[cma-l] Community Radio 50% Rules

[Julian Mellor]

Stroud's situation is absolutely mirrored here in Somerset - pesky  
hills and valleys.

Soo at Ofcom tells us that increasing the height of our transmitter  
(which they'd allow) would have a greater impact on reception than  
increasing output power, but the landlords aren't happy with the idea  
and I suspect the planners might have a wobbler as well.

Equally we are aware that some households are amazingly inept when it  
comes to tuning a radio and don't realise that trying a different  
room, changing position in the room, or just turning the radio round  
can make a big difference.

That aside though, we can do nothing when people complain to us about  
poor reception, apart from suggest they try the web stream.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that a commercial station in  
Wales (about two hour's drive from here) that transmits on the  
waveband next to ours has a stronger and overpowering signal when one  
is listening just a few minutes away from our studio.

Julian
10Radio
Somerset


On 11 Oct 2010, at 01:42, claire penketh wrote:

>  Absolutely!!!!! Here in Stroud we have a nightmare topography of  
> valleys and hills, reception has been traditionally been really  
> tricky here, even for the mainstream media.  Despite the fact that  
> there is no commercial station in Stroud itself, as Star FM handed  
> back their licence, and only the ubiquitous Heart  blasts from  
> Gloucester, we had to trim our  transmitters output to just over 20  
> watts in order to comply with OFCOMS regs
> The feedback we get from people is that they love us, but can't pick  
> us up easily. Tricky to reach the whole community really...
>
> Claire Penketh
> Station Manager
> Stroud FMl
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.commedia.org.uk/pipermail/cma-l/attachments/20101011/b545764c/attachment.html>