Flirt FM Short Documentary

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teckniqs
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Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by teckniqs » Sun May 12, 2019 1:58 pm

An interesting combination of video clips showing you how some of them do it over there on top of huge mountains with nice big expensive 19" rack mount rigs and links running on generators.


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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by drumandbasshead010 » Sun May 12, 2019 2:52 pm

Great station, would probably have close to national coverage if they bothered to find a better frequency. Last time I picked it up it was covering a very large portion of the country, it's coming from the midlands.
Watched the video a while ago but am totally blind so could only go by sound, is it a nice setup? High power etc?

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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by dancemusicdj » Sun May 12, 2019 3:15 pm

They used to get serious coverage when they used i think it was 104.9 or 104.8. I don't know how 87.6 faired as i had stopped using an fm radio by then. The kildare pirates galaxy, and freedom/pulse fm also got serious coverage when they used that part of the band. Iradio and classic hits 4fm would likely prevent such coverage now as they use frequencies around that part of the band in some areas.

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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by teckniqs » Sun May 12, 2019 3:43 pm

Was a good watch, and nice to see the way they did it.

....Do you know of any other stations with any videos like these?

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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by dancemusicdj » Sun May 12, 2019 3:51 pm

energy 106 from belfast have a few videos on youtube i think.

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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by drumandbasshead010 » Sun May 12, 2019 10:49 pm

Yeah there are a few Energy videos up there alright.
From what I've read in the past Flirt (as Fusion at the time incidentally it would appear) had great coverage on 87.6, there were no Dublin operators on the frequency at the time so it got into Southwest Dublin. I'd say they're using equipment/site of similar potential but 106.6 and 106.7 aren't as good frequencies as 87.6. Only for they'd probably overpower NLR in most of its coverage area they could return to 87.6, shame they can't make an arrangement with them.

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Re: Flirt FM Short Documentary

Post by thewisepranker » Tue May 14, 2019 2:33 pm

drumandbasshead010 wrote: Sun May 12, 2019 2:52 pm Watched the video a while ago but am totally blind so could only go by sound, is it a nice setup? High power etc?
It's very pirate! Drag a generator up a hill and run from a big blue plastic barrel full of diesel! The rackmount rig is mounted in a DIY wooden box with rackmount link receiver and just left outside. It's raining in one of the clips and it's getting a bit wet...!

There's a lot going on in the video. It's pretty much a collection of random short clips of them having a laugh and pissing into the bushes. Lots of different studios by the look of it, including a first floor bedroom in a house.

Regarding power, I think the rig is doing around 500 W but I really have no idea. It could be as high as 1.2 kW but more on that in a second.
At first glance the power meter looks to be indicating 250 W but the block diagram shows four separate amplifiers and a combiner followed by a low pass filter on the output. It has got a single moving coil meter which is able to display at least ten different things, which look like forward power, reflected power, Vpa1 to Vpa4 which I assume is the supply voltage to each amplifier and Ipa1 to Ipa4 which again I assume is the current drawn by each amplifier.
The meter is set to read Vpa4. Full scale deflection is 80 V and it is displaying around 37 V. I said 500 W originally because it's likely that it is running 48 V or higher rated output devices, so what kind of output power you get at 37 V, and what kind of output impedance you have to match to in order to get that power, is anyone's guess.
Full scale deflection on the forward power scale is 1200 W. I really have no idea what it's doing in terms of output power.

The antennas are expensive types used by lots of commercial stations.

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