Why am I not able to find out any information about radio stations in the UK?

I am used to being able to look up the transmitter location, power output, dbu coverage map, and street address of any station I could think of here in North America. However, I cannot seem to find any information about radio station in the United Kingdom. I was surprised to discover that no call letters were even available for me to look up (despite station in the UK going by some sort of 'brand' typically).

Getting to the point, is there a resource that provides information on call letters, transmitter location and power output in the UK?

There are no call letters to look up, because domestic radio stations in the UK (and most of the rest of the world) abandoned that archaic practice decades ago.

Some good sources for technical information include Mike Brown's mb21.co.uk site (http://tx.mb21.co.uk/) and the European MW Guide (http://www.emwg.info/).

The UK equivalent of the FCC is OFCOM, and you can find some information about the stations it licenses at http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/radio-broadcast-licensing/analogue-radio/licensees/

why is it archaic?

There are two factors at play here: first, the need of a regulatory authority to be able to determine the identity of a specific signal in order to ensure compliance with technical standards and remedy interference; and second, the need of listeners to be able to determine what they're listening to.

The use of callsigns, as a holdover from ship-to-shore radio practice, satisfied both needs worldwide up until World War II. Look at old station listings from the 1930s and you'll see that most of the world used them, both internally and on the air. Then the models began to diverge: in the US, we quickly exploded to thousands of local stations by the 1930s, while most of the rest of the world ended up with national networks based on a much smaller number of high-powered transmitters. When you've only got three or four main transmitter sites emitting your programming, you can be "the BBC" or "Radio France" or "Radio Norway" without engendering much confusion about what it is a listener is hearing (or what it is a regulator is regulating).

By the time local private radio started to flourish in much of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody thought in callsigns anymore. They hadn't been used on the air in decades, and so they appeared with brand names like "LBC" in London or "Europe 1" in Paris, and that seemed to work fine for everyone. As you note, GRC, by the 1970s in the US, stations were shifting to on-air identities like "The Buzzard" and "Y100" and "98Q." If that's been a problem for listeners in the 40 years or so that stations have been identifying that way, I'm not aware of it. Again, as you note, there's nothing "Seed Tick" about that "Tulsa" station, anyway - so what's the magic in making them mumble "seedtickTULSA" once an hour on the air? (The concept of "city of license" is almost uniquely American, by the way.)

Nor is the callsign as important today for regulators as it once was. If a station is operating outside its licensed parameters and causing interference, the FCC isn't waiting to hear a mumbled "WHTZandwhtzhd1newarknewyork" at :50 past the hour to figure out what station is causing the problem. In the unlikely event the Enforcement Bureau has the resources and motivation to deal with a problem, it has plenty of quicker ways to figure out what it's listening to. Internally, the FCC's own databases don't even use callsigns as the unique primary identifier for a station anymore. They're using "facility ID numbers," a purely internal identifier that's never heard on the air.

If there's a compelling reason to believe that a broadcast facility should emit a unique identifier, we have better ways to do that in 2013 than a once-hourly verbal ID. Digital TV stations already transmit a unique "transport stream ID" (TSID) assigned by the FCC. It's a constant part of the data stream, and can be accessed instantly by anyone with the right receiving equipment (I use a $20 DTV receiver dongle attached to my laptop) and software (I use the free TSReader). There's no reason a similar constant identifier can't be broadcast as part of an FM station's RDS data or HD PAD data. (In fact, many FM DXers already use stations' RDS identifiers as a quicker means of identifying their catches than waiting for an aural ID.)

You make too much sense, Scott. Prepare for the onslaught of criticism from the "Rest of the world = socialist" crowd. Baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet ... and call letters -- it's the American way!

Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:

Has the time come that we should go European, and declare that 24 audio signals are enough for all of America and license 24 operations and then let them establish the optimum number of transmitters around the country needed for distribution right down to the 9-digit extended zip-code including the little dust-mite towns?

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The marketplace would appear to have decided that question quite a while ago. Whether you're in Seed Tick or Seattle, the "talk" option on your dial is probably going to bring you Rush Limbaugh at midday and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage a little later in the day. If it's "NPR" you're looking for, the public broadcasters of America have done a pretty good job of making Morning Edition and All Things Considered just as accessible in Talking Rock as in the Bronx. And all by itself, EMF seems to be determined to use the $70 million or so that it spins off in "can't-legally-call-it-profit" to make sure K-Love and Air-1 are somewhere on the FM dial in every populated spot in America.

