Originally Posted by Mark C:
“Nothing, but surely the aim is to give coverage to all BBC stations, and as far as the beancounters are concerned if it's only possible to provide one service than it would be Radio 2 (largest audience, even in Scotland)
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The reason for these additional single station relays being set up was not to expand coverage of all the (national) BBC stations, but to ensure that in times of bad weather, motorists on the A9 could receive a station that could give them localised travel information.
Radio 2 doesn't provide this, but Radio Scotland does. If only radio 2 was carried on these TX's, car radios wouldn't switch to Radio Scotland for the travel news because there would be no Radio Scotland signal.
Not ideal, but if you don't want to listen to Radio Scotland, you can still get the travel but listen to a CD or whatever as long as the radio is tuned to Radio Scotland.
That said, the area involved is very isolated and the FM band really is a chasm of white noise.
If the will had been there, would it not have been possible to set up a chain of really low powered directional mono relays of all BBC services along the route - using frequencies outwith the assigned BBC sub bands if necessary - there is nothing else there and virtually every car radio retunes using RDS.
The relays could rebroadcast each other, or take a feed from D-sat? OK there would be a delay/jump in the audio at each end of the chain, but still better to have the choice.
The present system relys on motorists having to tune to Radio Scotland which as you point out is not the most listened to station.