FáilteDAB: Coverage, Tests and Services

Sports radio is the single most expensive format to do. Ireland is too small a market for someone to even try it without massive pockets

"The future is 5G/6G broadcast" - respectfully, no.

11k/yr + 23% VAT on top would put the price at 1,128/mo which is quite reasonable for the shear number of sites and large area covered. It would price out community and small-interest stations but I'd also expect that cost to scale down significantly for a small-scale operation.

You could argue the last time Ireland had truly independent radio was before the 31st of December 1988; after that the country was carved up into little fiefdoms and monopoly privilege was granted to the blessed few. Now if Government (via the IRTC/BCI/BAI) were doing their jobs well, would not have allowed any one company to own more than one station in any particular market nor more than a small number in total - this is how a reasonable person would interpret maintaining plurality of ownership and diversity in what is offered.

What I and others (including those behind FailteDAB) believe in is: Let us build the platform, let the market decide if the stations survive on their own merits (content, presentation etc). End the 1988 monopoly on choice that has strangled the FM market for almost 40 years.

BIII VHF has been fallow since RTE ceased PAL broadcasting, if there is no commercial demand for that spectrum, then from a purely economic perspective it's better to let someone use it for small money than doing nothing with it at all.

That said, I agree with you on the point regarding promotion, if folk don't know it exists they have no incentive to buy a compatible radio. While a lot of newer cars will automatically scan and display available DAB stations, listeners don't often scan around the band unless they're out of range of their preferred station so might not notice. Cars that put DAB on a separate 'band button' don't do much for discovery of new content, especially if it's never worked before

I fear this is precisely what will happen; that has been the traditional way spectrum itself has been auctioned off. FM licences for 'community of interest' stations has been something of a tossing of a bone to the hungry wolves; the 2009 Broadcasting Act is not fit for purpose

If the UK market is anything to go by, the large national/regional multiplexes will end up owned by one company anyway, if not 2RN then Foothold much like how it seems all the UK sites are owned/operated by Arquiva. For a variety of reasons, this is not a desirable outcome but the way Comreg usually runs things, that's precisely what will happen.

Indeed, they faced every possible obstacle and barrier to getting a full-time service operational, one would be forgiven for thinking that unless the major broadcasters want something, it won't happen ;)

I stumbled across that some time ago, I grew up with 252 and didn't imagine someone could or would just resurrect an old brand like that. Could they actually broadcast here on their Ofcom licence?

A little closer to home, the same woman on both Classic Hits and Nova that reads out the traffic and travel :)
The UK market saw this when Capital Radio started buying up all the local stations en masse.

DAB in Ireland has been discussed to death in other threads so I won't rehash that here but I will note that one thing TOTAL-DAB proved is that it doesn't cost 100s of 1000s of euro to setup a DAB multiplex, nevermind to operate one. In fact, and depending on the power you need, the single most expensive component is the cavity filter

It is my view that for Irish radio to survive, it will need to 'move with the times' and start offering folk a choice before the folk who listen to radio in their car stick with….ugh…Spotify; the folk who listen at home, stick with their Amazon/Apple/Google smart speaker.

Radio is more than just the music, or the talk programmes - music you can get elsewhere, talk programmes are podcasted - it is the live element and the relationship between the presenter and the listeners. I tune into John Creedon because his 'musical pic-and-mix' cant be replicated by a chatbot or a copy of StationPlaylist/Myriad/Liquidsoap.

DAB will be part of that, I believe, but another thing that needs to happen is to scrap the ornery requirements imposed by the 2009 Act, in particular, the 20% news and current affairs nonsense - we can and do have entire stations that cover that better than a music station should.

What sets FailteDAB apart from previous attempts to kick-start DAB is the massive buyin from Bauer, Bay and Onic; if they had shunned the idea, we would not be in a second year of a trial service now operating across most of the country. I fervently hope that they'll be able to convert this into a permanent operation, I doubt anyone else in the country would have had the connections and access to sites to pull this off other than 2RN and we know they have no interest.

I'm pleasantly enjoying getting to listen to Radio Nova, GHR and others in my car with a reliability and convenience that no amount of faffing about with Apps can match. I don't tune in just for music - I don't have nearly as deep a knowledge and quickly run out of songs I could listen to anyway - I listen to the shows and suffer the adverts.

DAB / FM are a lot safer to use whilst driving from a channel changing point of view. Apple Car play is dangerous to navigate through whilst driving. In fact I am so used to listening to DAB now that I use Newstalk for most of my news/ chat stuff as my car has FM and DAB on separate buttons so easier not to bother changing😉are you listening RTÉ ?, I don’t even miss you!

Does that car radio automatically switch to Newstalk on FM, when you go out of coverage of it on DAB ?

Did that merger actually go through in the end? I stopped paying attention after they said it had collapsed in 2019, but they were already doing things like having identical websites etc.

Sale of Clare FM and Tipp FM stake to Radio Kerry collapses – The Irish Times

Played with my car's radio the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how many stations were being picked up in Cork. As somebody else has said earlier, a wider range (e.g. talk) would be good, but still good to see so many additional stations.

Will be hard (I guess) for some of the stations to get some sort of visibility based on just their station names (e.g. I can see some stations are like Onic 80s or Onic 90s, so that's obvious - but then there are stations like Bob FM, GHR - what are these supposed to be?).

Maybe not, I'm not sure, I didn't keep up either. . The music library is definitely the same between Clare/Tipp. One night I heard the same program on Clare and Tipp with same presenter just delayed by a few seconds. They seem to use same transmission gear too (e.g Deva Broadcast RDS encoders)

When Energy Dance launched it had a good few of the Artists and Titles the wrong way round and there's still these 3 that need to be updated

Liquid - 'Sweet Harmony'

Layo & Bushwacka! - 'Love Story'

Oceanic - 'Insanity'

That's your receiver having an old DB, not the logos being sent.

It's a 2022 car with a DAB tuner in it, so why is it able to get the logo for two of the stations and not the others ? Anyway, I'm sure I saw on here that other posters weren't getting logos either.