Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

What will there be left to mange in Cardiff ? !

South Coast too, who have lost their local presenters in favour of Brighton’s Breakfast duo at drive.

Drivetime shows on Heart and Capital, think there might be an opt out on Smooth still too despite it being on AM there.

Then there's the news and travel operation. If anything that now becomes more important.

5Live on AM is delayed to match the satellite backup, so that if a transmitter has to use that backup it's not a horrible out of sync mess in overlap areas between transmitters on the same frequency.

Is local news live on Global stations, and does it come from the main studios? I was thinking, with all these studios going unused apart from Drivetime, is there any other value they can get out of them, such as hiring them out? Every man and his dog has a podcast these days, for instance.

It depends on the stations, Ex Real has Local news is only required from 6am - 7pm, and around 6 hours at the weekends. In scotland the news covers all three stations.

News is mostly pre recorded shortly before broadcast I believe. Because newsreaders are shared between regions and brands, ie. in the South West, generally speaking the Bristol based newsreader does the Heart bulletins for Gloucestershire and Wiltshire as well as Bristol. And in the North East, the same newsreader generally reads the news for Capital, Heart and Smooth.



Different bulletins will be produced for each brand in Scotland as is the case elsewhere, the bulletins are different lengths for a start and different target markets. The interesting thing for ex real stations, is the fact the 6am news is an extended bulletin about 5-6 minutes long and they also have a 10 minute news programme at 6:45pm on weekdays. I’m guessing the 6am must be going as the main Heart London don’t have an extended bulletin at 6am, whether the 6:45pm Nightly News stays is another matter.

I believe the newsreader for Heart London also does the bulletins for Heart 80s.

Yep, sorry I should have said FM. I assume that 5 Live doesn't auto switch between DAB and MW?

BBC FM Tx distribution is NICAM inside an MPLS wrapper. The latency varies because of that, but is still in the 80-100 ms ballpark. A couple of years ago, while the circuits were being slowly changed over into MPLS, some transmitters were being traditionally fed, others via MPLS, the result was a stutter as the RDS switched between txs.

A few years ago I stood under Big Ben listening to R4 FM. The radio chimes were slightly ahead of the real thing (as you'd expect )

I was in Hyde Park when Radio 2 were broadcasting a concert one weekend and I could hear it on the FM radio on my phone a long while before I could hear the sound from across the park

What is the obligation for local news after the changes? Aren't they still providing bulletins at the level of the original licences at the moment? If so, does that continue in the new world with the super-regions?