The Future of Longwave 252kHz (RTE Radio 1)

23-09-2019 3:42pm

Threads merged again

Thread title amended to reflect the fact that the thread now comprises a number of previously separate threads

end of the road · 23-09-2019 5:23pm

topper75 wrote: »

How many such listeners are there remaining in the UK? It could be interesting to divide that number into the 1.8m figure and see if you could buy them all a free DAB radio. :-)

If they left this land 50 years ago, it would be an outrageously kind favour by Irish taxpayers. You'd wonder why such people are still listening to Irish radio at all. Immigrants have obligations to integrate. Would be hard to blame perfidious Albion if they have made no efforts.

nobody has an obligation to abandon their culture or the ability to use links to their homeland as part of their integration. integration means abide by the law, pay the relevant taxes. ideally take part in the local community but that is up to the individual.

topper75 · 23-09-2019 5:48pm

end of the road wrote: »

nobody has an obligation to abandon their culture or the ability to use links to their homeland as part of their integration. integration means abide by the law, pay the relevant taxes. ideally take part in the local community but that is up to the individual.

Are we talking immigrants or colonists? What you wrote sounds like some kind of inverted Statutes of Kilkenny. :-)

After 50 years I'd be more British than the British themselves. I mean, what exactly would the point be of trying to do otherwise?

my3cents · 23-09-2019 6:20pm

topper75 wrote: »

Are we talking immigrants or colonists? What you wrote sounds like some kind of inverted Statutes of Kilkenny. :-)

After 50 years I'd be more British than the British themselves. I mean, what exactly would the point be of trying to do otherwise?

I've been in Ireland more than 20 years and still listen to BBC Radio 4 on Long Wave most of the time. When its crap I just tune into RTE on Long Wave (when available).

I don't see why the Irish in the UK shouldn't have the option to listen to RTE on Long Wave.

The problem with Long Wave is that it is expensive on the old electricity bill but thats also the reason the signal has the power to be picked up as far away as it does.

GarIT · 23-09-2019 6:34pm

my3cents wrote: »

I've been in Ireland more than 20 years and still listen to BBC Radio 4 on Long Wave most of the time. When its crap I just tune into RTE on Long Wave (when available).

I don't see why the Irish in the UK shouldn't have the option to listen to RTE on Long Wave.

The problem with Long Wave is that it is expensive on the old electricity bill but thats also the reason the signal has the power to be picked up as far away as it does.

Because it's expensive and they aren't contributing.

end of the road · 23-09-2019 7:05pm

GarIT wrote: »

Because it's expensive and they aren't contributing.

they contributed via making the huge sacrifice of leaving the motherland to go to britain and all that went with it. they survived turbulent times, and sent money home to their families, often forgoing anything they could to do so. they will remember the discrimination and even experienced the discrimination, dished out by a minority of people who do not in any way represent the majority. no blacks, no dogs, no irish was no doubt, a sad and familiar experience for some at some stage.
i am happy and proud that the motherland recognizes their sacrifice and provides them with a link to their homeland, providing comfort to them.

GarIT · 23-09-2019 7:43pm

end of the road wrote: »

they contributed via making the huge sacrifice of leaving the motherland to go to britain and all that went with it. they survived turbulent times, and sent money home to their families, often forgoing anything they could to do so. they will remember the discrimination and even experienced the discrimination, dished out by a minority of people who do not in any way represent the majority. no blacks, no dogs, no irish was no doubt, a sad and familiar experience for some at some stage.
i am happy and proud that the motherland recognizes their sacrifice and provides them with a link to their homeland, providing comfort to them.

That's not contributing. It's worth nothing.

end of the road · 23-09-2019 8:40pm

GarIT wrote: »

That's not contributing. It's worth nothing.

it is contributing, and is worth everything to those families who relied on the contributions those brave, and now elderly, immigrants went through hardship to provide.

GarIT · 23-09-2019 10:36pm

end of the road wrote: »

it is contributing, and is worth everything to those families who relied on the contributions those brave, and now elderly, immigrants went through hardship to provide.

Helping your family isn't the same as paying taxes.

end of the road · 23-09-2019 10:53pm

GarIT wrote: »

Helping your family isn't the same as paying taxes.

taxes would have been paid by the businesses operators and staff of any services those families were able to use due to receiving help from the brave people who emmegrated. so in an indirect way the migrants to britain paid taxes.

GarIT · 23-09-2019 11:45pm

end of the road wrote: »

taxes would have been paid by the businesses operators and staff of any services those families were able to use due to receiving help from the brave people who emmegrated. so in an indirect way the migrants to britain paid taxes.

