shortWWWave

After a number of years known as "HOFM", Hobart's original commercial radio station has returned to its original name from 1931 of 7HO. This goes against the trend of radio stations in Australia to drop the digits from their callsigns which reflect the state in which they are broadcasting (in this case, the seven refers to Tasmania).

The BBC World Service have announced on their website that the remaining shortwave transmissions to Europe will end on February 18th.

For anyone who relies on these broadcasts, they provide some alternatives, although suggestions of cable and satellite broadcasts aren't really going to be of much use to European travellers relying on the BBC for news broadcasts, when they're on the road. With the increased potential for Kosovo to become a flashpoint, this may leave a good number of people in the dark, and it strikes me as a particularly short-sighted move.

The Fiji Broadcasting Corporation has taken leaps and bounds to improve its website, over the last year, and now all of its six radio stations are streaming over the internet. This now gives the rest of the world a great opportunity to hear from a country that has been rather inaccessible on the radio bands up until now.

The stations are:

Radio Fiji 1: News, weather, culture, religious programs in Fijian and English. [Stream]

Radio Fiji 2: News and information in Hindi. [Stream]

Bula FM: Popular local and international music, in Fijian. [Stream]

Radio Mirchi: Hindi pop music. [Stream]

Radio Fiji Gold: 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's music, targetted at the 35-60 age group. [Stream].

2Day FM: youth station, playing a wide range of modern music. [Stream]

As reported here earlier, the rumours of Australia's ABC-TV being rebadged as ABC1 have become reality, and the station's new format will begin on Friday February 8th at midday.

There will also be changes to ABC2, which will be getting a new logo, and considerably altered programming. In the past, ABC2 has mostly been used for timeshifted programming and repeats, but it will now be showing increased amounts of new programs, including arts and culture.

Australia's new government is planning on using sport to drive digital television uptake, as reported in Melbourne's Age newspaper today. The government is considering allowing free-to-air stations to broadcast sporting events on their extra digital channels (which are not simulcast on the analogue broadcasts), so as to allow sport to stay free without compromising the stations' ratings on their main channels.

The previous government made a quite a mess of digital television policy, first banning commercial stations from multichannelling, and severely limiting the types of programming allowed to be broadcast on the second channels of the two publically funded broadcasters; they later removed some of these restrictions, but we're still stuck with the silly situation that the only commercial multichannelling allowed is on the high-definition channels.

Hopefully the new government's changes are the first step towards fixing the last government's rat's nest of problems.

Sydney's Radio 2SM, currently languishing near the bottom of the ratings, with a faily half-hearted talk format, was once a ratings powerhouse in the city, commanding large audiences with a very successful Top 40 format.

2SM: A "Super" Story documents the history of the station, from its beginning in 1931, through to its low-rating head of a network that encompasses most of New South Wales and Queensland today.

Anyone wanting to listen to the station's current incarnation can click on one of their three streams:

• MP3


• Windows Media


• Realplayer

After 69 years on air (note: German text), Radio Sweden will be closing its German shortwave and mediumwave broadcasts on March 30th, 2008.

According to the report, the German service has been particularly successful on the internet, so a podcast and on-demand service will remain at www.radioschweden.net. This popularity has come at the expense of the shortwave broadcasts, however, where listener numbers have dropped dramatically.

Radio Sweden's German podcasts are available here.