Which is only equitable, since the good folk of Seed Tick and Peter Pender go home at night and have access to the same 500 TV channels on their Dish or Direct receivers that they'd get in Boston or Chicago - and of course they have the exact same internet content (give or take local issues of high-speed availability) the rest of us do. Why should their lineup of broadcast radio choices be the only media offerings that differ from the rest of America in 2013?

We're way off the original question here (which makes this a good R-D thread, by my lights!), but here's the question that your questions raise in my mind: can "local" radio get a foothold in every "local" market in America, and should it? Sure, there's a class A FM licensed to my particular suburban community, population 36,000 or so - but if that station truly tried to be a "Brighton" station instead of a "Rochester" station, there's neither the "local" activity to discuss nor the "local" advertiser base that would be needed to support that discussion at any length...not with a city of 200,000 just minutes down the road (I can walk to the city line in under 10 minutes from my house), and not when the signal actually serves a metro area of nearly a million.

There are other communities I could think of, some of them within an easy half-day's drive of here, where I could support myself very nicely on the revenues I could generate from being the "local" station in a community of 36,000 people or even smaller.

As long as you're setting out to create a regulatory system that prioritizes the idea of "local" broadcasting - even if "local" really consists of K-Love or ATC or Rush or "Nash Nights" - you're going to bang up against the reality of a very big, very diverse country where one community of 36,000 can be dramatically different from another. That's not something the broadcast regulators of Belgium or Costa Rica have to deal with in the same way, I think.

One more thought, at the risk of hitting GRC levels of verbosity ...

Much of the conception of "local media" that we have in the huge, wildly diverse US is completely alien to most of the rest of the world.

Since we're on the UK board, it bears noting that there's almost no such thing as "local TV" in the UK system. The ITV system, in its original incarnation, had regional licensees providing a certain amount of regional news as part of their programming, and there's some regional news that's part of the BBC system, but there's no such thing as "local TV news" for even the biggest cities like Manchester or Birmingham. There's some local content on radio and in print, to be sure, but those local independent radio stations and local newspapers exist alongside a much more robust bouquet of national media - five national BBC analog radio services, as many national commercial analog radio services, a growing roster of national digital radio services, and eight or so major nationwide newspapers that appear on every newsstand from Aberdeen to Cardiff every morning. It's a very different way of looking at things, and it means the media experience in the UK equivalent of "Seed Tick" has been a rather different one from its US counterpart.

fybush said:

One more thought, at the risk of hitting GRC levels of verbosity ...

Much of the conception of "local media" that we have in the huge, wildly diverse US is completely alien to most of the rest of the world.

Since we're on the UK board, it bears noting that there's almost no such thing as "local TV" in the UK system. The ITV system, in its original incarnation, had regional licensees providing a certain amount of regional news as part of their programming, and there's some regional news that's part of the BBC system, but there's no such thing as "local TV news" for even the biggest cities like Manchester or Birmingham. There's some local content on radio and in print, to be sure, but those local independent radio stations and local newspapers exist alongside a much more robust bouquet of national media - five national BBC analog radio services, as many national commercial analog radio services, a growing roster of national digital radio services, and eight or so major nationwide newspapers that appear on every newsstand from Aberdeen to Cardiff every morning. It's a very different way of looking at things, and it means the media experience in the UK equivalent of "Seed Tick" has been a rather different one from its US counterpart.

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I listen to TalkSport, the commercial English sports station, via Sirius XM and was amazed the first time I heard its traffic reports. Tie-ups in London, Leeds and Portsmouth were reported during one break, tie-ups in Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle in the next. And succeeding reports detailed traffic difficulties in still more cities. I can't imagine any English driver being at all happy with this setup.

CTListener said:

I listen to TalkSport, the commercial English sports station, via Sirius XM and was amazed the first time I heard its traffic reports. Tie-ups in London, Leeds and Portsmouth were reported during one break, tie-ups in Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle in the next. And succeeding reports detailed traffic difficulties in still more cities. I can't imagine any English driver being at all happy with this setup.