Their family are welcome to receive the signal on the regular radio bands. They have not paid tax directly or a TV licence to fund the state broadcaster, their opinion shouldn't be listened to. The only consideration should be the cost/benefit to people on the Island of Ireland and Islands within the country of Ireland.

end of the road · 24-09-2019 12:26am

GarIT wrote: »

Their family are welcome to receive the signal on the regular radio bands. They have not paid tax directly or a TV licence to fund the state broadcaster, their opinion shouldn't be listened to. The only consideration should be the cost/benefit to people on the Island of Ireland and Islands within the country of Ireland.

their opinions have to be listened to as they are irish and not listening to their opinions when they have indirectly contributed to the country would be a showing of contempt for brave people who were forced from their homeland via economic necessity.
the fact they haven't paid tax directly or a tv license is irrelevant as a tv license isn't required for radio listening.

GarIT · 24-09-2019 12:55pm

end of the road wrote: »

their opinions have to be listened to as they are irish and not listening to their opinions when they have indirectly contributed to the country would be a showing of contempt for brave people who were forced from their homeland via economic necessity.
the fact they haven't paid tax directly or a tv license is irrelevant as a tv license isn't required for radio listening.

Calling them brave is nonsense. Economic migrants who have contributed nothing. Don't live here, don't matter. The TV licence funds the radio transmissions, only licence holders should be considered when planning infrastructure. What they have paid directly is the only relevant factor.

I have no problem with people emigrating for a better life but they can't expect services from where they have left and are no longer paying tax.

24-09-2019 1:43pm

GarIT wrote: »

Calling them brave is nonsense. Economic migrants who have contributed nothing. Don't live here, don't matter. The TV licence funds the radio transmissions, only licence holders should be considered when planning infrastructure. What they have paid directly is the only relevant factor.

Half of RTÉ's funding is commercial. And as you know, a licence isn't required for a radio.

I didn't have a licence for years (no TV) and listened to the radio very regularly. Many people, probably in this forum, are in that category of listeners.

end of the road · 24-09-2019 1:59pm

GarIT wrote: »

Calling them brave is nonsense. Economic migrants who have contributed nothing. Don't live here, don't matter. The TV licence funds the radio transmissions, only licence holders should be considered when planning infrastructure. What they have paid directly is the only relevant factor.

I have no problem with people emigrating for a better life but they can't expect services from where they have left and are no longer paying tax.

they have contributed by sending money home to their families, who have spent said money on their costs to live, which in turn will have had tax paid on the income by the businesses and services where the families spent the money.
so they actually did contribute, all be it they gave the money to others to do it.

GarIT · 24-09-2019 8:21pm

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Half of RTÉ's funding is commercial. And as you know, a licence isn't required for a radio.

I didn't have a licence for years (no TV) and listened to the radio very regularly. Many people, probably in this forum, are in that category of listeners.

end of the road wrote: »

they have contributed by sending money home to their families, who have spent said money on their costs to live, which in turn will have had tax paid on the income by the businesses and services where the families spent the money.
so they actually did contribute, all be it they gave the money to others to do it.

I completely disagree but there is no point going back and forth endlessly so I will leave it at this point.

0lddog · 24-09-2019 9:18pm

end of the road wrote: »

they have contributed by sending money home to their families, who have spent said money on their costs to live, which in turn will have had tax paid on the income by the businesses and services where the families spent the money.
so they actually did contribute, all be it they gave the money to others to do it.

Thats exactly it.

People dont seem to appreciated the poverty in this country in the 40s and 50s and how important foreign remittances were back then.

dxhound2005 · 24-09-2019 9:25pm

0lddog wrote: »

Thats exactly it.

People dont seem to appreciated the poverty in this country in the 40s and 50s and how important foreign remittances were back then.

There was no electricity in a lot of rural places, where most of the emigrants came from. Well into the 1960's. Getting a signal on the wireless was a much more challenging process than tuning in stations now on the modern devices. It needed a long wire external aerial, and the wireless sets used wet and dry batteries. The wet battery had to be taken to the local town to be charged.

Claiming that these emigrants who would have lived most of their adult lives in cities, are unable to cope with any technology except long wave is a bit far fetched. But that is the argument being used by the campaign.

end of the road · 24-09-2019 10:01pm

it's not necessarily about whether one is able to cope with technology or not, but the cost effectiveness and portability of such technology verses the simplicity, portability and low cost to the user of lw.

