RTÉ Radio Worldwide

Zaphod

There's a letter in today's Irish Times from a person in Ghana who is listening in on coverage of the game in Croke Park via a telephone line. Tongue in cheek, he asks that the fans cheer quietly as the roars cause the telephone link to drop out.

Looking at RTÉ's output on WRN/Worldspace, it's much improved from what it used to be, now that one channel is devoted to english and another is multilingual. Worldspace is now entirely encrypted although RTÉ did say that they would look at giving free subscriptions to people working in Africa and elsewhere at the time they ended their SW transmissions. And the schedule is strictly limited, so no possibility of live GAA coverage for example.

Back when the SW service was still going, around 1997, I used to tune in from the east coast of the US for the 30 min snippet from 5-7Live. The choice of output wasn't the best, containing 10 mins of Farm News and daily updates on the price of store bullocks in Castlerea mart. I think that they have also stopped the shortwave transmissions of the All-Ireland Finals since 2005.

In fairness, SW will be of limited benefit in US, Europe or Australasia where there is a good internet connection, but still has its uses in Africa and Asia. What sort of coverage does the DRM transmitter from Athlone have on LW and have they any intentions of DRM in the SW?

L1011

I read that letter as him saying he listened online and the cheering caused the codec to overload and break up on a slow line - which shouldn't happen. Either way, it was confusingly worded.

Its the Clarkestown (Summerhill) mast thats LW/DRM enabled, I believe I heard of someone on the continent getting one of the extremely limited DRM trials from it? It wouldn't cover Africa...

I have, however, seen a military install getting Hotbird in Ghana with a 9m concerete dish - he could get RTE Europe off this!

Zaphod

I suppose the easiest route for RTÉ to have full coverage over Africa and Asia would be to do a deal with Worldspace to carry RTÉ 1 as a full service and not just as part of WRN. But how much would that would cost and then there is their general unhappiness with the Worldspace encryption moves.

Some reception reports of the LW DRM tests as far east as Switzerland.

More.

I tried tuning in at 05:30 UTC yesterday, but 252kHz had reverted to AM.
I just tuned in and found DRM carrying four audio services:
RTE Radio 1 DRM AAC mono 11.0kbps (normal Radio 1)
RTE Radio News HVXC SBR 2.8kbps (rolling news bulletins like on the Dublin RTÉ DAB multiplex)
RTE Radio Sport HVXC SBR 2.8kbps (rolling sports bulletins; presumably the same as on DAB, but I live outside the DAB coverage area so I can\’t check)
WRN HVXC SBR 2.8kbps (WRN Europe English, as was carried on RTÉ\’s DAB trials in Dublin before regular DAB was introduced)
All carry text at 80bps, but only carrying service names, not any multimedia.

As for non-Worldspace satellite reception, it looks as if a mere 4.2M dish is nearly sufficient for Hotbird reception in Ghana.

C-band would be better in terms of coverage and climate. WRN's output has shifted from 1W to 68.5E and requires ~2M dish. In comparison, the signal blasting out of Badr-C could be picked up with a 1M dish over half the continent. And one of the additional benefits of C-band for those near the equator - dig a hole in the ground, line it with mesh or aluminium foil, and voila satellite reception ... until it rains.

It looks like they do still broadcast the Finals on SW.

L1011

They're pushing capacity there quite a bit, interesting to see the use of the exciter codecs (highly effecient voice, but voice-only) for the news/sport/WRN.

I believe they actually did DRM SW for the finals last year - its a real throwback to the 1960s in some ways, "ah sure we need to get the all-ireland out to the expats..."

Zaphod

SW DRM Reports

L1011

Was looking at the reception info page on Aertel. Lovely timewarp. It informs us that:

1: They still have the southern hemisphere SW service
2: That FiveSeven Live is carried on WRN
3: That Radio 1 is on channel 892 in the "Music & Radio" section of the Sky EPG

These pages could be quite useful if they were up to date, but barring the TX-work pages at the start of the loop they seem to date from about 2002.

