I hate seeing all of these old, legacy stations going silent with barely an acknowledgement on how important they were around the world. When I earned my Novice ticket in 1984, shortwave was still very much alive. Often I would tune in to one on the BBC services on 19 or 31 Meters to get an idea of propagation on the band. Or I might spend a "quiet" evening dx'ing the AM broadcast band for hard-to-find low-power stations in the "graveyard" portion of MW. I considered it a great accomplishment when I could pull out one of those stations from the mud just long enough to copy down call letters, frequency, program info (no Internet back then, only local BBS's!), then log a SINPO code (I had my own form for sending to stations). Then I looked up the station ID in the WRTH handbook, and send it out. Usually I would receive a reply in two to three weeks along with a QSL card or certificate. Sometimes replies took up to six months. One reply arrived two YEARS after I sent it! I had completely forgotten about it, as I had moved a few months prior; but the postal service was able to forward it to me. Now it seems shortwave is mostly dead, except for religious broadcasters and utility stations. A few stateside stations, having lost their parent programmers, now stay on the air by relaying signals from other broadcasters. Internet is okay, but it will spell the eventual death of shortwave radio.
This is really sad as I work in Poland half of the year and listen to Absolute on 1215 kHz at night and during early morning on the way to work. It’s the way I listen to English programming being stuck in a radio world of non-English programming.
@@RingwayManchester This is a great video! One side note in regards to the end of the video, when listening in Poland the audio always had a slight echo or reverb effect which I now know was caused by me receiving the signal from more than one transmitter simultaneously. That faint signal at the end absolutely confirmed this for me.
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Same for me, I listened to 1215kHz on my Tecsun (although I luckily almost never have to deal with situations where I don‘t have service, I almost always have 5G now). Kind of sad that it‘s going anyways.
It really does suck that they shut off the transmitters for your sake but also because it's so retro. Nothing like a hearty raw AM signal. You might want to consider using a free UK VPN if possible and use either their app or the website
I used to own two AM stations in the USA. I loved the sound of AM and tried hard to deliver a clean, crisp signal to my listeners. It's sad that AM seems to be disappearing. Thanks for the video and timely information!
@@O.G.LIL-MAN And then all the Zoomers and half the Millenials die because they have no idea how to switch to the AM band on their car radio, if they even know what the AM band is, or that their car actually has a radio and not just a bluetooth input.
I listened to the actual last broadcast 19/01/23 at 2350 they did a tribute to 1215khz it was sad but a great send off with excerpts from BBC ,Virgin and Absolute. Last song was absolute beginners by David Bowie.
This shows a great understanding from Absolute Radio on the important legacy of 1215khz, we should give them some credit. I've recently only just started listening to Absolute 80s, and they seem to put a lot of effort into the station: they could have just left it to automated playlists.
@@stupossibleify Fond memories of 1215. Right back to my teenage years of radio 1 "the happy sound of 247", and more recently absolute radio keeping me sane during the 2020 lockdown.
Am radio helped me through bad times here in Northern Ireland during the 80s when FM would be scrambled regularly during "events" shall we say. I would never let AM die. But I still find it strange radios don't have longwave anymore in them.
As someone who has a bit of Civil Defense background and mindset. Along with being a Amateur Radio Operator. The phrase that comes to mind is. "When all else fails.... radio". So I don't see that it's a good idea to have everything digital or internet based. Way to easy to go down.
I'm a broadcast engineer, amateur operator in New Zealand and I know how important analog radio is during times of civil emergency. It is the only thing that works. When we had the Christchurch earthquakes back in 2011, the first thing to be damaged was the phone lines. Then cell sites went down due to loss of power - so people's phones no longer worked. AM and FM stations that still had power or had backup generators were able to keep broadcasting and relaying important information to the public. Sadly, AM transmitters are slowly being shut down here as well and that's all down to cost of keeping them running 24/7.
@S W I agree fully. It's sad that profit and penny pinching are removing our backup systems that would be really helpful during national emergencies. How good is your amateur radio laws and do a lot of people out there have their amateur radio license?
@@erikmutthersbough6508 We have good amateur regulations. To qualify, there is a bank of 60 open-knowledge multi-choice questions. You must get 40 correct. Once you pass, you have to spend 3 months working either below 5 MHz or above 25 MHz and log 50 contacts. When you have done that then you can work any band at any power. Max EIRP on most bands is 1 kW.
I hope AM radio never dies here in the US. I love using old tube and transistor radios and keeping them running. There's something cool about using a machine that's well over half a century old to listen to modern news broadcasts.
lol, over here there's not been any real AM radio more or less ever I think there's like...maybe one or two stations I can *KINDA* make out, if tuned exactly right (with basic consumer radio, no fancy setups)
I remember laying in bed as a kid listening to my little am radio. As it got later the far away stations would start coming in opening up a whole new world.
Sad day indeed, there's something magical about AM radio for those of us of a certain age. I live in Sheffield and when out in the Peaks away from electrical noise I'm sometimes able to pick up Radio Caroline on 648, but even the pwm LED lights in the car drown it out most times. Really takes me back to my youth, down on the pebble beach at Barry with my Mum's old Bush radio and a 20ft Tank aerial Caroline was, and thankfully still is a legend. They were very lucky to get an AM licence.
@@almostfm If they're able to buy or generate their electricity for 20 pence (which is cheap) per kiloWatt/hour, powering a 100kW transmitter (which I guess because it looks like they're using a directional antenna system to radiate 200kW ERP), they probably are consuming 120kW/h using an efficient modern transmitter. That's roughly £210,000 each year. That's without maintenance, workers, replacement of equipment, expensive satellite transponder frequencies and everything I forget to mention. If you take that in account, it will be easily up to £500,000 each year or even more. 🤑
I live in regional Australia and they literally just replaced a 60yr old 198m tall MW mast with a new 236m tall mast about an hour away from here. 50kW transmitter covers about a 600km stretch of land. We still have no DAB broadcasters up here either. It's all about the coverage.
You have the terrain than lends itself to LW or MW band radio and no one wants DAB, except the broadcasters, and regulators who can sell the spectrum off.
@@dennis8196 there's one commercial SW channel that covers Cape York. National broadcaster turned off the SW transmitters at the same site in 2015 but these mostly targeted PNG and the Pacific. The broadcasters want DAB in regional areas but the regulator says no.
In Perth the DAB signal pretty much just covers a 50km radius around the city. Useless any further out than that. AM and FM still rule everywhere else.
I call it "the sign of the times". With broadcast radio, the broadcast pay for the transmission medium. With Internet, the listener pay for the medium. It is not only that. I can listen to an AM broadcast with a piece of wire, a coil and a diode. With digital, I'm gonna need some sort of processor or other hi-tech solution, with no provisions for an emergency. And maybe, I was one of the few that still own an AM receiver (or a collection of them)? Sure Absolute Radio wanted to save on the electricity bill. You're right, it's a sad day today. The entire downhill situation begun EU-wide in 2006 when many national broadcasters begun shutting down AM transmitters all over the continent; shortly after BBC shut down World Service on AM. I don't own a DAB radio...
@@thewhitefalcon8539 did you try DRM yourself? Its not better, because you need a very strong signal to actualy get usable decoding Look at this video: ua-cam.com/video/aofq6H1a3tQ/v-deo.html You can hear, the decoded audio on left channel as well as raw demodulated audio on the right one (it sounds like static) Now look at 0:47, when the drm signal cuts out, you can still hear analog audio If this would be transmitted on analog, you would still be able to hear the music
@@thewhitefalcon8539 sadly in digital world its just hard to do that You eather have enough bits or you dont, you cannot decode half bit, half bad, because you eather have a bit or you dont Thats why I always said that analog is better for over the air signals because a signal can have a varying degree of quality, and with analog your ears can at least extraxt some information Also, signal has to be analog at the end anyway for our ears to understand it, so why even convert analog signal to digital, to then transmitt it over a fragile medium, and then convert this signal with varying degree back to analog Also, not sure if you knew but DRM (we are not talking about DRM+, thats a different story) offers FM quality sound, which you can also get with guess what analog FM signal So no advantage at all I know I will probably never convince you to believe analog is better for audio broadcast, and thats all right So let me just end my talking with this: m.ua-cam.com/video/YMAPKTnJtnA/v-deo.html Listen to it, and admire its quality
Definitely the end of an era. The broadcasters pay a good amount to keep these AM transmitters alive and maintained, and for the larger ones the benefit of wide coverage is negated now by the fact that so few people listen to those frequencies (and many don't even have access). Building your own little radio was a fun pastime but the people who do so are few and far between as I think for many, radio has lost its "magic". Even though the things we are doing with it today still boggle the mind.
