Thanks to reader Paul Bailey I’ve recently been alerted that Ireland’s long-running longwave (LW) radio station RTÉ 252 is back on the air, after a period of maintenance beginning in June of this year. The service rebroadcasts public broadcaster RTÉ Radio 1, reaching longer distances than the mediumwave AM band – no longer in use by RTÉ – and the FM band.
As Bailey explained in a 2016 guest post, RTÉ 252 was founded when the broadcaster acquired the transmitter site from a commercial radio operation that lasted from 1989 to 2002. Able to reach distances of up to 1200 miles with fidelity roughly equivalent to conventional AM radio – with superior quality and reliability than shortwave – RTÉ 252 is able to serve a significant Irish diaspora in the UK. Though the same programming is available globally online, that still makes it inaccessible to many motorists and listeners with limited or no internet service.
Situated below the conventional AM band at 30 – 300 KHz, LW was never officially used for broadcasting in the Americas, though it’s had a long history in Europe, Asia and Africa. However, the long wavelengths mean that the transmission towers need to be very tall and situated on a large parcel of land in order to broadcast efficiently, using hundreds of kilowatts of power. Currently RTÉ broadcasts with 150 kilowatts in the daytime – a fraction of the 500 kw it’s licensed for – which is still 3x what the most powerful clear channel AM stations may use in the US.
All of that means a LW station is relatively expensive to operate and maintain, which is why RTÉ proposed shutting down the 252 operation back in 2014. Outcry from listeners across Ireland and the UK caused the broadcaster to cancel the shutdown in 2019, ultimately deciding to conduct maintenance this year to keep the service going into the future.
