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UK Radio

Why is it the UK radio is so limited. Most of the towns/cities in the UK only recieves one to three local commerical radio stations. Compare to France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany. Is the UK is the only country in Europe that have few radio stations?
 
the BBC takes up 88.0-94.6 MHz with only recent small time community radio stations anywhere within that band so thats a large chunk gone. plus stations have been going downhill for years with increased automation and networking. local stations have all but lost the local identity they once had being quasi national networks with maybe a 4 hour live breakfast slot
 
In general, it's interesting to see the differences between radio in Northern Europe vs. Southern Europe. In most Northern countries, FM broadcast allocation is much stricter, with state/public broadcasters having a dominant role and with few commercial stations, most of which operate at a fraction of the power that is allocated to the state/public broadcasters. This is true in the UK, Ireland, most Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.

Moving down south, the radio dial begins to get more and more crammed and state/public broadcasters have far less of a dominant position compared to commercial broadcasters. And the further east you go, the more crammed the dial gets, starting from Portugal and Spain and France and heading to Italy, Greece and Turkey. In the latter three countries in particular, the FM dial is pretty much crammed with stations 0.2-0.3 MHz apart in most cities, all the way from 87.5 to 108.0 MHz. This is especially interesting considering that many of these countries did not even deregulate domestic broadcasting until the late 80s-early 90s, prior to which there was only state radio and perhaps a few pirate stations here and there (Italy, however, deregulated in 1976).

It actually wasn't too long ago that FM broadcasting past 100 MHz was prohibited in the UK, and the Eastern bloc countries (most of which have pretty lively FM dials nowadays, at least in the cities) only used the old Soviet 66-74 MHz FM band!
 
Re: UK Radio ('60's Pirates history)

I stumbled upon a couple of hours of programming on Manx Radio (Isle of Man...) airing on Saturdays - called Carnaby Street --- "Carnaby Street puts you right at the heart of the sights, sounds and atmosphere of one of the most influencial periods of social history - the 1960's!"

Last Saturday's show was on the anniversary of the law closing down all the Offshore Pirate stations - If you want these 2 hours go to the Listen Again http://www.manxradio.com/listen.aspx page and either listen or rt/click and save them (2 hour-long segments).

Full of history, clips from the time and of course the music of the times. Great stuff... at one point someone noted that the music format was "50-50" (as I remember it) anyway, every other song was DJ choice. Just one of the reasons radio was fun back then!!
 
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