@@RingwayManchester Thanks! Hopefully my Dad and I can give a few more neat overviews of broadcasting towers here in the US. I love seeing little differences here and overseas (and what's similar!).
So it's goodbye to 247m. I remember - back in the late sixties - listening to Radio 1 come on air each morning with a series of bongs, follows by George Martin's Theme One. Another old friend laid to rest!
I have noticed there are less AM, MW, stations in Canada in recent years, moving to FM, and Europe too. Thanks for the NYC coverage while you were there, and I learned some things I didn't know. even having been living previously, most of my lifenear NYC.
Twenty Two AM stations in the US turned in their license to the FCC in 2022, giving up.
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FM also is killed in Norway, Switzerland will follow in 2025. DAB doesn‘t only have drawbacks however, I was able to receive a clear signal from 80km away (due to elevation), while the FM signal was audible but really noisy. HE-AAC v2 isn‘t that bad after all. However, I still miss listening to AM in this low quality with some cracking. I guess most don‘t want that, but prefer a clear high-quality signal (and to be honest, I‘d probably also broadcast on HD Radio or DRM in the guard bands).
@Max Müller I had heard about Norway 🇳🇴 shutting down FM, though not yet about Switzerland 🇨🇭 . In the US I have had Ibiquity HD for FM and AM for over 20 years now with portable and Auto receivers, though not currently in my 2018 Jeep Renegade, but my previous 2016 Toyota Prius had HD. AM, MW HD has been declining because, especially at night the HD sidebands interfere with adjacent AM station. There is a small AM station, about 250 watts, which was a local station for many years, WFAS, for many years in the White Plains, NY area where I used to live. It is only receivable with an HD capable radio, which may be the future in the US for FM and AM, MW. I have recently visited the area again and heard the HD only carrier. Also, I had an HD receiver, JVC, installed in my car over 20 years ago, which still has a CD player and an input wired for an ipod player, no Bluetooth connection back then. I was also an early adopter of XM satellite reception with an outboard Sony receiver back around 2001, but even though my Jeep and an Eton Satellit E1XM has it too, I recently dropped subscribing as it cost almost US $50.00 a month. Ray.
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@@raymondmartin6737 DRM possibly is the better choice, there is a station in Czech that can be received from Germany (it‘s 250 or 1000W I think) and DRM in AM bands is pretty widespread in India. I see a point in mainly digital AM band radio. Maybe they should have 20kHz wide channels (9/10kHz for AM and 4.5/5kHz for DRM). Even 6kbps xHE-AAC sounds incredible considering the low data rate. Equally to AM with a good signal, just that DRM seems to work perfectly at a SNR of 7dB>.
There is always AM stereo that would sound so much better than a compressed digital using AAC digital stream, as not hard to upgrade AM sites to the C-QuAM standard.
Thanks for the video. Very interesting, and also very sad. As a fellow radio ham, I used to surf the medium wave band in my earlier years. Who remembers Radio Luck-Lucky-Luxemburg? Caroline? Radio London? Happy days.......
As at approx 2230 on 25 January, the Absolute Radio close down loop is still being broadcast from the 16 KW transmitter in Lisnagarvey, mixed in with the COPE signals from Spain. Here in Suffolk, Absolute Radio is around SINPO 24242, with COPE around SINPO 33243.
Wow, never seen that coming although given the power bill I suppose it was bound to at some stage. Never listened to Absolute Radio on AM to be honest, but as a kid it was Virgin Radio and Atlantic 252 - now they are both gone of the air. Sad.
Another Britsh Radio gone here in Germany. After BFBS shut down this was one of the services i used. With all the german stations all ready closed AM falls dormant.
When I visited Brookman's Park in 1978 after the changeover, the 1215khz service was running at 50KW from an older Marconi Transmitter. I went up to the cabinet and turned up the audio monitor potentiometer and heard the Radio 3 output on the 6 " loudspeaker.
I guess these days were inevitable... I began in AM back in '83 and saw vinyl give way to cd's through '93, working on the air in both AM and FM stations. Upon returning for two more years (2001-2002), it was all digital and touchscreens (I loved the digital production rooms a lot!)... and voicetracking/recorded airshifts, often on several corporate stations (sometimes not even in the same region of the US)... The immortal words of the late, great BB King came to mind finally : "The Thrill Is (was) Gone"... As much as I have embraced and loved modern technology, there is always going to be a part of me that misses the artistic days of real radio.
It's a shame to see AM is on its way out. Absolute on 1215 was my go to station for years. I stopped listening to the radio in general about 3 years ago, so I suppose I can't complain too much about losing a service I had stopped using. It still feels sad to see it end though.
I know of a couple of ham radio clubs that have gotten permission to access defunct AM broadcast antenna sites here in the states and used the towers as antennas for field day events.
I'm sorry to see that they shut off the AM service over there. I was was a bit surprised that they put out 200,000 watts. Here in the U.S., AM stations are limited to 50,000 watts with many stations running far less than that. On the other hand, it may open the doors for some AM DXing possibilities for you. It may come of a bit surprise to some , but a few stations from the U.S. and Canada do make it across the pond. Including the 50,000 watt New York City stations such as 710 WOR, 1010 WINS, and 1130 WBBR as they beam their signals east. Check out the many Transatlantic AM DXing videos out there on UA-cam,. Cheers
There was a time during the 20's and 30's that the US had a 500KW station on the air. WLW was the first and only station in the US to operate with a license at that power until more stations wanted to increase their power to 500 KW at which time the FCC declined to renew the special license WLW had and they had to reduce power back to 50KW.
The US is big enough, and with enough analog oriented users, to make an AM station still commercially viable. Also the electricity is very cheap compared to what happened here in the UK...
It is unfortunate for me too. In last years I managed to listen to 1215 almost dayly in Poland with my wonderfull vintage radio and 15 m antenna . . I admire AM good music even with interferences - it has special athmosphere no comparable . to FM, Digital. And that awareness of direct communication through thousands km. In last months reception was weaker so I would conclude that the power was down due to rise of energy costs - we need to remember that station was received in other countries without payment. My last tape recording is very weak: sad announcement. In my life I lost 208 Luxemburg, R.Carolina, R Seagull, Nostalgia 5 from Hilversum and now this.
All the official radiostations in Norway has gone over to the DAB system. (Data signals on the air). Only local stations use FM now here. So in your car or at home you have to by DAB recievers to here NRK. Of course DAB radios has also FM, but everybody here had to buy new radios. 😞 I liked the old FM band! If you are driving outside towns, you miss the signals, and don't hear anything for a while. (hehe) Thank's for the video Lewis 🙂It remind me when we closed the ofisell FM broudcast system. The best from LB1NH Arild,
I find AM radio very amusing because of the SDR's available on the internet today, picking various radio bands, 0 - 30MHz being the standard. A example is the KiwiSDR project, which are hosted by normal people, and scatered all around the globe, so you could use them to listen to the local radio stations from that place. You can even look at the map, and pick one close to the transmitter site of that specific station. So, it's very sad to see the number of SDR increasing, but the actual stations being shut down.
I read somewhere that Virgin and Talk Radio (as they were then) replaced all of the old BBC valve-based transmitters with solid state units when they launched in 1993. Probably Harris units.
Very sad day for radio indeed. I know you can stream, or if you must- get it on awful DAB, but there was always something magical about receiving AM broadcasts. Thankfully there’s HF to listen to!
Well, Absolute Radio geoblocks their streaming... although if you're savvy enough, you may overcome this, even without a VPN 🤓 But where's the joy if it's (almost) as easy to pick up as literally thousands of other streaming radio stations from all over the world, compared to mediumwave & shortwave where you have to struggle sometimes to hear the station?
@@ArnieDXer There's a charm to radio listening that "Internet streaming" cannot and will never be able to give you. Great choice, sure, but there's no fun in it - it's all soullessly digital. Just like CDs vs. vinyls. Also, radios are great for listening to emergency broadcasts in emergency situations, when all else usually fails. Moving everyone onto online streaming is not a good move, as it makes non-enthusiasts get rid of radios and thus render them vulnerable in emergency situations when all they'd have is their smartphone and PC.
