2RN

Lenny Lovett

I often wondered where the 2RN (original title of RTE Radio) name came from. Brendan Balfe, in his very interesting lunchtime show today, says it was from an old time song "Come back to Erin".... To Erin - 2 R N.... He also said that the Cork sister station 6CK which followed on from 2RN got it's name from being the sixth licenced station in the British Isles and covered Cork and Kerry.

Strange but true?

L1011

Someone asked this on RW also, assume its you also.

Callsigns are controlled by the ITU. 2 was and is a British block, 6C is currently Syria but it may not have been in early 1927; blocks were reallocated and adjusted in 1927 and it seems this is when we got EI/EJ issued to us.

Assuming 6 was a UK block in early '27, I'd suspect it was the only one with CK for CorK (rather than "Cork and Kerry") available in it.

And there were a LOT more than 6 stations licenced by 1927, as well as 2RN and 2BE in Belfast there were a rake of BBC stations in the UK, 2BD, 2LO, 6BM (there's that 6 again) and so on.

Lenny Lovett

No, it wasn't me asking it there. It's funny though, a few threads I started here this week seemed to appear there soon after...:) Hence a certain red herring was thrown in to see how long that took to travel!

mathepac

It seems that there were stations with the "2" prefix in Australia around the same time as 2RN. "2FC" was an early Australian station, but they then got a blast of apparently random call-signs pre-fixed by "3", "5" & "7" over the years.

My grandfather told me that 2RN stood for "2 Roimh Nóin" (2 before noon as Béarla) with the station originally broadcasting from 10:00 to 12:00 when broadcasts ended with the bells of the Angelus.

L1011

Australia may have also been using UK callsign allocations at the time. It was a member of the ITU since the 19th century though!

As goes the "roimh noin" thing, sounds like a bacronym of the highest order.