out a few minutes past the hour.