I live a few miles from Brookmans Park, where several am (and DAB multiplexes) services are broadcast, including radio 5 on 909khz from a monster mast radiator. I find much comfort in the superior warmth of tone when listening to am broadcasts (particularly at night). 📻🎙️
Greetings from Cape Town. The magic of radio for the past 100 years is now to be replaced by more efficient broadcasting methods. Sad, but it is what it is.
Gone are the days when MW broadcast the best stations. Who can remember the golden days of Radio London and Caroline not to mention the much missed Radio Luxembourg fading in and out? It's the way of the world and I haven't owned a MW radio for many many years but on the flipside I used to love to DX MW for any American stations that were making it across the pond and the shutting down of UK stations would now make that much easier. Maybe this will give me some incentive to take up that hobby again.
I live in north east Wales and struggle to receive it on 1215 from Droitwich, it was always getting drowned out by that stupid Talk Sport station or whatever it's called. MW is nearly dead so now is the time to buy a pantry TX unit for my old radios, some of which are wartime and I'd like to keep them alive.
Jeez! I can remember radio1 as "247 radio"! Does anyone else have those little stick on diamonds that arrived through UK letterboxes so we could retune easily? Edit; Bugger! I'm getting old!
I found the tuning guide card at my parents house a few months ago, and bought it back with me to Munich Germany. I can't imagine there are many more of them to be found around here!
Interesting to hear how stations get bought out and merged and taken over, but its also very very sad as small local stations get swallowed up and become generalised having to tow some bigger corporate line and they all start to sound the same. already seen in "local tv" stations too. individuality goes out the window
Very nice mast transmission site being used by now former Absolute Radio. Pity that this left the airwaves as this was the only frequency of Absolute Radio being received. Thanks for sharing 73!
I didn't realize the UK had so many AM stations that played music. We have a lot of AM but its most sports, news, weather, and talk. I happen to live in the 700wlw broadcast area and people still talk about when it was 500,000 watts experimental back in the day. The stories talk about fences vibrating to the sounds,. aluminum siding, and even fillings in peoples mouth. Not sure how true they are but 500,000 watts is a pretty strong signal that could probably light a light bulb up if you were close enough and had it wired correctly.
I'm not sure why music orientated AM stations in the UK have outlasted their US counterparts. Although the ones that are left now are mostly news, sports and talk radio networks.
Personally I think cutting out AM and FM analog services is a terrible idea especially in emergencies. This could be a regrettable decision in the future.
In the US, broadcast radio and TV are the primary, and for the most part only means of delivering emergency messages. Smart TVs and other streaming media devices do not currently offer this capability, nor is there even an IP-facing API (that I know of) to look for alerts. So, there is no excuse to not have a battery powered radio with some means of power generation.
Cities and countries will discover this when it's too late. AM and FM services work when nothing else does. Everyone had (and can still have) a portable radio that works on dry cells and will allow hours of listening if a civil emergency happens.
As I have said elsewhere, you are assuming that everything will survive EMP in a nuclear emergency - let alone the general impact on the broadcasting infrastructure.
One would assume that but I have see this situation before and they play out either being sold off a a whole unit to another broadcaster or sold off in parts , scrap metal and land space. Cellular providrs will nto buy the sites as they like to use new specifically designed towers for their needs. Those towers will be dropped and not unstacked also, cheaper and takes less time.
The one I really miss is Atlantic 252, in the 90s in South west Scotland it was one of the few stations that had decent music you could get with good signal. 👍
Thank you for sharing the switchoff for Moorside. My local 1kW relay for 1215 kHz is also off. I am now only getting the Lisnagarvey transmitter on 1215 & Lydd/Romney Marsh on 1260. A shame this has happened as I have memories of 1215 during the days of Virgin, but MW is not sustainable in this current economic climate.
I heard the repeating broadcast on 1215. I was fiddling about with my kenwood ts 450 s having just re-capped the audio board. I gave myself the day off on 23rd January. ... it was my birthday! !
Just to clear up a few things. Moorside Edge has not been operating at 200kW since 2018. Indeed all Absolute high power sites were reduced to half power following an agreement with OFCOM to continue the service. Arqiva wanted a lot more money to keep the transmitters operating for another 5 years & Bauer wanted to reduce their costs, hence the power reductions & the closure of some low power sites. The transmitter heard operating after the plug was pulled was Lisnagarvey in Northern Ireland (Droitwich & Brookmans Park had already shut down). With no Arqiva engineers based in NI, one had to be sent across. It is also notably the last one to ACTUALLY broadcast a service, as there was a fallback standby transmitter in an adjacent room that was not connected to the shutdown loop. This fired up 30 seconds after the main was tripped out, giving listeners another minute or so of Absolute Radio output before it to was tripped.
When I was in Greece in 1966 they had 2 AM stations in Athens when was Was 7:40 AM on the doll and the other one I think was around 1400 on the ball and we went to Germany and Switzerland I could pick them up over there and listen to the two stations in Athens in Switzerland and Germany I was a teenager at the time and couldn’t believe the reception I got on a transistor radio I live in the United States and most of them stations at night time you can pick them up 5 to 700 miles away
Shame to close down AM stations. Could you do a video on Radio Caroline on 648 AM and how it links up with Manx Radio on 1368 AM as Radio Caroline North twice a month broadcasting from the Caroline ship Ross Revenge. If you haven't already done so. That would be interesting. 648 was formerly used by BBC World Service.
I'm gutted by this. I wasn't even an Absolute listener. Just upset by what it represents. I feel that digital radio sounds crap and internet streaming sounds sterile. The only things I listen on Medium Wave are Radio Caroline. (Usually not a bad signal here in Birmingham) and Radio Scotland which is good after dark. My paranoid / suspicious nature feels that the government want us on platforms that they can switch off with the flick of a switch. Long live Radio (Defined here as a sigmal emitted by an antenna and received by anything from a pocket tranny to a high end tuner.)
I feel the same, i might be a little bit paranoid spectrum person but from 2019 i start to understand that i am just rightly using mind. Of course i feel the same way, click - no communication = they can do whatever they want with us (lie to us). Everything is being organised right now to enslave people, im ashamed i live in theese filthy and sad times. And people are becoming so dumb right now! Everything on media is about non relevant shi* or propaganda.
You just need to do the math on the electricity. If they're anything like AM stations here in the US, they have to reduce power at night. Since I don't know what they power down to, I'm only going to count the "daytime" hours. 200kW X 12 hours is 2.4 megawatts per day. That's 876 megawatts per year. If you assume they pay half of my residential rate (and converting that from $ here in California to GBP), that's £.11/kw. For the year, it's roughly £96,500 If their night-time power is 1/5 that of the daytime power, that's going to add another £20,000 to the power bill. If they're microwaving the signal to the towers, those microwave transmitters are being powered, too. Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RJARL) collects listening data in the UK and the source (AM/DAB/FM, etc) being listened to, and publishes the numbers to broadcasters. I'm assuming that radio (and TV) ad rates are based on listeners/viewers. My guess without seeing the numbers is that the AM listening audience was just too small for them to generate enough ad revenue to keep them on the air.
@@almostfm Agreed. There there is also transmitter & mast maintenance and depreciation, rent of land etc. So probably no change from £150-200k per year. There was a mild hint at sarcasm in my comment, but the cost is obviously very high and much more expensive than an internet link and high-grade server.
While DRM has a few European Technical Standards Institute (ETSI) standards associated with it, it's mostly been implemented on MF in India - so far. There are plans for Pakistan, South Africa and Brazil to set up transmitter infrastructure, among others, and of course for shortwave. DRM didn't catch on in Europe due to DAB and mobile 4G being available first.
It's a shame Digital Radio Mondiale in the UK never took off. It would've given AM a bit more mileage, with a better quality of transmission / signal, and at night robust mode can be activated to reduce the effects of digital dropouts from the night-time propagation effects / ionospheric fading, albeit at the cost of a slight loss of quality, but is still listenable even so.