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I would assume that at this point, any English driver who's dealing with heavy-duty traffic during his or her commute will be doing just what his/her US counterpart is doing - using a smartphone or connected dashboard to zero in on real-time, route-specific information. (Google Maps tells me, right at this very moment late at night, that the outer loop of the M25 is all jammed up between junctions 5 and 6 near the Clacket Lane services...)

And if it's important and I don't have a smartphone handy, it's not as though there isn't local radio giving city-specific traffic reports as well. But, yes, the national model indeed makes for some interesting-sounding service radio sometimes.

fybush said:

Since we're on the UK board, it bears noting that there's almost no such thing as "local TV" in the UK system. .

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Currently true, but the UK goverment has licenced some TV stations, and the first of these are already testing. This is basically the third attempt to get truely local TV in the UK- the two previous attempts- via cable in the 1970s and via analogue OTA in the 1990s broadly failed so watch this space to see if it is third time lucky!!

CTListener said:

I listen to TalkSport, the commercial English sports station, via Sirius XM and was amazed the first time I heard its traffic reports. Tie-ups in London, Leeds and Portsmouth were reported during one break, tie-ups in Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle in the next. And succeeding reports detailed traffic difficulties in still more cities. I can't imagine any English driver being at all happy with this setup.

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The short answer is we are used to it. National radio is a big part of the UK radio scene. Local radio stations, both BBC and commercial, do give local traffic reports. I'm not sure if you use the RDS-TP system in the US, but there is a button on most modern car radios that will make the radio automatically to any local traffic reports on FM. So you could listen to highbrow Classical music on (national) BBC Radio 3, and still have your radio flip to local travel for wherever you are in the UK when it is broadcast.

I'm not sure if DAB digital radio has a similar system, but FM is still a big player at the moment.

And yes, as Scott points out, many people are moving over to smartphone based navigation with real time traffic info.


*****

annndd so to the OP.

This is my favourite site for UK radio info http://www.frequencyfinder.org.uk/

there are full listings of AM and FM and digital stations along with powers and transmitter locations. No coverage maps, but everything else you want is there

And don't forget radio stations (At least here in the US) only use their callsign for the top of the hour ID. Beyond that, it's just Mix, Magic, Kool etc. For Hot AC stations, it's usually something like Alice 105.9, Alice @ 97.3 etc. Sports talk stations (Usually those not affiliated with ESPN) use monikers like "The Fan' & "The Ball (Heck even I got caught up in this scraze, using "The Puck" an Internet Only station )

So in short, even stations in the US have gotten away from callsign ID, leaving only BBC Radio as the only "True Blue" network of stations that still stick to the callsign ID method

Cheers & 73

JeeperOne said:

So in short, even stations in the US have gotten away from callsign ID, leaving only BBC Radio as the only "True Blue" network of stations that still stick to the callsign ID method

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BBC stations don't use their callsigns and haven't done so since the 1930s. ("BBC" is not a callsign.)

Unregistered said:

BBC stations don't use their callsigns and haven't done so since the 1930s. ("BBC" is not a callsign.)

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Yeah, the UK doesn't really use call signs, and hasn't done, certainly since WWII.

JeeperOne may be thinking of the numbers the BBC gives its national radio stations:-

Radio 1 is the pop network, Radio 2 the light music network (more like AC these days), Radio 3 the Classical network, Radio 4 for 'serious' speech- documentaries, debates, radio plays and in depth news and Radio 5 (which IDs as 5 Live) is for rolling news and sports commentaries

I suppose those are 'call signs' of a sort, but they don't refer to transmitters or anything.

Also There are fewer stations

There are fewer stations in the UK.

OFCOM, the regulator, identifies each commercial facility by it's locale and a number: London FM 1, Birmingham FM 2, East London FM 1, etc. There's never been a need for a public identification of the facilities by their technical designation because of the relatively few stations. Either you are the BBC, you are commercially licensed or you are a pirate.

Australia, by contrast, is a Commonwealth country that does use call signs based upon which state the facility is in. E.g. JJJ, MMM, etc. These do not necessarily follow the international standards for call signs.

OFCOM does have all the ERP and locations on their site. You might have to hunt for it. Generally, all UK stations have a link to the "Public File" which links to their licensing documents.