TV Dxing

Here in NI occasionally depending on the weather I get TV3, Be3, 3e and the other RTÉ channels instead of the UK ones if the TV has retuned itself overnight.

Heart on 100.7 yesterday morning was being splattered over by something.

An improvement on the scheduled programming, no doubt

I actually quite like Heart.

Did it make you want to turn up the feel good?

I excuse Heart 100.7 as that's the original one.... before it escaped Birmingham and spread like a virus across the rest of the country is the problem

Yeah, but.. They won the first West Midlands regional on the promise of AOR and album tracks, and when that didn't work, ramped up the CHR and went after BRMB, Mercia and Beacon. Not the idea of how a new licence to 'extend choice' should end up doing.

BRMB, Mercia and Beacon don't figure in the story of Heart. They were GWR then GCAP stations, Heart was a Chrysalis one. The three were sold off when GCAP merged with Chrysalis because of competition concerns.


With the west mids already having a Heart and a Capital, I don't know what they would have become if they'd become part of Global

BRMB were never GWR, Capital Radio Group before the GCap merger. I think he means Heart went after their audience. And I think Capital would have switched to those frequencies with Galaxy possibly becoming Choice/Capital Xtra.

Ah yes, I stand corrected.... so many layers of mergers

That's what I meant. Heart went after demographic poaching of the heritage ILR cluster in the West Midlands.

The competition commission forced Global to sell of the West Midlands cluster (and Heart East Mids, which licences the Heart name and format off Global ironically) just to spark some competition in the advertising sales market.

If they hadn't, it would have been a virtual lock-out with the radio ad sales market, with Global having Heart, Galaxy, BRMB Beacon and Mercia (+Am Gold variants) , with only Radio XL, Saga/Smooth and Kerrang battling for the scraps.

Anyway, back to high pressure atmospheric lift DX'ing..

That arrangement ended over seven years ago. It's been Gem (106) since 2011 - although similar arrangements stand in other parts of the country where Global wasn't allowed to keep some of the former Guardian Media Group stations it bought, and the brands are franchised to Communicorp instead.