A good friend of mine has a classic car with its original stereo. He used to listen to absolute radio daily. He was gutted when it stopped transmitting on AM
Listening from Dudley West Midlands. Droitwich went off first I believe as the signal strength dropped by at least 80%, but the message could be heard until Monday when the faint signal went, now I can just make out the message but a very high level of noise. Hope this helps work out what happened
It's such a shame. I liked listening to 1215k absolute radio. They'll all be going that way eventually. All will be fine until the day the Internet goes down.
Used to listen to 1215 Khz here in Ireland a lot, I also miss RTL on 234 Khz. Sad time. The BBC have said by 2030 they want to me digital only no RF ? apps. All People want today is screens and apps, tuning a radio or turning a knob is too much hassle.
I used to listen Absolute radio in my car, thousand miles away from UK. Yes, it was played online, but it was in my car player. After a while it just started to speak "Absolute radio is no longer available on this stream, please install our free app and listen there etc". But the thing is I cannot install any other app into my car's player. So I was left with no more Absolute radio. Like a year ago or so....
This means that I am hearing fewer UK radio stations on MW in Iceland and Denmark (soon Iceland only). I can only hear them during the night in the winter from UK. I don't hear other mainland Europe stations over MW (or SW) in Iceland because of distance from the mainland (over 600 km to UK and over 2000 km on the mainland Europe).
I think the only time I really listened to 1215kHz was when I was playing with crystal radio circuits back in 2008. I do tend to listen to Greatest Hits Radio (formerly Magic AM), but now they have taken over from the local Lincs FM group stations, I expect their AM frequencies are on borrowed time.
Used to listen to them over here in Germany at times. Seems they share the fate of all our LW and MW stations now. I wonder if the hobby broadcasters will take over as they did on SW.
Vicars Lot transmitter nearby carries the Pulse 1 FM signal on 102.5fm. The same transmitter tower for pulse 1 FM also transmitted Greatest Hits Radio (formally pulse 2) on 1530MW. This was turned off this January as well. The 1530 signal was really strong and is one of the only ILR services available throughout the whole Peak District. The Snake Pass and Woodhead roads (which are major routes) have some black spots, and the only ILR station to come in was 1530. (Unless you put the BBC on)
@@RingwayManchester nice one, knew you wouldn’t miss the opportunity since you was in the area. The drone shots with the 62 in the background will look ace 👌
I used to listen to this on 1215khz in Klaipeda , Lithuania. Sometimes even came in superclear in my car stereo on an average afternoon. Edit: well i guess its yet another station adding to the tunein app
Labas :) I was in Palanga 15 years ago and noticed there was excellent reception of UK stations including Radio Scotland on 810. Perhaps the antennas are oriented away from what used to be called "the continent", meaning western Europe, which would benefit areas to the east on the latitude of Newcastle upon Tyne (KLP does have nicer summer weather than its sister region of North Tyneside). My cheap portable, which is all I had to hand, also picked up the North Korean radio and my friend commented on the awful accent of the announcers on their Russian language service.
@@andw2638 oh Nice, yes they are quite clearsounding! I havent actually hunted for the north koreans stations yet, but back home in southern sweden i usually received them easily once i stepped out of my distorted mancave with the tecsun :) Edit: ofc, with all the other factors on your side ;)
They want us all on streaming platforms so they can cut us off and isolate us by merely turning off the Internet and mobile cell circuits! Bring back pigeons! 🤣
Oddly related: Had some guy come to the door recently doing a survey on if we listen to radio or not. Admittedly, I had to say that I personally don't use my tuner on my hi-fi anymore and use my i-Fi Zen Blue streamer for any podcasts or anything radio station related.
It's pretty disappointing that in the UK we've not taken up Digital Radio Mondiale to replace analogue services in the AM broadcast band. Whilst it would still require new gear for broadcasters and listeners, at least we could re-use the transmitter sites. I'm not sure what other feasible uses for that particular band there is.
you cant blame them, I own a garage, so sit in many many folks cars, aside from that one in a blue moon customer, there radios are all on fm or dab and heres the kicker, there almost never on the radio. for me, personally, my cars audio is fed through wireless android auto, so its bbc dance, radio6 and absolute 90's. Its a shame to see AM radio dying but i get it. what would be nice is for the frequencies to be opened up to enthusiasts/pirate radio. could be a fun resurgance.
Years ago, I recall a spokesperson for 1215 MW (it might have been Virgin Radio at the time) publicly stating displeasure with the mediumwave broadcasts. The statement went something like, "We don't want you hearing us on that dreadful frequency [1215 kHz], and The Killers don't want you listening to them on that dreadful frequency." Bashing one's own product seems like really awful PR to me, though it gives an insight on the attitude that the broadcaster had.
AM radio is being shut down here in New Zealand as well. Not on a wide scale (yet) but it has started. A number of high power sites have been shut down and the tower dismantled and removed.
Interesting development on the absolute radio closedown
These Transmitters Should Not Have Been Switched Off
ua-cam.com/video/WlcG6z7I0ms/v-deo.html
I hate seeing all of these old, legacy stations going silent with barely an acknowledgement on how important they were around the world.
When I earned my Novice ticket in 1984, shortwave was still very much alive. Often I would tune in to one on the BBC services on 19 or 31 Meters to get an idea of propagation on the band. Or I might spend a "quiet" evening dx'ing the AM broadcast band for hard-to-find low-power stations in the "graveyard" portion of MW. I considered it a great accomplishment when I could pull out one of those stations from the mud just long enough to copy down call letters, frequency, program info (no Internet back then, only local BBS's!), then log a SINPO code (I had my own form for sending to stations). Then I looked up the station ID in the WRTH handbook, and send it out.
Usually I would receive a reply in two to three weeks along with a QSL card or certificate.
Sometimes replies took up to six months. One reply arrived two YEARS after I sent it! I had completely forgotten about it, as I had moved a few months prior; but the postal service was able to forward it to me.
Now it seems shortwave is mostly dead, except for religious broadcasters and utility stations. A few stateside stations, having lost their parent programmers, now stay on the air by relaying signals from other broadcasters.
Internet is okay, but it will spell the eventual death of shortwave radio.
This is really sad as I work in Poland half of the year and listen to Absolute on 1215 kHz at night and during early morning on the way to work. It’s the way I listen to English programming being stuck in a radio world of non-English programming.
Great to hear from you Walt
@@RingwayManchester This is a great video! One side note in regards to the end of the video, when listening in Poland the audio always had a slight echo or reverb effect which I now know was caused by me receiving the signal from more than one transmitter simultaneously. That faint signal at the end absolutely confirmed this for me.
Same for me, I listened to 1215kHz on my Tecsun (although I luckily almost never have to deal with situations where I don‘t have service, I almost always have 5G now).
Kind of sad that it‘s going anyways.
@@COASTALWAVESWIRES Yes, I saw that "Giant Slinky Antenna" video that you made receiving them in Poland.
It really does suck that they shut off the transmitters for your sake but also because it's so retro. Nothing like a hearty raw AM signal. You might want to consider using a free UK VPN if possible and use either their app or the website
Just as I built my first crystal radio this week, the close down loop was one of first stations I heard through the piezoelectric earphone.
I used to own two AM stations in the USA. I loved the sound of AM and tried hard to deliver a clean, crisp signal to my listeners. It's sad that AM seems to be disappearing.
Thanks for the video and timely information!
In America, AM will never go away because the US is so huge and you can use AM to span the country reliably in times of emergency
Just curious, but what stations did you operate? I'm wondering if I've heard it before.
Clean and crisp in relation to AM are oxymorons
Not capable either due to narrow freq response and atmospheric noise.
@@haywardmKW yeah... AM was always muddled and tinny at best. The amount of inference that AM radios receive is ridiculous.
@@O.G.LIL-MAN And then all the Zoomers and half the Millenials die because they have no idea how to switch to the AM band on their car radio, if they even know what the AM band is, or that their car actually has a radio and not just a bluetooth input.
I listened to the actual last broadcast 19/01/23 at 2350 they did a tribute to 1215khz it was sad but a great send off with excerpts from BBC ,Virgin and Absolute. Last song was absolute beginners by David Bowie.
This shows a great understanding from Absolute Radio on the important legacy of 1215khz, we should give them some credit. I've recently only just started listening to Absolute 80s, and they seem to put a lot of effort into the station: they could have just left it to automated playlists.
The Morse code at the begging of that montage reads 'ABSOLUTE INR2', which is a nice touch.
