The future of RTE Radio 1 LW

Gerry Wicklow

I'm sure the timing of this is purely coincidence. 😁

https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0419/1377768-rte-oireachtas-committee/

The chair of the RTÉ Board will tell an Oireachtas Committee later today that the Government must take a decision on the reform of the TV licence fee. ......

She will contend that Ireland's population is "too small to sustain public service media by licence fee alone" but RTÉ must also be "as resourceful and creative as possible in generating income to deliver against its comprehensive remit".

.....She will tell committee members that while RTÉ has "embraced many of the opportunities of digital technologies", "increased investment in digital services will need to be prioritised" 

RetroEncabulator

It’s being retired as they’re being rapidly replaced by digital meters.

Glaceon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494114#Comment_120494114

Extended to March 2024 for EDF.

https://mediumwave.info/2023/01/10/united-kingdom-212/

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494170#Comment_120494170

Imo, it is very obvious that RTE chorographed the closure with just 14 notice leading into the Easter holidays and the Biden visit to ensure that there wasn't any opportunity for campaign to save it to grow legs like the first time.

From reading back this thread, i gather the first closure date of Halloween 2014 was announced by RTE on September 23 2014 but it was only 13 days before the closure that RTE got any major backlash against it

There were a lot more boards.ie posters in favour of keeping RTE LW in 2014.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494114#Comment_120494114

Still required for another year or so

At least 2rn are already using the site for other things, 3 years ago they got planning permission for another communications tower on the site. https://www.eplanning.ie/MeathCC/AppFileRefDetails/RA200784/0

AFAIK Test match special cricket is still on R4 LW ? RTE had quietly phased out all sports opt-outs on LW 252 for some time before it's closure. The only opt-out remaining at closure time was 45 minutes of religious programming on Sunday mornings but even this was way down on the 3 hours of religious opt-out called Sunday spirit that was on the channel a short few years ago.

letovo3275

It's a good thing they closed down LW it was absolutely rubbish. same with DAB, rubbish too.

https://theconversation.com/dab-radio-was-the-future-until-live-streaming-and-podcasts-arrived-95250

http://digitalradioinsider.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-final-countdown-future-of-dab-radio.html

A global market for DAB is not in sight

To date, approximately 82 million DAB receivers have been sold since the technology was launched in 1995. Most have been sold in the United Kingdom, Denmark and Norway. A significant proportion of these sets can only receive the original system DAB, which since been abandoned in all countries except the United Kingdom. Other countries have adopted the upgraded version DAB+.

It is estimated that by 2020 there are at least 6 billion FM receivers in the world and 2.5 billion smartphones. Today, smartphones have become the major listening platform for radio alongside FM radio.

Good thing RTE stopped flogging the DAB horse.

Look how long LW was kept going even though it was completely pointless, and FM still has a huge number of listeners. FM might be good for a long time. will be interesting to see what happens.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494787#Comment_120494787

Do you think RTE was also right to close Medium wave in the 00s ?

Mickey Mike

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494808#Comment_120494808

RTE should have kept the 567hHz alive, even if they installed a new 200kw TX, it can be always used as a secondary platform or infill when FM txs goes down.

rathfarnhamlad

In relation to Medi 1 from Morocco, the LW frequency is still mentioned on the Arabic version of their website (https://www.medi1.com/ar/frequences).

Not only that, the SW frequency is mentioned too. I thought that that service was discontinued a couple of years back.

I decided to email the station but I the mail (which I spent about 20 minutes typing up in French) bounces back straight away saying that the address doesn't exist. Odd...

dxhound2005

171 never went off the air, as far as I know. It is clear but weak reception on the Malin SDR. Algeria 252 is a massive signal there in Donegal.

9575 went off air in 2017 I think. I can get the 13 East satellite and there are 13 Moroccan radio stations and 8 TV stations on that transponder. But not Medi 1, so that is out of date as well. Medi 1 is not on that satellite on any other frequency either. I can't get the other satellite at 7 West. Website information is only as good as the humans who are in charge of it.

rathfarnhamlad

@dxhound2005 Yes, I don't recall anything about 171 going off the air. It was mentioned a while back that the frequency is no longer mentioned on the English (or French) version of the website, which prompted speculation that it could be discontinued shortly.

"Website information is only as good as the humans who are in charge of it", yep, true enough!

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494787#Comment_120494787

There's a big difference between how DAB was rolled out in Ireland and how it was rolled out in the UK

The UK currently have 60 national DAB radio stations and a huge amount of local ones... RTE gave us 6 stations?

Safe to say there was no motivation there

rogue-entity

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120494787#Comment_120494787

LW had no practical future, when you need 100s of kilowatts to transmit you might as well be burning fivers. DAB could have had a future but you might as well have tried driving up a hill covered in black ice for all the good it would do, the IBI stations did not want it, and that was enough to kill it dead.

