People don't take AM radios on holiday with them but they do take their smart phones. They can either listen to the BBC on line or better still call their airline for information. No need for the expense of a BBC european AM service.

That's fine and dandy in theory, in practice the Beeb insist on providing international feeds of domestic radio content as vastly unwieldy 128k stereo MP3 streams. For about a year now, these have been breaking up and dying on the hour and half hour particularly in the morning when listening to Radio 4 or Radio Scotland, as Internet clock radios flick on and sync to the international streams causing congestion.

The only remedy for the endless 'broken microphone' effect that results from packet loss on my smartphone's radio client is to drop the stream and resync. Not ideal, when you're just out of the shower with wet hands and fumbling with several hundred quidsworth of fragile glass. And I'm only in Paris just now, a mere 15 hops from the Beeb content servers; others will have far more routing stages to contend with.

If this is the situation during normal times, I dread to think what the stream resilience would be like in times of an emergency when, of course, 648 AM would have had no break up at all......

The World Service is not a service for expats or UK citizens travelling abroad. Since the transfer to licence fee funding they do now have a service licence.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/...ng_licence.pdf

Note Annex 1.

...Which is why my comment was about the International versions of domestic services, not the WS. Which incidentally works fine, in its 48k MP3 incarnation on my phone, should I wish to learn about irrigation initiatives in the Lower Zambezi basin or the like. AudioFu^Wactory wonks take note.

648 didn't take World Service programming anyway, I forget what exactly it called itself, the European Edition or something like that.

For any Francophones on here, found this petition to stop the closure of 162kHz that you might want to sign:

http://162khz.wesign.it/fr

However, it isn't exactly setting the world alight with support at present!

Yes, you read that right! On 6th July 2016, Ofcom published an invitation to apply for an AM medium wave band licence to operate a Community radio service.

Applications are not as usual per local area or region, but anywhere in the UK save for London/inner M25.

Also different from the normal FM licence, for AM medium wave, it will be the Ofcom engineering staff that will first vet applications: "On receipt of an application, we will check that the proposed site is technically appropriate for AM transmission, we will use the proposed transmission site to check whether there is a suitable frequency available, and whether the proposed service area can be adequately served from this site.

We anticipate that some applications are likely to be rejected at this stage of the process. In other words, if the site is not suitable for AM transmissions, not appropriate for the proposed service area, or there is no suitable AM frequency to support the service, the application will be rejected and we will not take the application forward for consideration against the selection criteria set out in the legislation. The application fee is non-refundable under these circumstance."

The Ofcom licence application fee is £600. Closing date for applications Tuesday 25th October 2016.

What will be the uptake on this licence opportunity on AM band? Will there be many aspirants out there? And, is DAB digital radio listening now ahead of AM band listening?

I suppose they have no equivalent to the Test Match Lobby here who want Long Wave continuing WHATEVER THE COST, just so they can listen to one of the most boring sports a few times a year.

With TMS available on DAB, Freeview and Freesat as well as online then I would agree that the LW coverage which dips out for The Shipping Forecast etc is now obsolete (do not agree that it is boring though).

Could existing stations such as Radio JCom in Leeds apply for power increases?

Can frequencies that were once used by countries that no longer use them such as 567, 747 and 1440 be used? What is the maximum power?

For this new round of AM/MW only, Ofcom have not stated a maximum power (EMRP). It will depend on a number of factors including the transmission site, target transmission area and community and the available frequencies.

For the previous 'old' AM Community licences, generally frequencies at the bottom of the band were allocated for use like 1602, 1530 kHz etc. This was because transmit antenna at these frequencies require a lower aerial height, say around 20m. Also previously, to cover the typical 5km Community radio coverage, power was or around 70 Watts EMRP.

For the new AM, Ofcom will now offer a typical radius of 10km (6 miles). That does not mean that the old allocation of 70W is simply doubled to 140W. It really depends on the groundwave, building density and clutter in the target area and of course at the transmitter and aerial, a good earth.

It has already been done in the Yorkshire Dales where the new Dales community radio station took over the rural 936AM mast which commercial radio said was uneconomical to run at 1Kw, and Ofcom allowed it to be restarted at 150w, but for the main towns Dales radio is able to also use low power FM which is less prone to domestic interference.

Is that still true? My Tunein app finds a 48kbps AAC stream of radio 4.

But the BBC does pay for a number of FM relays dotted all around the globe, each one serving a small community of local car drivers and residents. That's justified - but 648 which covered 3/4 countries and SE England was not justified? 648 was perfect for speech transmission and there are as many AM radios out there as FM ones.

SE England can listen to World Service in all sorts of ways without the need for 648. The countries you mention presumably Belgium, The Netherlands, France and Germany are in the process of switching off AM because no one was listening to it, nor are they are priority area for World Service anyway., the Foreign Office had no objection to my knowledge to the BBC stopping English broadcasts on 648 to countries with high internet usage. I have no figures for the number of active AM and FM sets in those countries and don't know where to find them.

