Cork station, plays hiphop rap house edm tech trance etc, could be picked up from Cork City all the way back to rural Waterford [Ardmore, etc.] Very strong all the way across and no deterioration in sound quality, don't no how far it could've gone because I had to stop there, but very high power no RDS after leaving Cork but can still be picked up very strong.

I would well believe it, they were picked up in finland a couple of years back.

Aren't they running over 1kW from a mountain? Can hear heard weak near Manchester.

are you guys serious? That wouldn't surprise me if it was an AM station but fm?

You can hear a few Irish legal stations around Manchester just on a normal day. Today FM 101.4, Some RTE thing on 87.8 and some other thing on 89.6 I could always hear at home in Manchester. Someone from Wigan called radioredcat posted a video from their home in Wigan only quite recently tuned into Klub 87.5.

Yeah klub gr8 station, seems to have a massive audience and pretty professional

Not 1kW and not mountain.

Less power and a good engineer (not me obviously).

Is it possible signal is being dragged to Manchester over water rather than over land?
Similar with Ardmore: there's no significant elevation between Cork and Ardmore.

I'm not into the content personally, but the lads behind this run a tight ship. Usually a clean signal, usually good sound quality.

yeah over water obviously it's much easier for a station to be picked up over water than over land because there is no significant interference.

There's no path from Cork to Manchester that doesn't cross plenty of land as well as the Irish Sea.

The stations from Monaghan back in the 90's were perfectly listenable on the west coast of Scotland! With stereo and RDS! Mind you, Miles was running some serious power from a very high site with some amazing aerial arrays to get the signal into Belfast and most of the Six Counties! Take a look:



That aerial tower is pretty serious!

Albert H wrote:There's no path from Cork to Manchester that doesn't cross plenty of land as well as the Irish Sea.

The stations from Monaghan back in the 90's were perfectly listenable on the west coast of Scotland! With stereo and RDS! Mind you, Miles was running some serious power from a very high site with some amazing aerial arrays to get the signal into Belfast and most of the Six Counties! Take a look:

https://youtu.be/WIrAjmtS6BU

That aerial tower is pretty serious!

I'm assuming it's a video of the areal. I'm blind man!

Sorry - I forgot. It's a video of the whole set up that was at the top of the mountain. There were (eventually) two transport containers (that had fallen off the back of lorries!) with the transmitters inside them. The metal containers were earthed to provide a good Faraday Cage to prevent RF from the aerials getting back into the gear!

There was audio processing, stereo coding and RDS equipment there, and a couple of computers per station with pre-recorded programmes on them. In the event of the link failing, the automatic DJ would begin, so that there was no serious break in transmission.

The modulation index was kept high, so that the stations would flatten the noise - they sounded huge even if the signal was weaker than some of the local stuff in Ulster! The coverage was phenomenal, with listeners in Scotland and even Norway!

Energy or Kiss may have been the most powerful FM pirate station anywhere, ever - with an ERP of over a Megawatt. Some of the Mexican Medium Wave stations broadcasting into the 'States were probably bigger in the 60s and 70s, and Luxembourg on 1440kHz was nearly 6MW and was (technically) a pirate, so the Irish stations were probably the most powerful FM pirates ever!

man yeah that's some power, what was the station with luxamburg btw? they're known as a pirate but according to Wikipedia they were actually licensed.

The Luxembourg story is a peculiar one - they gave themselves a "licence", but existed outside the EBU. They worked on the principle that they'd grabbed that frequency back in the 1930s, and ran so much power that nobody else could use it anywhere in Europe!

Luxembourg were always trying to get a groundwave signal into the UK (their biggest audience in the evenings), but never really achieved it - that's why the station would always periodically "fade".

drumandbasshead010 wrote:Cork station, plays hiphop rap house edm tech trance etc, could be picked up from Cork City all the way back to rural Waterford [Ardmore, etc.] Very strong all the way across and no deterioration in sound quality, don't no how far it could've gone because I had to stop there, but very high power no RDS after leaving Cork but can still be picked up very strong.

I picked this up above the Wirral near Prestatyn North Wales with my mobile phone FM/recorder. I thought it was coming fro Liverpool area?



Was a while back though.

Hi Michael,

The recording you posted wasn't Klub, how do I know.......... It was me

Klub FM Cork under its current ownership have officially ceased transmissions. Comreg were out in Cork on Wednesday and were seen at Klub FM's studio and/or TX site. Another station, DHR, in the same area also went off air but have since returned, not sure if Comreg were directly involved in that or if they just went off air as a precaution because they knew they were in the area. Anyway Klub FM has not been on air since and it has been announced today that they have shut down for good. Shame as they were a great station. RIP Klub FM.

drumandbasshead010 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2016 11:14 am are you guys serious? That wouldn't surprise me if it was an AM station but fm?

Back in to 90s, Kiss and Energy from Monaghan were running hundreds of kilowatts ERP, and the were getting into western Scotland. Kiss was so strong in Glasgow, it sounded like a local station!

He's not joking Albert, he's blind.
It's a video of the tower, inside the transmitting site and a quick look at the equipment. I still have some of the directional gear that was used for boarder blasting, modified folded dipoles with added elements.. We just stripped them back to the dipole as they were in our freq range back on metalhertzfm

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

ah yeah MetalHertz remember them on I think it was 99.9 back in around 2007 or so, great station also.
Albert, Of course Kiss FM was covering other areas outside of Northern Ireland, they were running a megawatt of power. It was well known Kiss got way further afield than any other pirate,even then, I was more so comparing Klub to pirates of its time, rather than pirates as a hole. There will never be a pirate like Kiss FM in 2017, no authority, Irish or British, would stand for it, but Klub was still getting out great compared to most of the pirates in the country now. I don't think I could even name 5 reasonably high-powered outlets in the country right now, and certainly none coming close to what Kiss FM were running. The highest-powered pirates here right now are probably Phever (Dublin) and Storm (northeast.) There are 2 AM pirates up north which I believe make it out a good way, but I don't tend to keep as close an eye (pardon the pun) on the AM band these days.

I've heard a couple of the Irish AM efforts when I've been over in Wales. Now the French have abandoned Medium Wave, there's LOADS of room for everyone!