Zaphod

RTÉ RADIO TO BROADCAST GAA ALL-IRELAND FINALS ACROSS EUROPE, AFRICA AND THE FAR EAST

RTÉ Radio will broadcast the GAA All-Ireland Hurling final on Sunday, 2 September and the All-Ireland Football final on Sunday, 16 September on all wavelengths to Irish people wherever they are across Europe, Africa and the Far East.

Click here for programme details
In Africa and the Far East, the finals will be available on shortwave. See frequency details below.

At home, audiences can listen as usual to the GAA finals on RTÉ Radio 1 FM and Longwave 252.

Across most of Britain, listeners will receive our coverage on Long Wave 252.

For the second year, RTÉ will also transmit the finals to most of Europe on an experimental service; DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale - digital AM radio).

For those living in Ireland, who wish to get details of the shortwave frequencies to friends or family living abroad, RTÉ is providing a special phone text service. Listeners text the word "shortwave" to 51101 and they will receive a short text message with the shortwave frequencies. These texts are charged at standard rates. SP: Xiam Interactive Ph: (01) 4832010.

SHORTWAVE FREQUENCIES FOR AFRICA AND THE FAR EAST

Target
Frequencies
West of Central Africa
17860 kHz
11735 kHz
East of Central Africa
17710 kHz
11635 kHz
Southern Africa
9470 kHz

DRM (Digital AM Radio) FREQUENCIES FOR EUROPE
Target
Frequencies
Europe
17495 kHz
11735 kHz


This service is part of RTÉ's continued commitment to Irish people overseas and, over the years, has proven especially popular with those in geographically or technically isolated areas.

In addition to RTÉ Radio broadcasts, RTÉ will also broadcast the All-Ireland finals on RTÉ Two and RTÉ.ie/sport (island of Ireland only).

There will also be live uninterrupted audio coverage from RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Sport and RTÉ Television's The Sunday Game available worldwide here on RTÉ.ie/sport, while we will also have a live text matchtracker updating events as they develop throughout both afternoons. RTÉ Aertel will also carry live score updates, brief match reports and reaction, while there will be comprehensive reporting and reaction on RTÉ.ie/sport (www.rte.ie/sport).

For further details of RTÉ coverage abroad please see

http://www.rte.ie/radio/worldwide.html
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/pressreleases/1158310.html

Zaphod

Sunday Miscellany - 16 September 2007
Listening to the All Ireland of 1957 in Chittagong by Norman Freeman
http://dynamic.rte.ie/quickaxs/209-rte-sundaymiscellany-2007-09-16.smil
(about 11 mins into programme)

Zaphod

Robert Fisk: My Cold War nights, twiddling the dial
Published: 06 October 2007

In a country of political assassinations, Palestinian battles and constant political crisis, it seemed a romantic idea to send a sprig of lavender-coloured bougainvillea from my Beirut balcony to a friend abroad. The bush was covered in purple, so I snipped off a small bloom and swept it off to DHL for shipment. Nothing so simple, you may say. But that reckons without The State.

Hours later, I was summoned to the shipper's office to be solemnly informed that there was a problem. If I took the individual petals off the bloom, I could stuff them into an envelope and off they would go. But if I left them on the stem, complete with twigs, I would need an export permit from the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture. Aaarrgghhh!

The rationale was simple, of course. However disastrous or fanciful the reality, the machinery of power must continue to exert its baleful influence over our lives, the preservation of authority infinitely more important than us, its integrity supported by massive amounts of money and labour – even though provably worthless.

I am reminded of this by a hobby in which we Kentish schoolboys once indulged: the sending of reception reports – "double-Rs", we inevitably called them – to Eastern European radio stations during the Cold War. It didn't matter to us that we were helping the communist serpent spread its venom into the living rooms of England.

We would listen with rapt attention to the English language service of Radio Moscow or Radio Prague or Radio Warsaw or Radio Sofia – occasionally, incredibly, even to Radio Tirana – and then send off a postcard to the Communist Beast to report on the audibility of some tedious programme about Bulgarian steelworking, Polish agronomy or Soviet collective farm production. Was there too much static? A little distortion perhaps? Or was this nonsense crossing the Iron Curtain with pristine clarity on Thursday night?