@@stupossibleify Fond memories of 1215. Right back to my teenage years of radio 1 "the happy sound of 247", and more recently absolute radio keeping me sane during the 2020 lockdown.
🫡
Am radio helped me through bad times here in Northern Ireland during the 80s when FM would be scrambled regularly during "events" shall we say. I would never let AM die. But I still find it strange radios don't have longwave anymore in them.
As someone who has a bit of Civil Defense background and mindset. Along with being a Amateur Radio Operator. The phrase that comes to mind is. "When all else fails.... radio". So I don't see that it's a good idea to have everything digital or internet based. Way to easy to go down.
Which is why I'm glad the FM radio in my phone is functional and not locked out by a carrier.
I'm a broadcast engineer, amateur operator in New Zealand and I know how important analog radio is during times of civil emergency. It is the only thing that works. When we had the Christchurch earthquakes back in 2011, the first thing to be damaged was the phone lines. Then cell sites went down due to loss of power - so people's phones no longer worked. AM and FM stations that still had power or had backup generators were able to keep broadcasting and relaying important information to the public.
Sadly, AM transmitters are slowly being shut down here as well and that's all down to cost of keeping them running 24/7.
@S W I agree fully. It's sad that profit and penny pinching are removing our backup systems that would be really helpful during national emergencies.
How good is your amateur radio laws and do a lot of people out there have their amateur radio license?
@@erikmutthersbough6508 We have good amateur regulations.
To qualify, there is a bank of 60 open-knowledge multi-choice questions. You must get 40 correct.
Once you pass, you have to spend 3 months working either below 5 MHz or above 25 MHz and log 50 contacts. When you have done that then you can work any band at any power. Max EIRP on most bands is 1 kW.
That's the way they want it, for when the shit (us!) hits the fan (them).
I hope AM radio never dies here in the US. I love using old tube and transistor radios and keeping them running. There's something cool about using a machine that's well over half a century old to listen to modern news broadcasts.
lol, over here there's not been any real AM radio more or less ever
I think there's like...maybe one or two stations I can *KINDA* make out, if tuned exactly right (with basic consumer radio, no fancy setups)
I remember laying in bed as a kid listening to my little am radio. As it got later the far away stations would start coming in opening up a whole new world.
@@justinrayguitars6024 I get that when driving long distances at night. Driving down a dark highway and hitting the seek button on the car radio.
Long live AM. Its all I generally listen to especially at night for the DX stations.
yes same in New Zealand. since New Zealand was extremely late to get FM in 1982 every vintage radio NZ made is AM even the cars
Sad day indeed, there's something magical about AM radio for those of us of a certain age. I live in Sheffield and when out in the Peaks away from electrical noise I'm sometimes able to pick up Radio Caroline on 648, but even the pwm LED lights in the car drown it out most times. Really takes me back to my youth, down on the pebble beach at Barry with my Mum's old Bush radio and a 20ft Tank aerial Caroline was, and thankfully still is a legend. They were very lucky to get an AM licence.
given how much enforcement against broadcast transmitting you have covered, it is amazing that those who have the rights to it want to give it up.
Even if they get a discounted rate, powering a 200kw transmitter is going to be hugely expensive
@@almostfm If they're able to buy or generate their electricity for 20 pence (which is cheap) per kiloWatt/hour, powering a 100kW transmitter (which I guess because it looks like they're using a directional antenna system to radiate 200kW ERP), they probably are consuming 120kW/h using an efficient modern transmitter. That's roughly £210,000 each year. That's without maintenance, workers, replacement of equipment, expensive satellite transponder frequencies and everything I forget to mention. If you take that in account, it will be easily up to £500,000 each year or even more. 🤑
But do the public really listen to music radio on mono am?
@@CarolineFord1 driving in the US I think. I tend to use DAB or FM in the car nowdays in UK.
I love AM radio! Not for the content, but for the static. You can hear some very interesting patterns and tones.
The background static is the whole charm of it. It makes you feel alive.
Thanks Lewis, another interesting video that reminds me of those years we'd suffer multipath distortion listening to BBC Radio 1 on 1053 and 1089 KHz.
I live in regional Australia and they literally just replaced a 60yr old 198m tall MW mast with a new 236m tall mast about an hour away from here. 50kW transmitter covers about a 600km stretch of land. We still have no DAB broadcasters up here either. It's all about the coverage.
You have the terrain than lends itself to LW or MW band radio and no one wants DAB, except the broadcasters, and regulators who can sell the spectrum off.
@WirelessNut or an SDR.
@@dennis8196 there's one commercial SW channel that covers Cape York. National broadcaster turned off the SW transmitters at the same site in 2015 but these mostly targeted PNG and the Pacific. The broadcasters want DAB in regional areas but the regulator says no.
Yes no DAB here Newcastle NSW either
In Perth the DAB signal pretty much just covers a 50km radius around the city. Useless any further out than that. AM and FM still rule everywhere else.
I was able to listen to absolute radio here in Sweden, my hallicrafter tuned it in extremely well. Very sad to hear that it's gone :(
I call it "the sign of the times". With broadcast radio, the broadcast pay for the transmission medium. With Internet, the listener pay for the medium.
It is not only that. I can listen to an AM broadcast with a piece of wire, a coil and a diode. With digital, I'm gonna need some sort of processor or other hi-tech solution, with no provisions for an emergency.
And maybe, I was one of the few that still own an AM receiver (or a collection of them)? Sure Absolute Radio wanted to save on the electricity bill.
You're right, it's a sad day today. The entire downhill situation begun EU-wide in 2006 when many national broadcasters begun shutting down AM transmitters all over the continent; shortly after BBC shut down World Service on AM. I don't own a DAB radio...
@@thewhitefalcon8539 did you try DRM yourself?
Its not better, because you need a very strong signal to actualy get usable decoding
Look at this video: ua-cam.com/video/aofq6H1a3tQ/v-deo.html
You can hear, the decoded audio on left channel as well as raw demodulated audio on the right one (it sounds like static)
Now look at 0:47, when the drm signal cuts out, you can still hear analog audio
If this would be transmitted on analog, you would still be able to hear the music
@@thewhitefalcon8539 sadly in digital world its just hard to do that
You eather have enough bits or you dont, you cannot decode half bit, half bad, because you eather have a bit or you dont
Thats why I always said that analog is better for over the air signals because a signal can have a varying degree of quality, and with analog your ears can at least extraxt some information
Also, signal has to be analog at the end anyway for our ears to understand it, so why even convert analog signal to digital, to then transmitt it over a fragile medium, and then convert this signal with varying degree back to analog
Also, not sure if you knew but DRM (we are not talking about DRM+, thats a different story) offers FM quality sound, which you can also get with guess what analog FM signal
So no advantage at all
I know I will probably never convince you to believe analog is better for audio broadcast, and thats all right
So let me just end my talking with this:
m.ua-cam.com/video/YMAPKTnJtnA/v-deo.html
Listen to it, and admire its quality
United AM 1008 in Netherlands and now Absolute Radio... AM is taking a hammering in this new year.
Definitely the end of an era. The broadcasters pay a good amount to keep these AM transmitters alive and maintained, and for the larger ones the benefit of wide coverage is negated now by the fact that so few people listen to those frequencies (and many don't even have access).
Building your own little radio was a fun pastime but the people who do so are few and far between as I think for many, radio has lost its "magic". Even though the things we are doing with it today still boggle the mind.
Loved your million watt tower video Jeff!
@@RingwayManchester Thanks! Hopefully my Dad and I can give a few more neat overviews of broadcasting towers here in the US. I love seeing little differences here and overseas (and what's similar!).
So it's goodbye to 247m. I remember - back in the late sixties - listening to Radio 1 come on air each morning with a series of bongs, follows by George Martin's Theme One. Another old friend laid to rest!
The UA-cam algorithm actually sent me to a worthwhile post. Goodbye to our past.
I have noticed there are less AM, MW, stations in Canada in recent years, moving
to FM, and Europe too.
Thanks for the NYC coverage while you were there, and I learned some things I didn't know. even having been living previously,
most of my lifenear NYC.
Twenty Two AM stations in the US turned in their license to the FCC in 2022, giving up.
FM also is killed in Norway, Switzerland will follow in 2025.
DAB doesn‘t only have drawbacks however, I was able to receive a clear signal from 80km away (due to elevation), while the FM signal was audible but really noisy. HE-AAC v2 isn‘t that bad after all.
