RTE radio1 LW

The USP of radio is that it is completely free to air.

No licence, no subscription, no connection fees.

Just buy your FM radio and you are good to go.

We need to keep it like that.

(obviously it has to be paid for but it is free at point of use)

It's very hard to get something back once it's gone (unless it's Neighbours) so I don't see LW getting turned back on. Their DAB argument doesn't make much sense, aside from the current legalities of RTE being broadcast in the UK. They've argued all along that the people losing out on RTE radio are very old, poor, isolated, not in touch with Irish community centres and unable to use modern technology. How do they propose getting these DAB radios to them and showing them how to use them?

I've actually heard that on Sunday, as I always tend to tune into Sunday Miscellany when I have the chance. I found it an interesting remark, if he stated that when buying a new car a LW radio is a key requirement, and the car salesman never heard about that request.

In Switzerland DAB was actually driven by older listeners missing the Musikwelle or Musigwaelle as it was called on 531 mediumwave.

The "DAB argument" would be that RTE would have been better of investing in an Ireland-wide DAB coverage, rather than keeping the 252 alive.

RTE Radio 1 on DAB within the UK to reach the Irish diaspora will to a certain degree never happen, unless the law is changed.

And agreed internet can be difficult to use for older folks, albeit mobile internet coverage in the UK is pretty excellent.

I wonder how many listeners are really in the UK listening to the 252? ( And forget the campaigners, they are campaigning and they are connected, and certainly not isolated poor people )

Tinytobe has given some good info on this, but just to add my own...

The only country in the world so far that has switched off its national FM networks is Norway. Local stations are still available on FM while they are being transitioned to DAB+ for their service areas.

In addition, the RAS body which serves the largely German speaking autonomous region of South Tyrol in northern Italy in providing relays of TV & radio from Austria, Switzerland & southern Germany, switched off their FM transmitters in the region a few years ago. Other than RAI's Sudtirol station, all remaining FM in the region is in Italian or Ladin.

Switzerland are looking like the next potential candidate to switch off their FM broadcasts, but no firm date has been set yet.

However, what links the above three examples is that Norway, Switzerland & South Tyrol have extensive DAB+ networks that provided a direct replacement for FM stations in either previously served areas, currently are or will do so before FM transmissions are eventually switched off. In all three cases, moving to DAB+ has provided most former FM listeners with a wider choice of available stations, particularly outside the major urban centres.

Again with credit to tinytobe, in a few parts of Germany where Deutschlandfunk is available on FM, some of these transmissions are slowly being switched off whilst the main station & two sister stations are available on a national DAB+ ensemble (broadcasting laws in Germany are a bit more complicated since such matters are in the hands of the states/lander rather than the central government). DLF switched off their MW & LW transmissions back in the mid-2010's.

Other than what's been mentioned above, no European government has talked about an FM switch off other than give indications that if/when DAB reaches a critical mass of listeners will a rough date for the intention to switch off FM broadcasts be drawn up.

And in European countries where DAB either doesn't presently exist or is only available on a small scale, none of them are talking of an FM switch off, nor are the major public or commercial broadcasters in such countries indicating anything to do as such. For the record, RTÉ have said absolutely nothing about switching off their FM network in the state (though if I've missed one, feel free to show it).

None of these major broadcasters, nor their respective national governments, are planning on ending their terrestrial FM or DAB broadcasts and going satellite or IP delivery only for the foreseeable future. For PSBs it would be seen as a deficit of their duty to serve the public at large on their country, while for commercial broadcasts** it would be pretty much financial suicide for them.

And just to add my €0.02, RTÉ's DAB intentions have been well meaning and dare I say it, progressive, but hampered by funding to achieve a proper national roll out and a lack of parallel development in the commercial sector for the platform, it decided to cut its losses - for now, at least.

You're either badly misinformed, or are spreading FUD in talking about "...seeing the wholesale switch off of FM across Europe".

** (maybe some tiny, niche broadcasters in some cases, like a few community radio broadcasters in the UK that have decided that FM broadcasting is not worth the cost and have reverted to being internet-only (with a possibility of going on a local ssDAB multiplex if one is available) - but the bigger boys & girls are definitely NOT doing considering this in 2023!)

Living in the UK, I listened to Radio 1 on LW252 far more than on Sky/iPhone App, mostly because I live right by the beach - taking a portable LW radio down there in the summer (as well as having the radio on in the shower) is cheaper than using my iPhone.

€400,000 a year for the electricity alone, plus an estimated investment of €2.6m to keep the mast going. All for a service that has an unknown number of listeners.

The RTE plans have a whiff of "vapourware" about them. Even if the UK allows it, RTE might not do anything on DAB in Britain. The first extract below is from 2015, and Listen2Digital obviously did not win the bid. They went out of business in 2017. The second extract, is from 2017 in reponse to a query on a website about whether RTE was on DAB in Britain. Have RTE published any more plans for when the legislation in the UK is finalised?

"Plans announced today for a second national DAB multiplex in the UK include putting Radio 1 on DAB across the country.

