IRN fun

[Paul Martin]

IRN channel 3 carries a voice-tracked sustaining service for certain
UK radio stations. There are silences for station IDs to be inserted
and long silences for adverts. It's curious that, given its heritage,
the hourly news for this overnight service comes from Sky News Radio.

Cor! Unintentional bricktext.

[Jack Field]

Channel 3 of what?

[Paul Martin]

Post by Jack Field
Channel 3 of what?

IRN Channel 3.

On Sirius 2 (4.8E):

IRN Channel 1 usually carries IRN180 and cuts.
IRN Channel 2 usually carries IRN90 and cuts plus feeds.
IRN Channel 3 gets occasional daytime use, but mainly is used for a
network chart show on Sunday and an overnight sustaining service.
IRN Channel 4 is mainly used for a network chart show on Sunday.
IRN Channel 5 is mainly used for a network chart show on Sunday and
another overnight sustaining service.

On Hotbird 7A (13E):

IRN Channel 6 purely carries IRN180, possibly without Newslink adverts.

There are also data channels, but I've not looked at them.


IRN90 is the 90 second bulletin which is on the hour in the evenings
and overnights.

IRN180 is the full three minute bulletin, on the hour every hour.

[Mike Winson]

Post by Paul Martin
IRN channel 3 carries a voice-tracked sustaining service for certain
UK radio stations. There are silences for station IDs to be inserted
and long silences for adverts. It's curious that, given its heritage,
the hourly news for this overnight service comes from Sky News Radio.
Cor! Unintentional bricktext.
--

It's the feed for the overnight network for the northern stations of the
UTV Radio (GB) group. We're just in the process of changing over from
IRN to SNR as our news provider. SNR is delivered on transponder 25 -
service name SNR3 - free to air at present, and well documented, so I'm
not giving away any secrets (I hope)

Don't commas and full stops count in bricktext?

Mike

[Paul Martin]

Post by Mike Winson

Post by Paul Martin
IRN channel 3 carries a voice-tracked sustaining service for certain
UK radio stations. There are silences for station IDs to be inserted
and long silences for adverts. It's curious that, given its heritage,
the hourly news for this overnight service comes from Sky News Radio.
Cor! Unintentional bricktext.

It's the feed for the overnight network for the northern stations of the
UTV Radio (GB) group. We're just in the process of changing over from
IRN to SNR as our news provider. SNR is delivered on transponder 25 -
service name SNR3 - free to air at present, and well documented, so I'm
not giving away any secrets (I hope)

I've been picking up snr3 since autumn 2005 (when I got the PCI DVB-S
card). It used to be flagged as scrambled, but in reality unencrypted.

Post by Mike Winson
Don't commas and full stops count in bricktext?

Depends on whether you allow punctuation to go outside the margins.
Some manuals of style allow that.

[Neil]

Post by Mike Winson
It's the feed for the overnight network for the northern stations of the
UTV Radio (GB) group. We're just in the process of changing over from
IRN to SNR as our news provider. SNR is delivered on transponder 25 -
service name SNR3 - free to air at present, and well documented, so I'm
not giving away any secrets (I hope)

These IRN channels sound absolutely dire in terms of audio quality and when
you listen to the Hit40UK or A list charts for example, the audio bandwidth
seems to be limited to something like 13kHz. Our local UTV stations in the
North West now too sound very poor during the evenings as they use feeds
from these channels, the same is the case for TLRC. Combine this with the FM
processing that most stations use and you have an end result to the listener
that sounds very warbled and distorted on HF content.

I did flag this up with IRN some time back but nobody seemed to care, they
just told me it was due to pseudo-tandem coding used by various STL stages.
I know for sure that the GCap link is an 256 or 320kbps APT-X X21 cct which
presuming they are using Mpeg II for uplinking shouldn't cause any problems
near as bad as you hear. Paul, can you see what the off-air bitrate is? I
was told the 'over air' channels were carried at 256kbps.

[tony sayer]

Post by Neil

Post by Mike Winson
It's the feed for the overnight network for the northern stations of the
UTV Radio (GB) group. We're just in the process of changing over from
IRN to SNR as our news provider. SNR is delivered on transponder 25 -
service name SNR3 - free to air at present, and well documented, so I'm
not giving away any secrets (I hope)

These IRN channels sound absolutely dire in terms of audio quality and when
you listen to the Hit40UK or A list charts for example, the audio bandwidth
seems to be limited to something like 13kHz. Our local UTV stations in the
North West now too sound very poor during the evenings as they use feeds
from these channels, the same is the case for TLRC. Combine this with the FM
processing that most stations use and you have an end result to the listener
that sounds very warbled and distorted on HF content.

Transcoding .. another wunder by product of the dig-it-all age;!....

Post by Neil
I did flag this up with IRN some time back but nobody seemed to care, they
just told me it was due to pseudo-tandem coding used by various STL stages.
I know for sure that the GCap link is an 256 or 320kbps APT-X X21 cct which
presuming they are using Mpeg II for uplinking shouldn't cause any problems
near as bad as you hear. Paul, can you see what the off-air bitrate is? I
was told the 'over air' channels were carried at 256kbps.

Seems rather generous?..

[Paul Martin]

Post by Neil
I did flag this up with IRN some time back but nobody seemed to care, they
just told me it was due to pseudo-tandem coding used by various STL stages.
I know for sure that the GCap link is an 256 or 320kbps APT-X X21 cct which
presuming they are using Mpeg II for uplinking shouldn't cause any problems
near as bad as you hear. Paul, can you see what the off-air bitrate is? I
was told the 'over air' channels were carried at 256kbps.

When I last measured them about 2 months ago the IRN stations were:

IRN 1+2 dual channel 256kbps (IRN1 is left channel, IRN2 is right)

IRN 3, 4 and 5 discrete stereo 256kbps

I haven't measured IRN 6, but I suspect it will be 128kbps mono.

[Graham]

Post by Paul Martin
IRN channel 3 carries a voice-tracked sustaining service for certain
UK radio stations. There are silences for station IDs to be inserted
and long silences for adverts. It's curious that, given its heritage,
the hourly news for this overnight service comes from Sky News Radio.
Cor! Unintentional bricktext.
--

That's all very well, but who remembers
"News-feed, a non governmental public service" from Radio Deutsche Welle
with each story preceded by a three second countdown?

[Alan Pemberton]

Post by Paul Martin
IRN channel 3 carries a voice-tracked sustaining service for certain
UK radio stations. There are silences for station IDs to be inserted
and long silences for adverts. It's curious that, given its heritage,
the hourly news for this overnight service comes from Sky News Radio.
Cor! Unintentional bricktext.

Congratulations. You have earned yourself
the contract for news headline writer for
Ceefax/Teletext - the pages for which the
phrase ''never mind the quality, feel the
width'' was coined.