However, I still miss listening to AM in this low quality with some cracking. I guess most don‘t want that, but prefer a clear high-quality signal (and to be honest, I‘d probably also broadcast on HD Radio or DRM in the guard bands).
@Max Müller I had heard about Norway 🇳🇴 shutting down FM, though not yet about
Switzerland 🇨🇭 .
In the US I have had Ibiquity HD for FM and
AM for over 20 years now with portable and Auto receivers, though not currently in my
2018 Jeep Renegade, but my previous 2016
Toyota Prius had HD. AM, MW HD has been
declining because, especially at night the
HD sidebands interfere with adjacent AM
station.
There is a small AM station, about 250 watts, which was a local station for many
years, WFAS, for many years in the White
Plains, NY area where I used to live. It is
only receivable with an HD capable radio,
which may be the future in the US for FM
and AM, MW.
I have recently visited the area again and
heard the HD only carrier.
Also, I had an HD receiver, JVC, installed in
my car over 20 years ago, which still has a
CD player and an input wired for an ipod
player, no Bluetooth connection back then.
I was also an early adopter of XM satellite
reception with an outboard Sony receiver
back around 2001, but even though my
Jeep and an Eton Satellit E1XM has it too,
I recently dropped subscribing as it cost
almost US $50.00 a month. Ray.
@@raymondmartin6737 DRM possibly is the better choice, there is a station in Czech that can be received from Germany (it‘s 250 or 1000W I think) and DRM in AM bands is pretty widespread in India.
I see a point in mainly digital AM band radio. Maybe they should have 20kHz wide channels (9/10kHz for AM and 4.5/5kHz for DRM).
Even 6kbps xHE-AAC sounds incredible considering the low data rate. Equally to AM with a good signal, just that DRM seems to work perfectly at a SNR of 7dB>.
There is always AM stereo that would sound so much better than a compressed digital using AAC digital stream, as not hard to upgrade AM sites to the C-QuAM standard.
Thanks for the video. Very interesting, and also very sad. As a fellow radio ham, I used to surf the medium wave band in my earlier years. Who remembers Radio Luck-Lucky-Luxemburg? Caroline? Radio London? Happy days.......
Still got a QSL card from radio Luxembourg 😊
Hi, I'm G4RNI. Radio Nordsee International.
I remember radio Luxembourg from the 60s. "Fab 208" they often called themselves.
@@chrisreynolds6331 You probably will remember “Horace Batchelor, Keynsham, spelt K E Y N S H A M, Bristol” for the football pools as well!
I remember listening to Radio Luxembourg on 208 meters MW in Majorca in the late 1980's. It's signal covered a vast area.
When the Moorside carrier disappeared it dramatically showed how dependable AM was with Droitwich or brookmans park still being audible!
As at approx 2230 on 25 January, the Absolute Radio close down loop is still being broadcast from the 16 KW transmitter in Lisnagarvey, mixed in with the COPE signals from Spain. Here in Suffolk, Absolute Radio is around SINPO 24242, with COPE around SINPO 33243.
See the vid " Lost Timeline: The french distress call " on the channel " Sleeper Awake "
We were busy that week and didn't get a chance to turn it off for a while..... Btw it was a 10kW Harris DX10
Wow, never seen that coming although given the power bill I suppose it was bound to at some stage. Never listened to Absolute Radio on AM to be honest, but as a kid it was Virgin Radio and Atlantic 252 - now they are both gone of the air. Sad.
Another Britsh Radio gone here in Germany.
After BFBS shut down this was one of the services i used.
With all the german stations all ready closed AM falls dormant.
Your relaxing music hits, Smooth Radio...
Loved it!
When I visited Brookman's Park in 1978 after the changeover, the 1215khz service was running at 50KW from an older Marconi Transmitter. I went up to the cabinet and turned up the audio monitor potentiometer and heard the Radio 3 output on the 6 " loudspeaker.
I used to listen to absolute Radio on my 70s Transistor Radios at night here in Germany. Sad to hear it‘s now gone forever
I guess these days were inevitable... I began in AM back in '83 and saw vinyl give way to cd's through '93, working on the air in both AM and FM stations. Upon returning for two more years (2001-2002), it was all digital and touchscreens (I loved the digital production rooms a lot!)... and voicetracking/recorded airshifts, often on several corporate stations (sometimes not even in the same region of the US)... The immortal words of the late, great BB King came to mind finally : "The Thrill Is (was) Gone"... As much as I have embraced and loved modern technology, there is always going to be a part of me that misses the artistic days of real radio.
Glad the FCC is for the MW/AM radio for the backbone of Emergency Alert System in the US. And it’s here to stay in general
If war were to ever break out I promise you they are going to open up those AM radio stations again
I just discovered this a few days ago. Got a total surprise when I tuned into a UK SDR and couldn't find it.
It's a shame to see AM is on its way out. Absolute on 1215 was my go to station for years.
I stopped listening to the radio in general about 3 years ago, so I suppose I can't complain too much about losing a service I had stopped using.
It still feels sad to see it end though.
Aye tuning the MW band these days is mostly dead air even compared with a decade ago.
I know of a couple of ham radio clubs that have gotten permission to access defunct AM broadcast antenna sites here in the states and used the towers as antennas for field day events.
I'm sorry to see that they shut off the AM service over there. I was was a bit surprised that they put out 200,000 watts. Here in the U.S., AM stations are limited to 50,000 watts with many stations running far less than that. On the other hand, it may open the doors for some AM DXing possibilities for you. It may come of a bit surprise to some , but a few stations from the U.S. and Canada do make it across the pond. Including the 50,000 watt New York City stations such as 710 WOR, 1010 WINS, and 1130 WBBR as they beam their signals east. Check out the many Transatlantic AM DXing videos out there on UA-cam,. Cheers
There was a time during the 20's and 30's that the US had a 500KW station on the air. WLW was the first and only station in the US to operate with a license at that power until more stations wanted to increase their power to 500 KW at which time the FCC declined to renew the special license WLW had and they had to reduce power back to 50KW.
Yes, I’m more pleased than sad. It extends AM dxing for us in this part of the world
There's still an AM station in Algeria pumping out 1,500,000 watts, albeit on 252 kHz in the long wave band.
The US is big enough, and with enough analog oriented users, to make an AM station still commercially viable. Also the electricity is very cheap compared to what happened here in the UK...
In its heyday in the '70s, Radio Montecarlo had a 1.2 MW transmitter; it used a valve the size of a person...
It is unfortunate for me too. In last years I managed to listen to 1215 almost dayly in Poland with my wonderfull vintage radio and 15 m antenna . . I admire AM good music even with interferences - it has special athmosphere no comparable . to FM, Digital. And that awareness of direct communication through thousands km.
In last months reception was weaker so I would conclude that the power was down due to rise of energy costs - we need to remember that station was received in other countries without payment. My last tape recording is very weak: sad announcement. In my life I lost 208 Luxemburg, R.Carolina, R Seagull, Nostalgia 5 from Hilversum and now this.
All the official radiostations in Norway has gone over to the DAB system. (Data signals on the air). Only local stations use FM now here. So in your car or at home you have to by DAB recievers to here NRK. Of course DAB radios has also FM, but everybody here had to buy new radios. 😞 I liked the old FM band! If you are driving outside towns, you miss the signals, and don't hear anything for a while. (hehe) Thank's for the video Lewis 🙂It remind me when we closed the ofisell FM broudcast system. The best from LB1NH Arild,
I find AM radio very amusing because of the SDR's available on the internet today, picking various radio bands, 0 - 30MHz being the standard. A example is the KiwiSDR project, which are hosted by normal people, and scatered all around the globe, so you could use them to listen to the local radio stations from that place. You can even look at the map, and pick one close to the transmitter site of that specific station. So, it's very sad to see the number of SDR increasing, but the actual stations being shut down.
Id love to see the amplifier for this station, I bet the steel vacuum tubes are massive!
I read somewhere that Virgin and Talk Radio (as they were then) replaced all of the old BBC valve-based transmitters with solid state units when they launched in 1993. Probably Harris units.
@@VictheSecret Yes that is and was the case in more recent times but Arqiva didn’t even exist in 1993.
@@VictheSecret another thatcher tory win.