Most people in Europe who want to listen to stations from outside their domestic market will naturally use the internet to listen. This includes for Cars - many new cars have radio apps built in (mine, from last year, has TuneIN built in, and I intend to use it on this years road trip to Denmark to catch up on the move).

Apart from Internet, most residents in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the old 648 transmission area can also receive BBC Domestic and World Services via their Cable TV, or via Satellite TV. e.g. https://www.ziggo.nl/pdf/zenderoverz...roverzicht.pdf

They can even get BBC World Service on DAB in Brussels (although I doubt for much longer after Article 50 is triggered ). http://www.digitalradio.vlaanderen/zenderaanbod/

So let's just say I don't think there is much demand for 648 to return (and certainly no justification for its large transmission costs).

People will naturally use Internet radio in the car? Never met such a person. Old saying: If you build it they will come. New saying: if you take it away they'll leave, and won't return.

Who you've personally met is irrelevant, internet radio in the car is a fact and the audience that BBC World Service attracts is exactly the demographic that is likely to be using it. Add in all the other ways the BBC World Service can be accessed at home, which is what many of them would be doing anyway.

And who is this audience, if its largely expats the BBC World Service is not targeted at them. They also probably watch the BBC World News television service and certainly in the Netherlands some of the domestic channels which are available. As to the FM relays you mention a large number of them do not broadcast BBC World Service in English rather in the language spoken in the country concerned.

As licence fee payers now fund the World Service if it's going to resume broadcasts on a platform that domestic broadcasters in the countries concerned are either no longer using or closing down to a tiny number of car drivers who can understand English and who also more than likely access it in other ways at work and at home I would have thought most of them would rather have the money spent on other services.

There's a fair way to go yet before in car internet listening is mainstream- Car manufacturers are very slow at adopting anything- DAB is over 15 years old and it's only now becoming standard-ish. Is there a push for standard inclusion of something like TuneIn? Will there be a way of listening in the car without requiring some sort of subscription and without data limits? Will the 3G/4G infrastructure be able to cope with the additional load of all this extra streaming?

Once the answer to all these is yes, I'll stick my head out and declare the death of broadcast radio. Not before though.

As an aside, there was a hoo-har earlier this year about using DAB radios to hack the engine management system of some cars- with a car fully connected to the net, i'd hope that the designers keep the internet radio functions well separated from the car driving functions.

Does it work for non-UK IP addresses? Playing NoScript 'whack-a-mole' with the Radio 5 Live page on TuneIn.com, one of the sources I had to allow in order to get audio was llnwd.net. This is very similar to the URLs of the Beeb's own geoblocked streaming content provider, so I would doubt that the TuneIn audio for anything Beeb with sports rights content is available outside the UK.

If you listen to BBC World Service as I do in the UK on DAB, you'll know that they often announce (In English), 'hello to our listeners in... listening on...' and this is where I hear about FM relays in many world capitals. The ones in Europe are all-English but I hear that same English announcement in the middle of English language programs on Middle Eastern FM relays too. There are still one or two MW relays.

In the many years I lived in Europe I noted that BBC World Service was keenly listened to (on AM) by Anglophile Europeans, typically business people and their offspring. I didn't know many Eurocrats but assume there was a strong listernership in-car from them, The early demise of 648kHz might be seen as a symptom of the UK's waning influence in the EU, it happened at about the same time as our MEP slots started to fill up with UKIP reps.

Doesn't matter who you meet? Perhaps you ought to get out more.

As I've said your comments as to who you have met, now amplified with reminiscences of several years ago, have no relevance as the BBC closed medium wave on 648 because of declining audiences and the need to spend their budget elsewhere, particularly for services in Arabic, all backed up by their audience research and observations of the closure, which has continued, of most if not all medium wave stations in the countries concerned plus the many alternatives available including the internet which is increasingly used. In the Netherlands for example internet listening is around double what it is in the UK, if the Digital Spy search engine worked I'd quote the exact figure.

The BBC World Service FM relays in Albania and the Czech Republic did not carry solely English programmes until those language services were closed. The BBC Russian service was available on FM and medium wave until the Russian licencing authorities put pressure on the partner stations to stop relaying it.

BBC FM relays in Europe are currently listed as in Albania, Kosovo, several in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Berlin. BBC Berlin carries some adverts and some years ago moved its FM frequency to one that suffered from more interference.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...ound-the-world

There's also some partner stations carrying some World Service output. Note the availability of the BBC World News television channel.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldserv...ng_april16.pdf

I have long time friends, some of whom have worked in international radio, who live in the areas formerly covered by 648 so can get a good impression of what media consumption in the target area actually is. It backs up the BBC's own research.

Did the BBC used to have some German language stuff on 648KHz twenty or so years ago, or am I imagining that?

WRTH 1986

German (also on FM 90.2MHz)
0445-0545 810, 648, 3955, 6195
1900-2000 810, 648, 3955, 6010
2030-2115 810, 648, 3955, 6010

A couple of other periods without 648

Thanks. Thought I'd remembered hearing it. Think it would be the early/mid nineties.

An online list of countries worldwide where AM has been closed, is endangered or there are hardly any stations has just been updated.

http://www.bamlog.com/darkcountries.htm