In return, the producers of these awful fictions would send us heaps of books and magazines, most of them groaning with statistics, or photographs of gaily smiling farmers and industrial slaves or beaming autocrats. Few were those of us who did not know the much loved features of Todor Zhivkov or Walter Ulbricht or, indeed, the entire central presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pity the postmen of the Warsaw Pact.

The Polish literature came by the double whammy, volumes heavy with grainy wartime photographs of the destruction of Warsaw which linked the villainy of Nazism to the supposedly fascist government of Adenauer and other western lackeys. The Czechs were by far the smartest; they sent out quite well-produced books on the masterpieces of Prague's art galleries.

Of course, we self-important schoolboys believed that our double-Rs were being discussed at the plenary session of every local party headquarters. Perhaps they were – and heaven knows what MI5 made of this mass conspiracy by the pupils of Kent's richest schools. I fondly imagined how – from Potsdam to the Urals – legions of Stakhanovite workers were clambering up massive transmitters under pale blue Eastern European skies (copies of my double-Rs in hand, of course) to tamper with the giant cross-pylons and beacons that were sending their socialist message to the world.

I once even sent off a double-R to dear old Radio Eireann in Dublin – only to receive back a black-and-white postcard of De Valerian bleakness, informing me that I need send no more. The Irish, of course, had got the point: the whole fandango was a complete waste of time – just as the entire billion-dollar propaganda radio system of Eastern Europe converted not a single capitalist to the cause of world revolution. The entire thing was a sham, dreamed up by communist bureaucrats to keep other communist bureaucrats happy.

I guess we played the same tune in Britain. I recall how, driving up the A1 with my Mum and Dad, Peggy Fisk would use her new cine-camera to film the forests of white-painted – but totally unconcealed – anti-aircraft missiles that lay to the right of the highway. We would even picnic beside RAF stations in Lincolnshire while Mum happily filmed away at every creaking Vulcan bomber which soared into the air to threaten the Soviet monolith (and all those radio stations) with its nuclear might. And yes, I still have the film. But what would have happened to her today – a trip to Paddington Green, I imagine – now that we are fighting the "war on terror"?

For as we all know, this particular spurious conflict is our latest version of the Cold War – as I discovered during an interview with a Spanish journalist and her photographer in London a few months ago. We had, by chance, met at Paddington and I was talking about my childhood delight in loco-spotting (the railway version of double-Rs, I suppose) and I suggested that the photographer might take a picture of me next to a locomotive. So we padded to a platform where a London-Oxford stopping train was about to leave.

Yet after a couple of snaps, two members of the British Transport Police arrived in what appeared to be flak jackets and ordered us to stop filming. One of them said that it was "not permitted" because of the "terrorist campaign". I had vivid images of a nest of ETA militants scissoring out our pictures of the Titfield Thunderbolt and packing their explosive equipment before heading for Paddington.

It's the kind of police tomfoolery which I enjoy most. And with reason. For only last month, advertising the brilliance of the new Eurostar terminal, almost every newspaper in Britain carried huge aerial pictures of the new St Pancras – which showed almost the entire network of rail tracks, switching points, signal gantries and marshalling yards outside the station.

I felt sorry for the vulnerable Titfield Thunderbolt over at Paddington. Because, after all, no terrorist would ever dream of attacking the Eurostar, would they, or study the tracking system outside St Pancras from the air? The words "not permitted" didn't cross the lips of the lads in blue when confronted by the commercial campaign to launch the new Eurostar terminal.

And that's it, I suspect. We create monsters, and then – in the interest of money or bureaucracy – we quietly dismantle them. In the face of evil and incipient civil war, we build transmitters by the thousand or rockets by the million. Our leaders are happy. They have power. And that's what matters. So remember this morning my double-Rs and that sprig of bougainvillea on my balcony.

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3033368.ece

Zaphod

From here.

A few others:
http://www.mwcircle.org/gallery/QSL_Card_Gallery/252_G

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=kb9ygd&aid=4989504420707041297&iid=4979494399635488786

http://www.petermanson.com/dublin.jpg

http://monitor.ibb.gov/qsl/sw/Ireland-RDublin.JPG