24-09-2019 10:18pm

GarIT wrote: »

I completely disagree but there is no point going back and forth endlessly so I will leave it at this point.

I don't know whether you're "disagreeing" with the fact that half of RTE's funding comes from private activities or that a licence isn't required in order to legally own a radio but these are objectively true statements.

topper75 · 25-09-2019 11:28am

end of the road wrote: »

they contributed via making the huge sacrifice of leaving the motherland to go to britain and all that went with it.

Given the contrasting economic situations between the two lands in those days, I would be quite confident that it was indeed my people, the ones who stayed, who were the ones who were 'making the huge sacrifice' as you put it. It was they, not the ones who packed up and went abroad, who paid 50p in the £1 marginal tax in the 80s and scrimped on meagre pickings, and it is that money that meant we still have an RTÉ at all.
If the ones who stayed and paid for it have no need for it, then it is a straight forward argument I would have thought to get rid.

end of the road · 25-09-2019 2:16pm

topper75 wrote: »

Given the contrasting economic situations between the two lands in those days, I would be quite confident that it was indeed my people, the ones who stayed, who were the ones who were 'making the huge sacrifice' as you put it. It was they, not the ones who packed up and went abroad, who paid 50p in the £1 marginal tax in the 80s and scrimped on meagre pickings, and it is that money that meant we still have an RTÉ at all.
If the ones who stayed and paid for it have no need for it, then it is a straight forward argument I would have thought to get rid.

it's not no as the people who rely on it need a simple and easy accessible link to their homeland so as to provide all of the information they require in an unbiassed manner, but from an irish perspective.
so the link will stay open for now at least, with a viable solution found in the future i'm sure.

Welsh Megaman · 17-10-2019 5:23pm

LW252 is back.

*hugs radio*

gctest50 · 18-10-2019 8:09am

my3cents wrote: »

............

The problem with Long Wave is that it is expensive on the old electricity bill ........

How much of a waste is the whole thing anyway ?

500kw (daytime) x say 72% efficiency ?

Infoanon · 21-10-2019 1:24pm

gctest50 wrote: »

How much of a waste is the whole thing anyway ?

500kw (daytime) x say 72% efficiency ?

A long time since 252 was at 500kw

Zird · 12-11-2019 1:45pm

Infoanon wrote: »

A long time since 252 was at 500kw

Fun fact, the last time 252 ran 500kw was for the all Ireland hurling final 2003. This was when RTE were still "studying" the possibility of launching R1 full-time on the frequency.

225LongWave · 12-11-2019 6:24pm

252 was silent until March 2004 ! TEAMtalk only used 250kW (100kW)
RTE put 2FMs Charity252 from 10th March included Amanda Brunker

September 2004 Radio1 put an Arts program on 252 on Sunday afternoon from 567mw
& RTL had not sold their 80% stake (RadioTara Ltd) to RTE until January 2004 !

Zird wrote: »

Fun fact, the last time 252 ran 500kw was for the all Ireland hurling final 2003. This was when RTE were still "studying" the possibility of launching R1 full-time on the frequency.

Welsh Megaman · 11-06-2021 7:59pm

More essential maintenance work coming shortly!

From RTE’s website…

RTÉ will carry out essential maintenance of the Long Wave (LW) transmitter in Clarkstown, Co. Meath from 15th June 2021 for two months during which period RTÉ Radio 1 will not be available on LW 252. These works are necessary to ensure that RTÉ can continue to broadcast RTÉ Radio 1 on LW.

Antenna · 12-06-2021 12:21pm

For the duration of this 2 month LW outage, was there any consideration to coming to an arrangement with the BBC/their transmission operator to temporarily transmitting RTE Radio 1 via the now former BBC Radio Ulster transmitter on 1341 MW ?? .

This would give 100% coverage of areas on Northern Ireland that cannot receive RTE Radio 1 on FM. There would also be coverage to nearby parts of Britain with a high number of Irish residents (such as Glasgow and Liverpool ) also nighttime coverage further away.

An arrangement happened in 2011 when the recently closed BBC World Service medium wave transmitter (648) on the east coast of England was made available to temporarily transmit the Dutch equivalent of RTE Radio 1 to the Netherlands after serious transmitter fires and other issues lead to a huge drop in its FM coverage in the Netherlands for a number of weeks.

kazoo106 · 12-06-2021 4:05pm

I can only imagine the political storm that would cause if it were to happen !

Antenna · 16-06-2021 8:03pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

I can only imagine the political storm that would cause if it were to happen !

