Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

I've noticed the same listening on line to the same radio station all day. Starts off at 7:00am about 30 seconds late, by evening is 3 or 4 minutes behind!

It probably doesn’t help that their Plymouth FM transmitter is miles away from the main radio relay (Plympton) where the DAB service originates. Wonder if they’ll apply to move the FM transmissions to Plympton in time?

Arqiva would charge a (relative) fortune for FM at Plympton, which is probably why they are using Fort Staddon.

Their DAB feed won't be going there anyway, it'll go along with all the other stations on the mux to the code/mux site (I think at Aztech West near Bristol, or perhaps somewhere even further away? ) and the composite transport stream sent to all of the Plymouth mux tx sites from there

I’m not au fait with how local DAB muxes work (as you can tell). That’s very interesting...... Is there anywhere where I can read up on the setups?

It's complicated to explain why this happens, but it's basically down to audio clocks on different devices not being perfectly in sync.

If for example you have a station encoding a stream with a 44.1kHz sample rate, their streaming computer will have a clock which is fired 44,100 times a second, which triggers the sound card to grab a sample of the incoming audio and pass it to the encoder. On the receiving end there's another clock running at the same rate, which is used to time when a sample should be received and output.

Unfortuantely as they're two separate devices they won't be in sync, and computers aren't perfect so neither will be precisely on time. This results in the output running slightly very slightly fast or slow (usually the latter), which results in the drifting on long running streams.

The neccessary buffering on the receiving end also doesn't help.



I'm not sure there's a good public resource that explains it in simple terms, but if you look up Open Digital Radio they have some resources that go some way to explaining it.

Basically all DAB muxes have a multiplexer either at the transmitter or more often at a central location. They take in the incoming audio and data from each station, put it together in to the mux data stream, and then send it on to the DAB modulators at the transmitters create and send out the signals. There's a few options for getting stations to the multiplexer; stations can do all the encoding on site and send it to the mux ready to go, send audio to a encoder that the mux operator hosts, or simply tell the mux operator to use their web stream.

As for the specifics of what is used by each station and what's based where for the UK muxes, that'll be private knowledge between the mux operators and the individual stations.

What the heck is going on with GH Plymouth this morning?

In the last 20 mins we've had nothing but Queen and Prince? And Queen song has been "Somebody to love" 3 times. It's a good song but come on.....

Sounds more varied than their usual music log.

I’m guessing this must be emergency audio being played out due to the network feed being lost locally, and for some reason it keeps being restarted. Are you getting regular silences too?

Turns outs a song would start. Then stop, a bit of silence then Queen. Then they'd try again- rinse and repeat.

Here's a public domain example of the proposed South Cumbria mux. Take a look at page 14/15, you can see there that mux is to be assembled at Arqiva's Croydon site. As Orry says, the specific details are not generally available.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/167843/muxco-cumbria-application-part-a.pdf

From page 16 onwards are details of the delivery paths from each radio station to Croydon

It's quite usual for local muxes for the transmitters to be fed in a ring, so there are always two paths for redundancy

You don't think somebody knows that they haven't updated the emergency tape yet and there's a jingle with the old name coming up so they keep forcing it so reset?

Which Queen track is it? Show Must Go On is a common choice for emergency tapes

It was “Somebody to Love” last time it crashed last week

Sorry if this has been said before, but is there not a bit of irony in that?