Why Do The Irish Broadcast Church Services?

Jonathan1990

I use to imagine churches having a radio station broadcasting their services and the steeple been where the transmitter is. Unfortunately it's not a thing in the UK. Ireland though do have their own local church radio station. They don't broadcast on AM or FM too. A radio station band using 27mhz what we call CB Radio over here used rarely these days for car type walkie talkies.

http://www.dxing.info/articles/irish_churches.dx

KaneToad

Jonathan1990 wrote: »

I use to imagine churches having a radio station broadcasting their services and the steeple been where the transmitter is. Unfortunately it's not a thing in the UK. Ireland though do have their own local church radio station. They don't broadcast on AM or FM too. A radio station band using 27mhz what we call CB Radio over here used rarely these days for car type walkie talkies.

Never heard tell of CB radio type broadcasts for church services in this country. Sounds interesting.

RTE broadcasts religious services on radio & TV. Lots of local churches do web broadcasts too.

JDxtra

Plenty of churches around the country broadcasting on FM during mass times. Not licensed but generally ignored.

Declan A Walsh

I think there has been some form of limited range broadcasting of Masses for quite a large number of years now, presumably CB. In recent years, there has also been some, eh, unlicensed broadcasts on FM of Masses in some parts of the country!

ford fiesta

local radio stations broadcast mass from a different church in the locality each Sunday for example Mid West Radio in Mayo.

Ger Roe

KaneToad wrote: »

Never heard tell of CB radio type broadcasts for church services in this country. Sounds interesting.

It used to be a thing alright - through from the mid 70's and into the 80's when CB was all the rage.

All of the CB sets that first were smuggled/imported into Ireland were USA sets operating in AM mode and then when minister for P&T Albert Reynolds finally legalised the 27Mhz band for public use, he did so for FM mode, as was the European norm at the time. Putting it on a legal footing pretty much killed off CB in a very short few years.

Some churches introduced mass transmissions on the 27Mhz band and gave or rented out receivers for house bound people. I am sure there was some clever chap behind the sale, supply and installation of the church radio systems.

These days, church towers and steeples may well be used for transmission purposes still, but it is more likely to be for mobile phone network cells and point to point RF links. Take a close look and you may be surprised by what you can spot in some cases. Sometimes even the people at mass might be surprised too.

coylemj

Ger Roe wrote: »

Some churches introduced mass transmissions on the 27Mhz band and gave or rented out receivers for house bound people. I am sure there was some clever chap behind the sale, supply and installation of the church radio systems.

+1 the sacristan had a vested interest in seeing to it that the broadcast was not in the regular FM band so that he could sell the receivers. I knew of one case where the transmission was in the airband range and the sacristan made a packet selling Russian airband radios at inflated prices. Needless to say, there was no refunds when the transmitter was shut down.

dxhound2005

Masses are now on the internet on webcams.

https://lucanparish.com/live-webcam-broadcast

It's a bit misleading for the OP to say "only in Ireland", when some of the radio broadcasts are from NI churches. The UK equivalent of Comreg has jurisdiction there. Travelling through Tyrone on a Saturday evening a couple of years back I heard Mass from Clogher (I think) parish near the top end of the FM band on the car radio. I recently heard one from Newtownbutler on the CB band, which I don't think features on any of the dx reports. Patric Robic mentioned in the OP has a very impressive list.

http://www.udxf.nl/WPAS-List-February-2016.pdf