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.

Rumours abound today that Australia's ABC-TV could be shortly renamed "ABC1", based upon a short promo that has been posted at TV Tonight. If so, this would be one of the most significant changes to ABC-TV in its 51-year history.

The video seems to suggest that the well-known ABC logo (see left) may disappear, which may well result in much irate correspondence to newspapers and the ABC...

Almost 28 years after commercial FM radio came to Australia, Launceston in Tasmania is finally set to have its own commercial FM station. 7LA, the major local commercial station, currently broadcasting on 1098 kHz, was scheduled to start test transmissions on 89.3MHz on January 8th.

Launceston's other commercial station, 7EX, is also expected to move to 90.1MHz at some point in the future; the station currently relays Melbourne's Sport 927 horse racing station. It is likely that the station will change format when it moves to FM, and the Sport 927 broadcasts will transfer to a narrowcast AM licence, as an FM commercial licence is too valuable to waste on horse racing.

The 2008 edition of the renowned Passport to World Band Radio book is now available. For years, the Passport has been providing schedules, receiver news, a comprehensive radio directory and one of the best introductions to shortwave radio for novices available. For a brief look at this edition, the table of contents is available online.

Passport to World Band Radio 2008 can be purchased from Amazon, here:

After months of promotion, Australia's Ten network has finally launched their new high-definition multichannel, named Ten-HD. The station promises up to 50-hours of different content to the regular, standard definition Ten service, although most of this will be outside peak viewing hours. The Channel Ten evening news, broadcast at 5pm for many years now, will be repeated half an hour later on the high-definition channel, and already a number of low-rating programs have been moved off the SD channel onto the HD service.

Unfortunately, there isn't much prime-time multichannelling, and most printed television guides haven't yet listed the new station, so it remains to be seen whether it will gather much of an audience.

This is the second HD multichannel service to start operation in Australia; back in October, the Seven network commenced separate programming on their 7-HD channel.

This leaves the Nine network as the only metropolitan commercial network without a multichannel service, although they have claimed it will begin in 2008.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's local station in Darwin, 105.7 ABC Darwin, is now streaming online meaning that now, local ABC stations in all state and territory capital cities are available via the internet.

ABC Darwin carries many of the programs broadcast on VL8A, VL8K and VL8T, Australia's only remaining domestic shortwave transmitters.

There's not all that many regional Australian radio stations streaming their programs on the internet, but as of this week, there's one more: 3GV, broadcasting from Sale in eastern Victoria, on 1242 kHz.

However, the station will only exist with this name for one more day; according to The Spy Report, the station will be relaunched on Friday November 30th, 2007, at midday, with a new name of Gold 1242, playing oldies.

The station's stream is here.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation will launch its third domestic television station, ABC3, in April 2008, if government funding goes ahead. Australia is currently in the middle of a federal election, and the governing conservative coalition has promised $80 million to the ABC for the station, dedicated towards commercial-free children's programming, if re-elected.

The ABC currently broadcasts two domestic channels, ABC-TV (analog and digital) and ABC2 (digital only). ABC2 currently carries a large amount of childrens programming during daylight hours, and it is unknown if this programming will continue after the launch of the new channel.

All India Radio, India's public broadcaster, has a novel on-demand service: users can select one of a number of songs from a list, dial a number on their phone and then enter a code. The song selected will then be queued to be played over a transmitter in Chennai, Kolkata or Mumbai, during selected times.