Bill Shepherd writes:
Hello Tom
I am one of the twosome who originated the campaign
against the closure of RTE1 Longwave.We had been working on it for 4 years and more. We harnessed the press and the opinion of the Irish overseas who depended on this service.
Our website tells you the factors and motivation behind the move to close longwave originating in the EBU decision to go digital. We do not object to digital BUT NOT by reducing the choices offered to the listener especially by a service part funded by the public.
I include our website where the whole case is explored and recorded. we hope you may find it possible to display our link to your readers so that they can be made aware of this tendency.
http://savertelongwaveradio.com/
Thanks for the opportunity to bring this to your attention and good luck with your great website.
Happy to oblige, Bill, and many thanks for making us aware of your campaign to save RTE longwave. I’m sure there are a number of longwave listeners amongst our readership!
21 March 2015. Since the Algerian transmitter was upgraded (+ improved grounding ? ) in recent weeks it is playing havoc with RTE 1 252kHz reception day and night all along the south coast , up to about 40 miles inland making car radio reception degraded and even with a portable radio directivity both stations can be received , at times with equal strengths . Similarly I would think that RTE reception in S Wales and southern England would be affected. RTE should seek a change to 261 kHz and continue for the foreseeable future even on lower power , 50/100kW say .
Long wave is much more rugged for reception than the other carriers and more secure. How many links are there in the DAB chain from studio to listener ? Too many too easily broken. In any case DAB on 230 MHz VHF will have many reception problems in cars/portable considering the problems we had with TV Band 3 here in the Republic. National public radio broadcasting needs to keep a LF facility going . Leave the DAB/DAB+ , smartphone , iPad and other digital reception modes for those that want them. We want our Long Wave to continue .
Des Walsh .
Did they stop broadcasting on long wave or reduced the power now? Last week I could listen to RTÉ Radio 1 on 252 KHz (with some interference from Algeria but with some careful nulling it was very listenable).
The last few days I have only been able to hear Algeria. RTÉ website mentions nothing about long wave except that some DAB channel is supposed to have “extra long wave content”.
For fun, I tried their online options, the “mp3 stream” is set up wrong (it’s an URL for an M3U file which is supposed to be a play list, but instead the server sends an MP3 stream directly which is completely wrong and doesn’t work). The web player refused to work if I didn’t disable AD Blocker…
Also the UI of the player options is just supposed to be hip and is guaranteed to be completely unusable for older people. A hip mobile app or web app is not radio!
This behaviour should be made crimial! (except if it’s a private station using private funds).