Sutton Coldfield transmitter

[french frank]

Bit of a long shot, maybe, but does anyone receive R3 via this transmitter? A listener (ex BBC engineer) writes:

"How do other listeners feel about the persisant 'glitches' (tiny but irritating breaks in transmission) on Radio 3 FM from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter? Yes, that's right: analogue! This situation has been going on for months. As listeners of many years, we have seen a decline in technical standards. Does no one in position of technical responsibility actually listen any longer?"

Any comments? NHTL, are you there?

[Andrew Slater]

I'm too far north to receive a signal from Sutton Coldfield, but I did experience a similar problem with the Holme Moss transmitter last February.

I made recordings and viewed the waveforms using Audacity which showed that drop-outs of approximately 30ms were happening at intervals of anything between a few seconds and a few minutes. It was more obvious on R3 when music was playing, but it was also noticeable on R4.

I contacted the BBC via a comments page (I can try to find it again if your correspondent needs a link), and was taken seriously as somebody else in the Leeds area (about 40 miles away) had also complained, so that it was unlikely to be local interference - somebody rang me up the next day, and asked me to ring whenever the fault was particularly bad.

The problem was that the fault was very intermittent, and it took until about April to get it resolved, after a couple more 'phone calls.

It might be useful for your correspondent to refer to this case.

[french frank]

Thanks, Andrew. It sounds as if this listener would be glad of the link. Perhaps you could PM me with it when you locate it. He sounds as if he knows what he's talking about.

[Frances_iom]

Think this has been raised before - the same pattern of random but quite frequent short drops is quite common on reception of R3 from the repeater serving Peel on IoM - I'd always assumed the dropouts originated in the feed either to the repeater or the Island itself - it does appear to be somewhat weather linked especially with wind(tho this is not exactly uncommon on the Island!) thus my thought that some receiving antenna was at fault.