Though is it not already the case that RTE1&2 TV and TG4 for a number of years are broadcast from a number of transmitters within Northern Ireland (to cover much of the population who cannot receive cross-border Saorview
This without any uproar from Loyalists or anyone else that I am aware of ??

https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/how-you-get-tg4-rte-one-and-rte-two

So I cannot see what the issue would be with a temporary use of a MW channel which is otherwise going to be disused after the ceasing of the BBC's info loop that has been broadcast for several weeks.

RTE could alternatively perhaps have put on a reduced power LW transmission from the Tullamore mast , which is still standing for now, if they were seriously interested in maintaining the LW service, which would also provide continued coverage of NI and nearby parts of Britain. Transmission equipment could have been moved within relatively short downtime, a lot less than two months.

Its unfortunate it has to go off during summer, when their might be more use made of LW by listeners. People might be visiting or holidaying in coastal areas that can be poor reception areas for FM, also the more fringe areas of RTE FM reception in Northern Ireland is more likely to be disrupted during summer by Sporadic-E propagation (as happened earlier today) of stations from other countries.
The GAA coverage etc

TAFKAlawhec · 16-06-2021 8:45pm

UK Broadcasting legislation doesn't permit audio-only broadcasting in the country that is not licenced by Ofcom, wherever that is FM, MW, LW, DAB or DVB-T(2) - however, this restriction does not apply to non-English speaking stations, nor does it apply to satellite or (I think) cable.

It's for the above reasons why RTÉ Radio 1 cannot broadcast presently on, say, DAB in the UK. It is also the reason why they cannot broadcast the same station, along with 2FM & Lyric on the RNI1 DVB-T2 multiplex, but RnaG can because their spoken output is not in English.

It is again the same reason why NPO Radio 1 in the Netherlands were able to make short-term use of the 648 kHz transmission facilities at Orfordness on England's east coast after the Smilde transmitter station fire - content wasn't in English.

For those reasons, it's why RTÉ can't at present make use of terrestrial transmission facilities anywhere in the UK, including any potential spare capacity at Lisnagarvey, unless it was granted a sound broadcasting licence by Ofcom and the regulation that it would present - and it's also the same reason why there's never been any type of "external" broadcasting made from the UK other than from the BBC using otherwise deprecated MW or LW facilities that was the case in some European countries e.g. Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland - otherwise I'd have reckoned that in the past the likes of CRI or Voice of Russia/Spuntnik Radio would have liked to have "purchased" airtime on 648 & 1296 kHz once the BBC left (well, they could have but they would have had to at least sacrifice any English language programming).

Radio via satellite i.e. DVB-S(2) is different, and it's why the four main RTÉ radio stations can appear on the Sky & Freesat EPGs.

Television is also different, which until recently had its licencing governed through the EU's Television without Frontiers directive. Post the UK leaving the EU, I contacted Ofcom on this matter and they said that nothing would change once the UK fully left the EU on 1st January 2001, so I'm assuming a special arrangement is now in place to let RTÉ1, RTÉ2 and TG4 broadcast in NI on the RNI1 multiplex.

thesandeman · 16-06-2021 10:23pm

That language restriction thing is mad!!

Mickey Mike · 20-06-2021 3:09pm

Can anyone have a guess as to how long RTE Radio1 will continue to broadcast on LW 252? The battle to switch it off is going on 8 years now, I also noticed with each passing time they are reducing the power output, think its down to 100kw and 60kw by night, I can't see a long term future for sure platform.

21-08-2021 6:55pm

LW 252 is back on and sounding good on my SDR

http://emeraldsdr1.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/

dxhound2005 · 17-11-2021 2:30pm

No signal 1.30 pm 17 Nov 2021.

dxhound2005 · 17-11-2021 7:15pm

Back on at 6.10 pm. Unless there was some notice about a maintenance outage that I missed, the short duration suggests that it was a fault.

Antenna · 17-11-2021 8:29pm

It was a planned outage today for 'essential maintenance'. It went off at approx. 12:38 .

Antenna · 06-02-2024 2:58pm

JJ, Would be good if you put a link to the story too:

https://www.meathchronicle.ie/2024/01/25/moynalvey-community-exploring-potential-of-former-radio-mast-lands/

Was talk of Solar farm going there on at least part of it, as the existing electricity 38kV grid connection to the site could of course be used in reverse.

Especially considering RTE's financial difficulties, I do not think it is going to happen that part/all the approx 60 acres + building can be sold to the local community, the local GAA or anyone else for less than market value, as is suggested in the report..

The Future of Longwave 252kHz (RTE Radio 1)

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