Not quite sure how it happens but here in Wiltshire if you are in the car and can pick up GWR Wilts, GWR Bristol and BWR Bathyou can listen to a song 3 times one after another! Which I guess is good if your favourite song is on ( although it feels like there are only about 3 songs an hour with all the E N D L E S S ads!
I had a gigh gain aerial at my old house, but now i moved jus down the road to the bottom of the hill, i can only get 2CR really fuzzy, anyway, 2-TEN is for Berkshire AND NORTH HAMPSHIRE, and 2CR is for Dorset, athey do border eachother, we could get really easily at my old house in Whitchurch, near Basingstoke
The thing you have to remember about ILR is that each station is a business, and as such has to make money to survive. With so many stations now around, it's increasingly difficult for many to do this.
This is especially true of the many very small stations which broadcast to a limited number of people, and so can't charge a fortune for advertising. Despite this, the actual cost of broadcasting and paying staff isn't significantly less than that of their much bigger rivals.
With a big group in charge, it's much easier to reduce these running costs for instance by networking off-peak programmes or buying one big batch of jingles / idents / letter-headed paper for the whole group which proves much cheaper than each station buying their own. Groups can also draw on the expertise of the many people at the various stations to share ideas and put the best ideas into practice across the network.
Unfortunately this does result in a lot of stations sounding similar, and for us anoraks it'd be lovely if every local radio station broadcast its own unique format, jingles and presenters 24 hours a day. However, in a market now so competitive, this simply isn't possible. In the current economic climate when spending on media advertising has taken a serious tumble, if it wasn't for group ownership in radio, a lot of smaller stations might have gone to the wall by now.
So if you're unhappy that your local station shares the same jingles as the one down the road, consider that the alternative may be no local station at all.
Oh, and in reply to nwtv2003's post, I'd argue that Wire FM isn't "probably the most independent staion there is" as it's owned by Kelvin Mackenzie's 'The Wireless Group' which owns over 10 local stations and national AM'er talkSPORT.