The closure of 252 feels like an end of an era after 36 years, I have nostalgic memories of Atlantic 252 but that's all they'll be.

Gerry Wicklow

LW is like 8-track tapes, as a technology it served a purpose but it's time is gone. We may have loved our mix tape cassettes in the 80's but if you listened to them now, you'd be horrified by the quality.

That said, it makes me laugh to see the RTE chair saying they want to invest in digital technology. The half-assed way they tried DAB doesn't inspire confidence in their approach. It only covered a small part of the country and apart from anoraks, no one knew it even existed.

Aertel is a similar example. It always annoyed me to see a TV based news system include raw HTML links and Twitter quotes that then repeated the exact same paragraph. You can get 3 versions of the same news story as they add more details.

PAGE 12:- Man dies in XYZ town...

PAGE 8:- Gardaí open murder enquiry in XYZ death...

PAGE 1:- Person arrested for murder in XYZ

Or links to a competition that ended a year previously. Or how about the the monitor in the old Morning Ireland studio that said 'check HDMI connection' for 10 years. Or the NewsNow ticker that would crash and take many hours/days before someone rebooted it.

Can you guess I don't have much faith in their approach to digital anything. /Rant

I'm surprised that nobody seemed to have noticed when it was published last summer the future of media commission report had recommended closing longwave asap. I only read it myself last week and it's written there alright.

Something nobody has ever experienced is how can BBC 198 be on all the time with an mid 1980s valve transmitter but RTE 252 was subjected to long outages with a modern late 00s transmitter?

dxhound2005

198 had problems at times as well, but they have more than one transmitter. The 252 outages would probably just be a tiny percentage of the total air time.

From Saturday 29th March until June/July, 2014 the BBC Radio 4 LW Droitwich transmitter will be subject to daily shutdowns between 10:00-17:30hrs. As the work will take place between 10.00 and 17.30 the long-wave only Yesterday in Parliament and Daily Service programmes will continue to be transmitted normally each day. In addition, we have planned the work to ensure Test Match Special coverage is not affected. However, the LW only shipping forecast at 12.01 will not be available.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498109#Comment_120498109

That's a good example, when extended work was done on the 198 mast, it was only off during work hours, when 252 went under extended work it was switched off 24/7 for 60 days.

Glaceon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498146#Comment_120498146

Personally I think it's a classic semi-state reaction to a service you don't want to provide. Make it as difficult as possible for potential customers to use it while putting money into heavy maintenance; then close it claiming lack of use and high costs. It's exactly what CIE did with the railways. That said, I'm not advocating that 252 be left on, I agree that it had its day.

dxhound2005

Add to the intrigue that RTE had planned to close it down 10 years ago. It was only the political intervention that forced them to make it continue. Wheels within wheels, like the wheels on the CIE trains.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498166#Comment_120498166

It's a pity that no newspaper would investigate just how much money was spent on this maintenance work in the summer of 21 and could that expenditure have been avoided if they simply shut it down 21 months ago.

Hotblack Desiato

Question now is how long the mast is going to remain standing

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120497645#Comment_120497645

Licence fee and available advertising income isn't enough to support any more stations here and understandably none of the existing ones want more competition. Even in Dublin, FM is not full.

Now maybe if the BAI would relax their ridiculous restrictions / mandates on content then more stations would be viable, in Dublin anyway, but maybe not.

As long as FM has empty slots even in Ireland's largest radio market, DAB remains a solution in search of a problem

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498425#Comment_120498425

Considering the Medium wave ones are still standing 15+ years on, I don't see it coming down anytime soon. 2rn put out a tender a couple of years ago to remove the 567 one but it's still standing and we were never told what happened with the tender

letovo3275

This is the thing DAB is a solution in search of a problem, it's been looking since the 1990s and no one wants it. it has taken the BBC decades to persuade people to use it and that's a totally different market which doesn't fit elsewhere in the world. even then internet radio is stealing DABs lunch.

It's unfair to call 8-track the equivalent of DAB. 8-track was popular enough in its day even though it never gained a meaningful market foothold and there's loads of youtube channels which are all about repairing old 8-track players. Dab is just the technology these same channels give off about sounding rubbish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84

sure even on Today fm they're always plugging their "Goloud" app for their sister stations or whatever. their app and Goloud website is absolutely terrible, but it seems to be the business decision they've taken in preference to putting their stations on e.g. Saorview or satellite. I wish they would put the main Today FM on Saorview, would be handy.

No need for MW or LW now that Saorview is the alternative platform for the main FM radio channels. in the event of a complete nationwide FM failure, sure turn on the radio on Saorview and listen to Joe Duffy.

dxhound2005

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498260#Comment_120498260

If there was some worthwhile story, I'm sure they would have done it. Still not too late if there is some smoking gun that you know about.

It was reported by someone on Boards as being a multi million investment by RTE in Long Wave. But that was disinformation.