One of the bids submitted by Listen2Digital, includes 18 national radio services, one of which is Radio 1.

The bid faces competition from a consortium of UTV, Bauer Media and transmission provider Arqiva. If successful, it could be seen as the answer RTÉ’s current dilemma of removing Radio 1 from Long Wave in the UK by providing an alternative terrestrial channel. The broadcaster received backlash from hundreds of listeners when it announced it would be closing the 252LW service at the end of last year. It is now scheduled to continue for at least another year."

"In March 2017 RTÉ announced a plan to “launch a service on DAB+ digital radio modelled from RTÉ Radio 1”. Details of the service were still being worked out, but “it is likely to include a limited amount of new targeted programming commissioned for audiences in Britain”. The broadcaster anticipated that the service would be available in urban centres where the “majority of RTÉ Longwave listeners live,” rather than across the UK. The specific areas have not been detailed yet."

@[Deleted User] - well measured comments IMO.

In terms of technical capability, DAB/+ can deliver potentially better audio quality than FM given a sufficiently high bitrate & sampling rate. This is being done in many of the Contentinal European countries that have dusted off old DAB v1 equipment and relaunched as DAB+ services. For example, in France all services are being broadcast with fixed 88 kb/s HE-ACC. Indeed in a lot of cases the minimum bitrate of services is 64 kb/s HE-AAC v1 unless it's a service unlikely to need such a high rate (e.g. mainly speech services). Presumably the 64 kb/s minimum has been set using HE-AAC v1 as using lower bitrates makes the Spectral Band Replacement (SBR) data in the codec sound too harsh and the Parametric Stereo (PS) of v2 not sufficiently good enough?

It's also the case that DAB/+ while having the potential to suffer encoding artifacts is at least immune from multipath interference that can plague reception of FM even in strong signal areas, probably a good reason why Norway & Switzerland with their mountainous terrain have welcomed DAB+ because of this. Dropping in "fillers" for patching coverage in certain areas is not too difficult either (especially with satellite feeding of the ensemble) and avoid headaches of finding a "clear" frequency in an SFN, which is starting to become more troublesome these days in Ireland for FM radio.

However, for most listeners, even in areas where high bitrates & sampling rates are in use for DAB+, it's unlikely they will notice a significant difference between DAB/+ and FM, compared to say FM and MW or LW. This will be especially true for those listening with the likes of portables where the potential additional quality cannot be given justice.

As you mention, in the UK DAB development was driven partly thanks to a BBC that is big and important enough to try and drive such developments, as well as successive governments from the mid 90's onwards to make a push for it in parallel to DTT. The problem was that the equipment costs was at least initially too expensive for most consumers, there was not a sufficiently large network in place other than to serve the major urban centres & important roadways, and that it soon became clear that what listeners in Britain preferred more was additional choice as opposed to "near CD quality sound". Potential opposition from commercial radio operators were essentially given a comfort blanket by being given a guaranteed eight year extension to their FM broadcast licences if they simulcast on DAB in their service area. From around the mid 00's, DAB receivers started becoming that bit more affordable - I have an Acoustic Solutions Portal 2 DAB/FM radio that I bought in 2005 and it still serves me well to this day - and Ofcom started to loosen regulations concerning minimum bitrates to going by perceptual audio quality levels, before doing away with most such regs anyway. This in turn saw stations drop bitrates, sometimes to help squeeze an additional "digital" service into the space, and eventually in some cases (Global have been advancing this the most) converting from MP2 to HE-AAC and squeezing even more services in. In the UK at least, as well as some commercial services in Australia & Italy, DAB can't really be considered a Hi-Fi platform to any serious extent now and it is now (and in the past 15 years or so) more focused as a platform for portable & in-car use.

As for RTÉ, it is what it is and ongoing comparisons to the BBC is essentially a case of David & Goliath - it's often unfair to compare the two in a head-to-head. The times when RTÉ get involved in technical trials it's usually in co-operation with a larger body like the EBU or CEPT as it has nowhere near enough funding or clout to do much of its own original experimentation. And on DAB itself, it's quite clear that even with their additional digital stations they could never fill an ensemble of their own services using DAB+ (if it ever relaunched, no point going back to DAB v1 now). IF there was a national DAB plan in the future, it would IMO be possible be that a single national multiplex could be "launched" that carried both RTÉ & commercial services. First would be the network infrastructure going out to tender (you'd presume 2RN would be the choice, but it could be someone else), then giving sufficient, guarenteed bitrate for RTÉ for their services, then try and allocate remaining bitrate for other services. Today FM, Newstalk, Classic Hits & Spirit Radio could be given a carrot similar to what the UK did of automatic FM licence renewals for jumping on board with DAB+, while remaining data space could be offered to additional services whereby otherwise standard BCI content regulations could be significantly scaled down or cut altogether (e.g. speech content) as a carrot for being "exclusively digital", which might make it attractive for some operators like 8radio, Zenith Classic Rock, Radio Rí Rá etc. to apply. I'm sure there's plenty of theories and suggestions that could be made - but all of that above as well as anything else is just talk if there is no political will to do something let alone any financial will. History has shown that legal broadcasting policy in the state has been mostly reactive rather than proactive (e.g. 80's pirates forcing the hand of breaking RTÉ's legal monopoly of broadcasting) and when it comes to DAB, if nothing is done then it's a case of FM dominating for the forseeable future until there comes a point where radio streaming for the masses reaches a time where (a) it's extremely easy to access stations in the same way terrestrial broadcast radio currently does, (b) mobile data essentially becomes "too cheap to be metered", (c) such wireless networks are not only even more extensive than what they currently are, but are also robustly reliable & capable of handling needed data capacity for everything that requires such, and (d) that a station can cost accommodate having a large amount of streaming listeners, which is not something right now that is cheap - that'll require IP multicasting to be very widespread, and I'm not sure that is possible even in the long term without breaking net-neutrality.

