foreign radio drifting in

mountain

Living west cork, I always picked up TodayFM on 101.8o, the past week or so, it has been a bit static, just listening to it now, and there is a foreign station coming in over the top of it,, displays says :HR" for station id, now it is a beautiful clear calm night, so is this some station just drifting over the waves...

or poor output from the Todayfm broadcast?

any ideas

mike65

Its summer! It happens. I like it myself, nothing like the sound of a Spanish wan senorita wafting across Biscay

Liam Byrne

Sporadic-E is, I think, the term for it, and west Cork / Kerry are probably most prone to it.

I used to love listening to WRKY and Horizon in Kerry, but you'd regularly get a Spanish station swamping them, despite the Kerry station being on decent power from only a few miles away.

EDIT : LINKY

grenache

I notice lately when i'm driving between Limerick and Cork, a Spanish station comes in around 95-96fm. Given the distance involved, how is this possible?

tbh

grenache wrote: »

I notice lately when i'm driving between Limerick and Cork, a Spanish station comes in around 95-96fm. Given the distance involved, how is this possible?

radio propogation via the ionosphere.

or in laymans terms, waves bouncing off the sky and back down into your radio usually affects SW, but not unusual for FM either

todolist

On a few mornings I managed to recieve Chris Evans loud and clear on my FM car radio instead of the dreadful tubridy offering.Yeah,I know Radio two isn't foreign.Just had to mention it.

GSF

driving along the east coast of Scotland you often get Norwegian radio stations drifting across the North Sea.

Liam Byrne

It's a variation on seeing a mirage "reflection" of the sky in the road ahead on a warm day.....

Radio waves that travel upwards don't have as many obstacles like mountains, trees and buildings in the way, so if they get bent they'll travel further

Liam Byrne

todolist wrote: »

Yeah,I know Radio two isn't foreign.Just had to mention it.

Huh ?

Given that you mentioned Chris Evans, I presume you're talking about BBC Radio 2 ?

Which is definitely foreign.

todolist

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Huh ?

Given that you mentioned Chris Evans, I presume you're talking about BBC Radio 2 ?

Which is definitely foreign.

BBC 2 definitely isn't foreign to me.Listening to Chris Evans having the crack was great for the short time I could hear it.Incidentally his biography is a cracking good read.

Liam Byrne

todolist wrote: »

BBC 2 definitely isn't foreign to me.

Well that's me confused, because either you're in the UK (and therefore shouldn't have to rely on sporadic-E to deliver BBC2 to you), or else it is foreign.

todolist

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Well that's me confused, because either you're in the UK (and therefore shouldn't have to rely on sporadic-E to deliver BBC2 to you), or else it is foreign.

for example at least 90% of the population on this Island would watch BBC TV sometime during the week.That would hardly make the BBC brand foreign to anyone here.We in the Anglo world,USA/UK/Australia/NZ share basically the same customs and values that we couldn't possibly find each other foreign.

tbh

todolist wrote: »

for example at least 90% of the population on this Island would watch BBC TV sometime during the week.That would hardly make the BBC brand foreign to anyone here.We in the Anglo world,USA/UK/Australia/NZ share basically the same customs and values that we couldn't possibly find each other foreign.

lads lets not get bogged down in the whole "foreign as a cutural concept/ foreign as a geographical concept" debate.

topper75

Good to learn that I wasn't taking leave of my senses that time in Cobh a few years back when crystal clear Spanish speaker replaced 2fm. And nice to learn why it happened too. It felt pleasantly exotic for a while on the road back to Cork city.

dh0661

Can anyone explain how come I can tune into News Talk during an outage of Today FM (along with other stations), AFAIK News Talk and Today FM operate from the same building, and presumably use the same broadcasting equipment?

Liam Byrne

tbh wrote: »

lads lets not get bogged down in the whole "foreign as a cutural concept/ foreign as a geographical concept" debate.

Point taken.

Given the topic of discussion - "foreign radio drifting in" - I don't think I was wrong in taking the "foreign = from another country" line, though.

And I still wouldn't view "Raidio na Gaeltachta" (or, for that matter Open FM) as "foreign", even though it probably would fall under the "cultural concept" criteria

LordSutch

Talking of foreigh radio, the are at least two french or spanish? stations breaking-in on my LW reception from time to time, depending on atmospherics I think?

Thomas828

I've managed to pick up France-Info on FM in my home in London. As for those French LW stations that Camelot mentioned, the ones you're most likely to pick up in Ireland are France-Inter, Europe-1 and RTL. Although you just might get Radio Monte Carlo too.

thalia_13

Might just be my house, but if low flying planes from the local airfield fly near my house. I get really bad interference which i thought was foreign radio, but its getting worse and you can actually hear them talk.

So it would seem to be the radio frequency is interfered with by the planes. Today fm and i105-107 are affected the worst! You can always hear and see the plane as the radio is affected, can hear some right bog accents coming through