That would be my second choice if national DAB was too expensive.

Ideally I'd say Free view plus local DAB in London and Northern Ireland.

I would not have expected it to be cheap and it has to be remembered that most of the Freeview relay stations only have Freeview Lite which only has a limited number of radio stations and in Scotland some are dropped in the evening when BBC Alba is on. So to get national coverage on Freeview a BBC station would have to be dropped which is not going to happen.

Ah right okey, thanks for the info.

Exactly.

Uk dab and freeview would cost more than lw, one must remember that the reason for turning off lw is to save money. Reading between the lines, i think rte have in mind to supply elderly people with help to get listening via a table or freesat etc

sorry if this is a stupid question but would a move to MW on a frequency or 2 help save money and keep the service running?
maybe a couple of tx in the uk or a high powered one from the coast of ireland if they got anything like that still around?

Absolutely not !

Using a higher frequency would just reduce the daytime coverage. This rather optimistic map shows that 100kW wouldn't go very far into the UK mainland, and fillers are needed in Londonderry and Enniskillen.

If they can't afford the electricity to operate one existing LW transmitter, they certainly wouldn't be able to afford the capital expenditure to build a couple of MW powerhouses let alone run them. And they'd never be licensed in the UK.

If they want to reach most of the UK from the RoI there's only one answer, to restore high power and to switch to a clear LW channel (261kHz).

Getting RTE onto Freeview lite isn't realistic. Even if RTE makes in onto regular Freeview people into Freeview Lite areas are going to need to use satellite or internet.

Personally I think we should be getting full Freeview onto as many transmitters as possible.

The likelihood of Éire reactivating 567 or 612 kHz is nil. In fact there is talk of Spirit Radio eyeing up 567 kHz as a replacement for its current 549 kHz, in order to escape night-time co-channel interference. Certainly for the time being it seems to be 252 kHz or nothing; my guess is that if RTÉ were ever going to be granted a Broadcasting Act licence to go transmit via any medium in England+Wales and Scotland it would have happened by now.

There are so many TV channels with many hours of programme hours to fill so why not make a daily or weekly half hour programme and offer it to some of them free of charge.

It does not have to be anything too complicated so could be done cheaply.

i did think that would probably be the case. and i agree that the only way does look like a high power 261.
i wonder how far a high powered 261 would get and what power they would be allowed to go at on there if allowed?

what about 279? closest station on this is TR1 from Turkmenistan?
or 180? no station is on that i think

If the Isle of Man will release the frequency, sure.

But it is missing the point that RTE are looking to get out of the longwave game, not find a new frequency!

I'm not familiar with the telephone line filters installed, but I can't imagine the notch would be so tight as to be ineffective on the adjacent 261kHz?

A filter with a very tight notch could easily drift off frequency caused by varying characteristics of the phone line, so I doubt these filters actually have a very tight notch.

Even if these phone line filters were a few dBs less effective on 261, its counterbalanced by the lesser power nowadays compared to the Atlantic 252 days.

Even if there is just one more year left in RTE's LW service, its surely worthwhile to try gain international agreement for temporary permission to move to 261kHz at the current power, under the understanding that if Germany etc were to reactivate 261 that RTE would have to revert back to 252 again (but how llikely is the latter to happen)

Even with a fairly ordinary Q factor of 100 or so, an L-C tank circuit at 252 kHz only has useful rejection of around 2.5kHz, so it wouldn't be much use on 261. The filters are in-line with the phone receiver after any ADSL microfilter, to counteract AM rectified and audible through the earpiece, so you could probably just issue new ones for 261kHz to all in the area who required one.

A move to 261kHz would be worthwhile at least seeking, as there is zero chance of Germany reactivating that frequency given that Federal and local government there has decreed that there should be no more "wasteful" transmissions via AM. I was just pointing out that a frequency move was nothing like as simple as rocking up at Clarkstown and twiddling a dial, as the person who wrote the linked article seems to think.

Impossible to consider 180kHz unless Europe 1 on the +3kHz off-channel frequency of 183kHz closes down.

279 would be feasible (now totally clear at night in Europe), however 261 is preferable for a number of reasons. For a start some dial tuned receivers don't go up as far as 279

Surely the rejection would have to be wider than 2.5kHz to attenuate the sideband energy. Its also the case that the transmitter moved by 2kHz years ago (from 254), and I don't recall any reports of filters needing to be changed then.
I would have thought that low-pass filters would have generally been installed rather than notch filters on telephones, so would be immune to a frequency change upwards.

What type of telephone filters get installed (and to what extent are filters needed) around Droitwich, where there is more than one frequency to worry about?

Until RTÉ gets interested in and eventually applies for a change of frequency this is all conjecture, but a shift to 261 kHz may just about be possible via physical alteration or replacement of the existing inductors and coils in the Antenna Tuning Building.

Even if there were widespread availability of LW radios capable of tuning 279 kHz, this would be a shift in frequency of nearly 10% so there's zero chance that the existing ATU would be able to tune that. It would be a major project to rebuild and re-commission the ATU/Antenna combination at 279 kHz. With downtime stretching into months RTÉ might as well just pack the service in anyway.

Easiest and cheapest way to get RTE Radio 1 or 2 for that matter is to buy an old sky box off ebay with a dish and connect up to your stereo.

Homes around Wychbold village, right in the shadow of the Droitwich masts must employ some filtering,i have been right past on the A38,and even DAB/FM is wiped out briefly by the power!

No, knock out the carrier frequency and that's pretty much it. The stray audio arises from old-fashioned envelope detection at spurious non-linear junctions, so no envelope = no detection. For normal speech frequencies, as carried by RTÉ 1 Extra, most of the energy is concentrated around +/- 2 kHz. So a notch on 252 kHz is going to leave pretty much just higher sideband energy which, if it's audible at all, will just sound like periodic background noise and won't be obtrusive.

If there were more than one frequency such as at Droitwich and other mainland Britain sites then yes, you would just have to use a low-pass filter and hope for the best. However, unless it's multipole i.e. quite a few components and therefore quite expensive, then the rejection obtained over the two decades 3-300 kHz will be around 20 dB poorer than even the simplest notch filter with a decent Q factor coil.

Exactly -----
Regards

BIB. Inductors and coils are the same things.

The ATU, or matching unit, is to match the base impedance of the antenna to the transmitter/feedline. It doesn't actually tune the aerial.
Without knowing the base impedance, it's virtually impossible say whether it will "tune" the antenna to 279 but, given that these units are variable (they have to be), there's a good chance that it will.

Most if not all phoneline RFI filters I have seen are bandpass, not notch.
They usually come in different ranges. e.g. 500 KHz to 1.5 MHz.
Chances are that the filters used there are good for the whole LW band.

Incidentally, I've used the ASDL filters with reasonable good success for eliminating RFI on my phone.

At 90 degrees, an antenna is calculated to have an impedance of 37 Ohms.
If the Clarkstown mast is 248 mtrs (the only figure I can find), it will be closer to 75 degrees and will have a base resistance in the low/mid 20's on 252 KHz.
The same mast on 279 is about 83 degrees and a resistance of around 30 Ohms so easier to match to 50 Ohms using the same network.

This are quick, back of an envelope calculations, so won't be 100% accurate and I'm open to correction.

I believe that RTE have said that the mast insulators/stay wires will need to be replaced before the end of the decade ?