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One is that, in my opinion, commercial radio sucks.

That's why I only listen to a non-commercial radio station :) however its signal is not very strong on my mobile phone FM radio: entering a train kills it - though it does work on my car radio when I drive to work. I do like the idea of FM radio - it uses less battery power then playing an MP3 - but it doesn't tend to work very well in practice.

If FM is going to be required, maybe all phones should also be able to send/receive faxes? It is an equivalently-obsoleted technology. My phone plan in 2001 actually had a separate "fax number" but when someone called it all I could do was "reject" since my phone couldn't handle it. It didn't take me long to get it permanently blocked.

Wouldn't something like DAB+ reception be better than FM anyway? I've had FM reception in several of my phones, including my current one: they have all been (2G GSM) Nokias.

Did you know you can listen to JJJ over the internet? Just head on down to http://www.triplej.net.au/listen/default.htm.

These guys did and do. There is no competition involved, they just want their music to be out there. Hey, they don't even have to pay for hosting, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation does.

Stream away. Better still, visit Triple J or even the catch of the day, where they've even found the best stuff for you.

There's also an annual "Triple J Unearthed CD" which is a compiliation of the top ten listeners' choices for the year. Unearthed #4 contains (track 3) Relapse by Endorphin. I loved it the moment I heard it. On the the strength of that one home-made track, when he brought out an album (yes he fell into the hands of the recording industry and is now making that pittance in royalties The Industry likes to refer to as "Big Money"), I bought it. That Unearthed entry was created using two walkmans in his bedroom.

Keep spending, mate, there are others who are simply getting on with it.

http://triplej.net.au/
Triple J is a national radio net which has lots of music and podcast interviews.

There are no intelligent creationists, but there are sane Christians. I'm a regular listener to Sunday Night Safran, a religious discussion program with an atheist and catholic priest hosting, who had a TV series before their radio stint called Speaking in Tongues. Anyway, if you can spare the time have a listen to John Safran interviewing Bishop John Shelby Spong (33mb download, interview at 50:05 onwards). He has restored my faith in sane Christians.

Heh.

In Australia, there is a government-funded broadcast organisation called the ABC. It's often counted as one of the best sources of real, hard televised news, as opposed to the celeb-crap that is spouted on the commercial networks. The entire organisation is openly left-leaning and thus decidedly anti-government (to both major parties, these days). The government would love to scale back funding for them, but they know there'd be a pretty significant outcry, particularly from older Australians (who provide a fair percentage of the incumbent conservative coalition's votes).

One of the funnier things I heard was from the ABC's youth radio Triple J, where one of the DJs (on this 'government-controlled' station) said (in response to some talk-back stuff) 'Take this as a lesson kids - don't burn down your school. Do something constructive and burn down Parliament House instead.' This is the kind of stuff which seems to be encouraged by the higher-ups at the station, rather than discouraged.

Government radio doesn't necessarily mean that it's controlled by politicians.

Two of the members of Frenzal are now presenters of the Triple J radio breakfast show.

Their latest promo is available from here

http://triplej.net.au/jayandthedoctor/promo.htm

Worth it's weight in gold.

Agreed. Triple J rocks - make sure you check Hack as well - their news and current affairs half hour, not the regular shit you see on the news etc. It's also available via podcast.

hmm, stuffed up the link, try this one.

These competitions are hardly scientific or well judged. The runner-up is a little pretty boy that (according to my brother) only got as far as he did with the teenage girl vote. And the dropping of Ricky-Lea a few weeks ago was controversial. Everyone was so confident of her performance that they forgot to actually vote for her! In the epic final show (...just after this break...) they had the final 12 contesants back and apparently Ricky-Lea's performance was much better than Casey. If a proper career can be made of this silly media circus, I'd give Ricky-Lea a much better chance than this voting aberation.

I didn't watch the show myself, but several other family members did. And my elitist, left-wing radio station of choice likes to mention it regularly. I find this latest blow to pedestrian entertainment to be a hoot. You couldn't write funnier stuff if you tried.

I may be wrong, but my understanding of cable TV here in Australia has been that our population is simply too sparse to support wide-spread roll outs. Foxtel and a few other operators have cable around the big three cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane... what about Perth and Adelaide?) but everywhere else requires satellite. And satellite is an extra hassle, and I'm guessing is more expensive for the operator.

But I think you're also right about us not being "real heavy tv watchers". I used to get Foxtel when I lived in Sydney and while it had some good things from time to time, it never really engrossed me to a great deal. With the internet, computer games, Triple J radio, a good collection of DVD's, and several gigs of ripped MP3/Vorbis music, the five FTA channels are entertaining enough for me. I never find myself thinking "geez I'm bored and what I'd really like to do right now is flick through 500 channels of crap and vegetate".

Besides, there's always the D1 Home Media Centre as well as DIY MythTV and Freevo boxen.

NWA used to be on Australia's national publicly-funded youth radio network (uncensored) all the time.

These days, one of the songs that gets a fair amount of airplay on there is entitled "Russell Crowe's band is a fucking piece of shit".

can be good, but is too inconsistent to recommend to everyone.

If you want to listen on the internet, look out for Triple J No ads, excellent non-patronising news/ features. Completely uncensored. I only wish the UK had something like it.

There are a few stations that already support RDS in Australia (eg: TripleJ), and systems are available here that support the RDS standard. It's been running here quite a while, it's just that not many radio stations have picked it up. I have already accidently tuned into one radio station here that was transmitting someone elses RDS signal. It didn't last long though, they vanished pretty quick.

RDS is a very old technology, and it's a real wonder this hasn't happened before. RDS is carried on a "subchannel" on the FM signal, and digital data such as the station name, time signal, etc, is transmitted. My car syncronises the inbuilt clock with that of the radio station every 2-3 minutes. (It did take TripleJ about a month to adjust to daylight savings however).

But it's not hard to fake another stations RDS signature. If a station transmits someone elses RDS signature, and your radio is set to tune to the strongest station with the same RDS sig, well.. you can guess the result I think. The original idea is to allow for movement between different locations/states that have the same station broadcasting on a different frequency, and having your car radio follow the signal automatically and seamlessly. It's just an abuse of the system that no one bothered to cater for, and even if they did, it'd be hard to implement, as the data is all one way. You could capture the data and simply re-send it, or even receive their signal and then re-transmit it. It may have even been considered, and deemed simply not worth the trouble of worrying about it.

If anything, this will lead to more publicity for pirate stations, but that also means that the people designated for tracking down pirate radio stations might hear about it a lot sooner than normal. And if they have a list of authorised frequencies that a particular RDS signal is transmitted on, then it's just a matter of singling out the ones that have a valid RDS signal but the wrong frequency. For the pirates, I'd count this as a two-edged sword.