Very sad day for radio indeed. I know you can stream, or if you must- get it on awful DAB, but there was always something magical about receiving AM broadcasts. Thankfully there’s HF to listen to!
Well, Absolute Radio geoblocks their streaming... although if you're savvy enough, you may overcome this, even without a VPN 🤓
But where's the joy if it's (almost) as easy to pick up as literally thousands of other streaming radio stations from all over the world, compared to mediumwave & shortwave where you have to struggle sometimes to hear the station?
@@ArnieDXer There's a charm to radio listening that "Internet streaming" cannot and will never be able to give you. Great choice, sure, but there's no fun in it - it's all soullessly digital. Just like CDs vs. vinyls.
Also, radios are great for listening to emergency broadcasts in emergency situations, when all else usually fails. Moving everyone onto online streaming is not a good move, as it makes non-enthusiasts get rid of radios and thus render them vulnerable in emergency situations when all they'd have is their smartphone and PC.
I live a few miles from Brookmans Park, where several am (and DAB multiplexes) services are broadcast, including radio 5 on 909khz from a monster mast radiator.
I find much comfort in the superior warmth of tone when listening to am broadcasts (particularly at night).
📻🎙️
So sad to see this. Absolute Radio 1215 was a beacon for MW DX across the pond in the USA.
Greetings from Cape Town. The magic of radio for the past 100 years is now to be replaced by more efficient broadcasting methods. Sad, but it is what it is.
247m you say... a certain BBC employee had the number plate JS247 😂
Farewell from Lancaster, California USA.
Gone are the days when MW broadcast the best stations. Who can remember the golden days of Radio London and Caroline not to mention the much missed Radio Luxembourg fading in and out? It's the way of the world and I haven't owned a MW radio for many many years but on the flipside I used to love to DX MW for any American stations that were making it across the pond and the shutting down of UK stations would now make that much easier. Maybe this will give me some incentive to take up that hobby again.
Great opportunity for Radio Caroline to expand . Buy / Lease the site and TX gear !
I live in north east Wales and struggle to receive it on 1215 from Droitwich, it was always getting drowned out by that stupid Talk Sport station or whatever it's called.
MW is nearly dead so now is the time to buy a pantry TX unit for my old radios, some of which are wartime and I'd like to keep them alive.
Jeez! I can remember radio1 as "247 radio"! Does anyone else have those little stick on diamonds that arrived through UK letterboxes so we could retune easily?
Edit; Bugger! I'm getting old!
I found the tuning guide card at my parents house a few months ago, and bought it back with me to Munich Germany. I can't imagine there are many more of them to be found around here!
@@markwoolley3672 Or many that remember them or the jingle that was drilled into our heads before the move... 🎶"Two four seven radiooooo!"🎶
The wavelength switch over of R1,2,3,4 with the diamond stickers - wasn't that around 1978?
End of an era
Interesting to hear how stations get bought out and merged and taken over, but its also very very sad as small local stations get swallowed up and become generalised having to tow some bigger corporate line and they all start to sound the same. already seen in "local tv" stations too. individuality goes out the window
Very nice mast transmission site being used by now former Absolute Radio. Pity that this left the airwaves as this was the only frequency of Absolute Radio being received. Thanks for sharing 73!
I didn't realize the UK had so many AM stations that played music. We have a lot of AM but its most sports, news, weather, and talk. I happen to live in the 700wlw broadcast area and people still talk about when it was 500,000 watts experimental back in the day.
The stories talk about fences vibrating to the sounds,. aluminum siding, and even fillings in peoples mouth. Not sure how true they are but 500,000 watts is a pretty strong signal that could probably light a light bulb up if you were close enough and had it wired correctly.
I'm not sure why music orientated AM stations in the UK have outlasted their US counterparts. Although the ones that are left now are mostly news, sports and talk radio networks.
Personally I think cutting out AM and FM analog services is a terrible idea especially in emergencies. This could be a regrettable decision in the future.
In the US, broadcast radio and TV are the primary, and for the most part only means of delivering emergency messages. Smart TVs and other streaming media devices do not currently offer this capability, nor is there even an IP-facing API (that I know of) to look for alerts.
So, there is no excuse to not have a battery powered radio with some means of power generation.
Cities and countries will discover this when it's too late. AM and FM services work when nothing else does. Everyone had (and can still have) a portable radio that works on dry cells and will allow hours of listening if a civil emergency happens.
I would assume the AM transmitters would be maintained for use in an emergency.
As I have said elsewhere, you are assuming that everything will survive EMP in a nuclear emergency - let alone the general impact on the broadcasting infrastructure.
One would assume that but I have see this situation before and they play out either being sold off a a whole unit to another broadcaster or sold off in parts , scrap metal and land space. Cellular providrs will nto buy the sites as they like to use new specifically designed towers for their needs. Those towers will be dropped and not unstacked also, cheaper and takes less time.
AM radio is stilling going strong here in Australia, DAB is a bit like beta tapes , if your going to listen to digital you may as well stream .
The one I really miss is Atlantic 252, in the 90s in South west Scotland it was one of the few stations that had decent music you could get with good signal. 👍
Thank you for sharing the switchoff for Moorside. My local 1kW relay for 1215 kHz is also off. I am now only getting the Lisnagarvey transmitter on 1215 & Lydd/Romney Marsh on 1260. A shame this has happened as I have memories of 1215 during the days of Virgin, but MW is not sustainable in this current economic climate.
I heard the repeating broadcast on 1215. I was fiddling about with my kenwood ts 450 s having just re-capped the audio board. I gave myself the day off on 23rd January. ... it was my birthday! !
0:43 "sound better on digital" ... techmoans video about 48-64 kbps mono DAB radio stations comes to mind *shudders *
some music stations near me are in 24kbps mono
Just to clear up a few things. Moorside Edge has not been operating at 200kW since 2018. Indeed all Absolute high power sites were reduced to half power following an agreement with OFCOM to continue the service. Arqiva wanted a lot more money to keep the transmitters operating for another 5 years & Bauer wanted to reduce their costs, hence the power reductions & the closure of some low power sites. The transmitter heard operating after the plug was pulled was Lisnagarvey in Northern Ireland (Droitwich & Brookmans Park had already shut down). With no Arqiva engineers based in NI, one had to be sent across. It is also notably the last one to ACTUALLY broadcast a service, as there was a fallback standby transmitter in an adjacent room that was not connected to the shutdown loop. This fired up 30 seconds after the main was tripped out, giving listeners another minute or so of Absolute Radio output before it to was tripped.
When I was in Greece in 1966 they had 2 AM stations in Athens when was Was 7:40 AM on the doll and the other one I think was around 1400 on the ball and we went to Germany and Switzerland I could pick them up over there and listen to the two stations in Athens in Switzerland and Germany I was a teenager at the time and couldn’t believe the reception I got on a transistor radio I live in the United States and most of them stations at night time you can pick them up 5 to 700 miles away
Shame to close down AM stations. Could you do a video on Radio Caroline on 648 AM and how it links up with Manx Radio on 1368 AM as Radio Caroline North twice a month broadcasting from the Caroline ship Ross Revenge. If you haven't already done so. That would be interesting. 648 was formerly used by BBC World Service.
Yep heard this at the weekend loop recording on the old frg 7.cheers lewis...
I'm gutted by this. I wasn't even an Absolute listener. Just upset by what it represents. I feel that digital radio sounds crap and internet streaming sounds sterile. The only things I listen on Medium Wave are Radio Caroline. (Usually not a bad signal here in Birmingham) and Radio Scotland which is good after dark. My paranoid / suspicious nature feels that the government want us on platforms that they can switch off with the flick of a switch. Long live Radio (Defined here as a sigmal emitted by an antenna and received by anything from a pocket tranny to a high end tuner.)
As far as AM audio quality goes Anything sounds better.
A pocket tranny...😆
I feel the same, i might be a little bit paranoid spectrum person but from 2019 i start to understand that i am just rightly using mind. Of course i feel the same way, click - no communication = they can do whatever they want with us (lie to us). Everything is being organised right now to enslave people, im ashamed i live in theese filthy and sad times. And people are becoming so dumb right now! Everything on media is about non relevant shi* or propaganda.
I would listen to that occasionally on my crystal set. How could they think that saving the cost of a 200kW transmitter is reasonable I'll never know!