Edit: Just to add - RTÉ Radio 1 could already broadcast within the UK if there was a licence holder residing in the UK willing to stand over its content. Of course, the issue is with a "live" relay of the station with content potentially unsuitable not only for Ofcom regs, but also the law - I'm thinking of how the odd bit of mild swearing is deemed acceptable in Irish radio but not in Britain for the former, as well as the potential for breaking the likes of "Superinjuctions" for the latter, like the Ryan Giggs case. With stations like Polish Radio London and the likes of the now defunct Spectrum before them, if they were relaying programming from "home" it's nearly always on a delay lest the above might happen and the licence holder gets into really hot water - probably not as dangerous for non-English spoken content, but still... my assumption for new licencing that can allow for foreign broadcasts to broadcast terrestrially in the UK is that there will be special licensing conditions for such services compared to "home" stations - this is already the case in some parts of Europe where a PSB or state broadcaster is transmitted terrestrially in a country other than its own, the most obvious example being RTÉ & TG4 TV broadcasts in Northern Ireland.

*throws all Roberts radios in the bin*

I was listening to it live when it closed, that's how it played out alright. A user on Digital Spy uploaded the last 80-odd minutes of it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/50pmskdz8izw9zz/RTE%20252%20LW%2014-04-23%20Final%20Programme%20From%2010.45pm.mp3?dl=0

Exact time it went off unknown so far, (maybe someone somewhere had a recording left on?) but probably very unlikely that anything of interest happened before the plug was pulled (such as an Atlantic 252 jingle being sneaked on the air!)

Perhaps they should have left it until 2:52 this afternoon before powerdown! (At least one of the main Absolute 1215kHz transmitters (when on announcement loop) was finally shut off at... 12:15 during the day)

I understand that Misirlou by Dick Dale (the theme song for Pulp Fiction) was the last song played on RTE Radio 1 before the loop message kicked in on Long Wave at 12:04am on Sunday.

I am pretty sure it just happened to be the song that was on at the time and was nothing to do with the closing down of the Long Wave service.

From a Republic of Ireland perspective, data is very indeed cheap compared to a lot of other European countries (only Finland really compares off the top of my head) - but not quite near the "too cheap to measure" level yet IMO even allowing for many mobile subscribers being on "unlimited" plans. There's also still plenty of data bottlenecks occurring (there's one such example just very recently mentioned on the DAB thread in the Cable & Digital/Terrestrial section), rarely an issue these days for landline based internet connections to premises, but still enough to be an issue at peak times in places (mainly urban, but could be rural) for mobile networks. That needs capacity increases which are ongoing from all three MNOs.

Also in terms of streaming, given the predominance of FM radio listening in Ireland transferring all of that on to an IP based delivery is something I'm not sure several interests could suddenly handle very well at present. For its faults, broadcast has largely fixed costs but every stream costs a station money and this is even more wasteful to stations if the listener is in a place where they are of no interest to their advertisers. I remember 20 and even 25 years ago being told that streaming was the future of radio. And honestly, it still is, it's just a lot easier to do now than it was then. At some point, broadcast radio as we know it will end but I reckon that is some time away, at least 10 years IMO. The death of many things have been predicted in those past 25 years to be superseded by hardware & software but a lot of what could be deemed obsolete or at least deprecated are still standing.

As for issues concerning energy costs and processing power - again Moore's Law is a factor but there will come an unknown point where this theorem will start to plateau - we just don't know when yet. When it does start to occur we'll likely have to start changing tact in a similar way that the likes of OFDM modulation are now very close to hitting the limits of the Shannon theorem, and that to get faster data speeds we're now having to develop technologies that use larger bandwidths (or combined segments of such) in combination with potentially developing more advanced path robustness for a given modulation level, as its getting very tricky now to squeeze any more "bits per Hertz" with what we already have unless Shannon's theorem can be blown out of the water.

That's how it is with me. I could easily just put on my personal music collection or a Spotify playlist but I like the bit of chat on some radio shows. Especially in the morning once it's not too ridiculous.