Off to London

[Scott Fybush]

Garrett Wollman wrote:
> <<On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:47:01 -0400, markwa1ion@aol.com said:
> 
>> On AM your main BBC channels are 693, 882, and 909.
> 
> Also World Service for Europe on 648 from Orford Ness; apparently the
> Dutch station Radio Nationaal is no longer using the 1296 from there.
> BBC Radio 4, the voice of the British middle class, is on FM and 198
> kHz longwave (with slight differences in programming); Radios 1, 2,
> and 3 are on FM, and 1Xtra, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 Music, and 7 are
> digital-only.  Plus there's the Asian Network, which is on MW in the
> Midlands but is digital-only in London.

882 is BBC Wales (though the transmitter site in Washford is actually on 
the English side of the border, if memory serves) and is not a very 
useful signal in London. BBC R4 has a low-power London MW relay on 720.

There is one full-market London MW signal that's gone unmentioned: 1152 
was the old home of LBC, London's first private radio station, and I 
believe is now running LBC's all-news service (though it might have 
swapped places with LBC's talk service, which is, or was, on 97.4 FM or 
thereabouts.) There are also lower-powered MW services on 558 and 1035; 
I'm not sure what they're doing now, but they were doing ethnic 
"Spectrum Radio" and country, respectively, when I was there in 2002.

There are commercial FM stations all up and down the dial, except for 
the portions reserved for the BBC (roughly speaking, 88-93 and around 98 
MHz). Among the bigger ones are Capital FM on 95.8, Classic FM on 100.6 
(part of a national FM network), xfm at 104.9, Kiss on 100.0, Heart on 
106.2, Absolute Radio on 105.8 (simulcast with the national MW feed on 
1215), and "Magic" on 105.4...or at least that's where it was a few 
years ago when I was last in London:

http://www.fybush.com/site-020710.html

s