b2b fm 88.6

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Mon Sep 05, 2016 9:59 pm

I ment listening on 88.65 was difficult not 88.6

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Tue Sep 06, 2016 1:23 am

I'm pretty sure B2B fm bought their transmiter from house fm when they first started because the last days of house fm then on 886 and the start of B2B in early 2011 was exactly the same signal? and who remembers house being on both 1003 and 886 at the same time for about 4 months before house came off 886?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by DJ Mikey » Thu Sep 22, 2016 9:23 pm

Never once picked them up

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Fri Sep 23, 2016 6:10 pm

You won't now until you get to the centre to north /east of London?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by 4therecord » Sat Sep 24, 2016 3:27 pm

I'm not one to generally disagree with Albert, but "Their signal is fine in most of north, east and south-east London".... I'm in SE London and it doesn't exist, I'm around all day between SE and East London and the city.... you can get it manually tuned in but it's not listenable, yet I know people in certain parts of North London who get it VERY well..... but they all live in the same area

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by Effemm » Sat Sep 24, 2016 9:13 pm

Agree...its very North Circular, a406 friendly, not south of the water, some nice showz :tup

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sat Sep 24, 2016 9:37 pm

That's exactly the point I made when I started this topic? It's probably got a smaller coverage area than any station legal or pirate except possibly nu soundz 92.0 fm?I miss hearing it on the fm?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sat Sep 24, 2016 9:39 pm

And as for the North circular? Only past Brent Cross?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sat Sep 24, 2016 9:47 pm

And will we ever get a legal station like B2B on fm and why haven't solar radio and misoul gone for fm instead of the enoying dab because it just ain't happening for dab?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by teckniqs » Sun Sep 25, 2016 12:36 am

When I first heard B2B I thought it was an RSL on a weird frequency because (in my opinion) it sounded just like a legal station, so yes is the answer to your first question. :D


DAB stands for dead and buried, nothing more to say on that matter. :tup

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by Albert H » Sun Sep 25, 2016 2:59 am

You're all very wrong about DAB. Stephen and I used to joke that it was "Dead And Buried", but it seems that it's going to be available to everyone sooner or later. The receivers are falling in price (as you'd expect with the take-up of the technology), and the transmission end is now well within the reach of the more technically adept pirates!

There's an Open Source DAB+ project going on at the moment, and the FOSS encoder software is now in commercial use in several parts of the world. One prototype test site used some Raspberry Pis as the audio stream encoders and a knackered laptop as the multiplexer. The transmission part is easily handled by the latest generation of Software Defined Radio modules, and a linear 6MHz wide Band III PA really isn't too tricky for the smarter ones amongst us.

The problem in London is that 5 of the possible 6 multiplexes are now used. Out in the rest of the country, there's less of it, so there's more space possible.

We can do it, but probably shouldn't bother at the moment. I remember when the FM-only pirates were seen as "elitist" by some of the die-hard lefties!
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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sun Sep 25, 2016 9:58 am

Albert are you saying that you think dab will catch on properly after all? One day

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sun Sep 25, 2016 10:51 am

Even if they do get dab right one day it still seems to me people are bypassing dab going straight from fm to the Internet because you can have any radio station you want so why would you get a set for dab with some more stations ? when every station can be heard online?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by Albert H » Mon Sep 26, 2016 12:36 am

famefm wrote:Albert are you saying that you think dab will catch on properly after all? One day
I'm fairly sure that in the next 30 years or so, DAB+ will become quite widely used. It'll be installed in cars as standard, and most home hi-fi gear will have it built-in. The transmitter sites will be increased to give more reliable coverage, and the technology will improve. The reductions in audio quality to squeeze more stations in will stop, and we'll end up with many more multiplex frequencies, probably twice as many as we have at the moment.

FM will still be with us for the foreseeable future. The proposed "switch-off" probably won't happen in the next 30 years, and OFCOM will finally realise that it isn't necessary for National stations to smear themselves across 60% of the band, and that some intelligent band planning will improve coverage for everyone, and allow many more local stations.
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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by famefm » Sun Oct 16, 2016 7:12 pm

I was in central London yesterday I was surprised they bother broadcasting with such a poor quality sound and I got them up to Hammersmith on my way home?