You just need to do the math on the electricity. If they're anything like AM stations here in the US, they have to reduce power at night. Since I don't know what they power down to, I'm only going to count the "daytime" hours. 200kW X 12 hours is 2.4 megawatts per day. That's 876 megawatts per year. If you assume they pay half of my residential rate (and converting that from $ here in California to GBP), that's £.11/kw. For the year, it's roughly £96,500 If their night-time power is 1/5 that of the daytime power, that's going to add another £20,000 to the power bill. If they're microwaving the signal to the towers, those microwave transmitters are being powered, too.
Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RJARL) collects listening data in the UK and the source (AM/DAB/FM, etc) being listened to, and publishes the numbers to broadcasters. I'm assuming that radio (and TV) ad rates are based on listeners/viewers. My guess without seeing the numbers is that the AM listening audience was just too small for them to generate enough ad revenue to keep them on the air.
@@almostfm Agreed. There there is also transmitter & mast maintenance and depreciation, rent of land etc. So probably no change from £150-200k per year. There was a mild hint at sarcasm in my comment, but the cost is obviously very high and much more expensive than an internet link and high-grade server.
What a shame that Digital Radio Mondiale never caught on.
DRM is catching on (eventually) in other continents but sadly not in Europe.
@@johnflowers1976 Not in the Americas, unfortunately. Standard MW is still here for the moment, though.
While DRM has a few European Technical Standards Institute (ETSI) standards associated with it, it's mostly been implemented on MF in India - so far. There are plans for Pakistan, South Africa and Brazil to set up transmitter infrastructure, among others, and of course for shortwave. DRM didn't catch on in Europe due to DAB and mobile 4G being available first.
It's a shame Digital Radio Mondiale in the UK never took off.
It would've given AM a bit more mileage, with a better quality of transmission / signal, and at night robust mode can be activated to reduce the effects of digital dropouts from the night-time propagation effects / ionospheric fading, albeit at the cost of a slight loss of quality, but is still listenable even so.
I won't be listening anymore. This is sad 😢
I'm in the US, and I still fell bummed over the downing of an OG radio station :(
A good friend of mine has a classic car with its original stereo. He used to listen to absolute radio daily. He was gutted when it stopped transmitting on AM
AM is essential for resilience, the internet is the first thing to go in a crisis, DAB does not have the range.
Listening from Dudley West Midlands. Droitwich went off first I believe as the signal strength dropped by at least 80%, but the message could be heard until Monday when the faint signal went, now I can just make out the message but a very high level of noise. Hope this helps work out what happened
I'm in The Neterlands, and I'm still getting a strong signal from somewhere.
I have never heard of a station broadcasting a shutdown loop, that's a new one on me lol.
Oh no... I used to be able to pick up Absolute Radio _barely_ here in Lithuania. That was a fun listen, I'll miss it...
It's such a shame. I liked listening to 1215k absolute radio. They'll all be going that way eventually. All will be fine until the day the Internet goes down.
Used to listen to 1215 Khz here in Ireland a lot, I also miss RTL on 234 Khz. Sad time.
The BBC have said by 2030 they want to me digital only no RF ? apps.
All People want today is screens and apps, tuning a radio or turning a knob is too much hassle.
Great for those who can't get digital. DAB doesn't reach where I live (in a valley). The assumption as ever that everyone lives in a city.
I used to listen Absolute radio in my car, thousand miles away from UK.
Yes, it was played online, but it was in my car player. After a while it just started to speak "Absolute radio is no longer available on this stream, please install our free app and listen there etc". But the thing is I cannot install any other app into my car's player. So I was left with no more Absolute radio. Like a year ago or so....
Living in Ireland I could pick up Absolute radio at night on the AM band. Was sad to hear this message last night.
This means that I am hearing fewer UK radio stations on MW in Iceland and Denmark (soon Iceland only). I can only hear them during the night in the winter from UK. I don't hear other mainland Europe stations over MW (or SW) in Iceland because of distance from the mainland (over 600 km to UK and over 2000 km on the mainland Europe).
long live radio caroline!
Try driving around Scotland and in many places you have no fm digital or mobile phone signals AM is all there is so much for progress
Shame, the signal would reach here in berlin at night time and was able to listen while driving in my van
Can't remember the last time I listened to AM radio!
For those who believe music is gone from AM, search this on UA-cam:
*_Ten Presets of AM Radio Music Stations in October, 2022 !!_*
It's all about money. AM will be missed.
Sad also I hate when broadcasters say you can still listen for free. Well not everyone wants to buy new equipment to listen.
I think the only time I really listened to 1215kHz was when I was playing with crystal radio circuits back in 2008. I do tend to listen to Greatest Hits Radio (formerly Magic AM), but now they have taken over from the local Lincs FM group stations, I expect their AM frequencies are on borrowed time.
Now I want to take over all those dormant transmitters and spread my own brand of the truth.
Used to listen to them over here in Germany at times. Seems they share the fate of all our LW and MW stations now. I wonder if the hobby broadcasters will take over as they did on SW.
Vicars Lot transmitter nearby carries the Pulse 1 FM signal on 102.5fm. The same transmitter tower for pulse 1 FM also transmitted Greatest Hits Radio (formally pulse 2) on 1530MW. This was turned off this January as well.
The 1530 signal was really strong and is one of the only ILR services available throughout the whole Peak District. The Snake Pass and Woodhead roads (which are major routes) have some black spots, and the only ILR station to come in was 1530. (Unless you put the BBC on)
Video on vicars lot coming soon :)
@@RingwayManchester nice one, knew you wouldn’t miss the opportunity since you was in the area.
The drone shots with the 62 in the background will look ace 👌
I used to listen to this on 1215khz in Klaipeda , Lithuania. Sometimes even came in superclear in my car stereo on an average afternoon.
Edit: well i guess its yet another station adding to the tunein app
Labas :) I was in Palanga 15 years ago and noticed there was excellent reception of UK stations including Radio Scotland on 810. Perhaps the antennas are oriented away from what used to be called "the continent", meaning western Europe, which would benefit areas to the east on the latitude of Newcastle upon Tyne (KLP does have nicer summer weather than its sister region of North Tyneside).
My cheap portable, which is all I had to hand, also picked up the North Korean radio and my friend commented on the awful accent of the announcers on their Russian language service.
@@andw2638 oh Nice, yes they are quite clearsounding! I havent actually hunted for the north koreans stations yet, but back home in southern sweden i usually received them easily once i stepped out of my distorted mancave with the tecsun :)
Edit: ofc, with all the other factors on your side ;)
They want us all on streaming platforms so they can cut us off and isolate us by merely turning off the Internet and mobile cell circuits!
Bring back pigeons! 🤣
Oddly related: Had some guy come to the door recently doing a survey on if we listen to radio or not. Admittedly, I had to say that I personally don't use my tuner on my hi-fi anymore and use my i-Fi Zen Blue streamer for any podcasts or anything radio station related.
I remember the night Radio Luxembourg (The great 208) closed down. It was one of the saddest nights in history. Very few stations left on MW now.
It's pretty disappointing that in the UK we've not taken up Digital Radio Mondiale to replace analogue services in the AM broadcast band. Whilst it would still require new gear for broadcasters and listeners, at least we could re-use the transmitter sites. I'm not sure what other feasible uses for that particular band there is.
Can’t believe it! thats so sad😢
you cant blame them, I own a garage, so sit in many many folks cars, aside from that one in a blue moon customer, there radios are all on fm or dab and heres the kicker, there almost never on the radio. for me, personally, my cars audio is fed through wireless android auto, so its bbc dance, radio6 and absolute 90's. Its a shame to see AM radio dying but i get it. what would be nice is for the frequencies to be opened up to enthusiasts/pirate radio. could be a fun resurgance.
Years ago, I recall a spokesperson for 1215 MW (it might have been Virgin Radio at the time) publicly stating displeasure with the mediumwave broadcasts. The statement went something like, "We don't want you hearing us on that dreadful frequency [1215 kHz], and The Killers don't want you listening to them on that dreadful frequency." Bashing one's own product seems like really awful PR to me, though it gives an insight on the attitude that the broadcaster had.
I think at the time Branson tried too get the FM 105.8 frequency nationalised
AM radio is being shut down here in New Zealand as well. Not on a wide scale (yet) but it has started. A number of high power sites have been shut down and the tower dismantled and removed.