Sound Digital Ltd is today advertising for anyone wanting to add their radio station to the national DAB platform to get in touch with them.
The multiplex, which covers the majority of the UK population, is currently full, but RadioToday understands changes are coming which will make an extra 32kbits/sec available for an additional station.
It’s not known at this stage if a current radio station is being removed, or if one or more stations are switching to DAB+ to make space for the extra services.
In September, Kelvin MacKenzie’s London sports station Love Sport Radio announced it will broadcast nationally via SDL by the end of the year, so we can expect at least two new radio stations to appear in the coming months.
Bauer Media, Arqiva and Wireless are joint owners of the platform which now carries 20 radio stations including Absolute Radio 80s, BFBS, Jazz FM, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio. It currently has seven DAB+ services and 13 original DAB.
See the advert for Sound Digital’s spare capacity here.
32?? Might as well be on Long Wave!
Or good old fashioned Medium Wave
The sound of quality AM can be better than over compressed digital radio.
Its for DAB+ which is good enough for a signal the equivalent to FM stereo.
32kb spare? Excellent! Let’s get another low quality metallic sounding, mono radio station on the air … or two .. or six!!
It will be taken by a DAB+ station (using AAC+) which can be stereo (if it’s a speech station they may choose to use mono).
Hi what about cheesy FM great staion.top songs as well.
Heart + + . This is HEART + +. more dreary music, at the same time every day, from the same CD. THIS IS HEART PLUS PLUS.
I listen to cheesy and max all the time at home. The niocast stations are so much better than bauer global etc signals a bit weak for work be great for stations like these to get on digital 2
Virgin Radio 80s? Get in competition with Absolute 80s and Heart 80s.
More likely the newly launched (online) Absolute Radio 10s service.
The advertisement is more likely to be going through the motions in the interests of ‘fairness’.
Somebody suggested Absolute 20’s on Absolute Radio Facebook page a few weeks ago and I told this person you will have to wait ten year for that station to launch.
I have a radio which picks up the newer DAB+ signals & I can confirm that as of today (December 13th) that Panjab Radio (which broadcast in ‘original flavour’ DAB at 56 k/bps) has ceased broadcasting. Love Sport has taken over 24 k/bps of the capacity in the newer DAB+ format leaving another 32 for an additional DAB+ service.
Chris Evans announced new virgin spin off Jan 1st 2020.hope its less repetitive than anthems. Great station but not many songs on playlist.