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by rigmo » Sun Sep 24, 2023 11:19 pm

Albert H wrote: Sun Sep 25, 2016 2:59 am You're all very wrong about DAB. Stephen and I used to joke that it was "Dead And Buried", but it seems that it's going to be available to everyone sooner or later.
this is what I was most afraid of.. that quantity will stifle quality... fucking capitalism and population control.. the world is going into reverse at full speed.. the more I researched everything we use today and what we will use was already invented at the end of the 80s. .. golden times!
Albert H reading this article, it will be much faster than 30 years..
https://www-tportal-hr.translate.goog/t ... r_pto=wapp

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by rigmo » Mon Sep 25, 2023 8:37 am

Bryan Emm
You don’t need 192kbps to listen to radio. FM tops out at 15khz and so does 128kbps mp3 stereo. Slice it in half and you get 64kbps mono. It’s the same thing, just only carrying 1 channel instead of 2.

Ronald Leemans
Totally not true, over here DAB+ is gaining more and more market share - and all new cars have a DAB+ radio. Reception is excellent across the whole country.. Nice bass, nice highs and excellent Stereo image - i love it!

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by rigmo » Mon Sep 25, 2023 9:18 am

Albert H
DAB (Dead And Buried - Stephen Moss was exactly right!) ensures that the fragmentation of the radio market
(that would never suit the conglomerates)
DAB is very poorly implemented, and is a surprisingly aged system - original DAB still uses MP2! DAB+ is better (in some ways),
but still doesn't "hit the spot". There's the huge problem that people who were persuaded to buy expensive DAB radios can't receive
DAB+ services, so many stations are unavailable to them, and there's no way to upgrade their expensive receivers to allow them to
receive everything in their area.
This incompatibility has been part of the collapse of DAB listenership. It's never going to become a mass market broadcast product.
Unfortunately, DAB really is turning into "Dead And Buried" in most areas. Now the mobile phone networks have almost universal coverage,
most radio listeners use the 'net, even in their cars. Online stations - even the smallest, almost unknown ones - have gigantic
audiences compared to DAB!
DAB is a truly horrible way to do digital radio. The original concept was to use a "high quality" digitisation, interleave several
high quality audio streams, and transmit them robustly in a 6 MHz-wide channel that ...
TBH mpx, it'll never happen. The major migration away from broadcast radio is to online services:
DAB / DAB+ is a real waste of bandwidth. It's spectrum-inefficient, has poor results
(because of the desire to cram ever more low bit-rate stations into each multiplex) and is impractical in
huge areas of the country with low population density (like most of the countryside).
DAB+ just adds extended radiotext and allows the use of other codecs (other than the standard mp2).
The problem is that nobody has the decoders built into their receivers for the alternative codecs!
DAB+ is pretty much dead before it really starts.
DAB will soon stand for "Dead And Buried" - there are many more listeners on the 'net than there are on DAB.
DAB still suffers from all the problem it had when it started over 20 years ago: -
Expensive (relatively) receivers,
Poor and patchy coverage,
The infamous "bubbling mud" effect with weak signals, FRAUD machinery trying to cram ever more stations on to each multiplex so
that they can rake in the Licence fees - at the cost of reduced quality and bandwidth.....
It's MP2 FFS! OFCOM are still trying to persuade the gullible public that DAB is "high quality" while giving 64k mono streams to
music stations. Even BBC Radio 3 has had its bandwidth reduced (to make space for 1Xtra).
You can get away with 192kbps stereo on MP3 - just. MP2 has a bigger bandwidth overhead, and you'll need 320kbps to get close to
192 kbps MP3.

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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by Albert H » Tue Oct 03, 2023 9:25 pm

I'm running four DAB multiplexes at the moment (in Eastern Europe). There is constant pressure from the broadcasters to cram in more stations (at the expense of quality), but we're sticking to a minimum of 192kHz streams for stereo, and most of the stations sound reasonably good. We found that most of the programme providers seem to work with differing standards for levels and equalisation, so we're taking their streams and tweaking them at our "head end" to make them consistent from channel to channel. We're applying some gentle compression, brickwall limiting and frequency response compensation and all the stations now sound just about right.

The biggest problem is rural coverage. Nobody really wants to broadcast to sheep, so the coverage outside the towns and cities tends to be sporadic. FM - by comparison - uses between 20 and 40 times the power of the DAB transmitters and can often be heard well away from the cities - particularly if you're prepared to listen in mono.

The move to the internet carries on apace. As stations improve their stream quality, and the mobile phone companies provide "unlimited" data options for users and improving coverage, there's little point in conventional AM of FM broadcasting any more, and the results from DAB are usually inferior to the streamed version....

We're probably close to the end of free-radiating radio. The bands we've known and loved will eventually be reallocated for other purposes, and all "broadcasting" will end up on the Interweb.

We're close to "Game Over" for pirate broadcsting!
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Re: b2b fm 88.6

Post by Old Anorak » Wed Oct 04, 2023 9:09 am

Game over for pirate broadcasting- how depressing 😒

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