Australian ABC Radio:
- Regional Radio – especially 5am-7am and the Country Hour from noon until 1pm, weekdays.
- The Queensland Country Hour
- ‘ Australia All Over‘ with Ian McNamara, Sunday mornings, 5.30am to 10am. It can be heard outside Australia via shortwave radio or over the internet.
- ‘ Saturday Night Country ‘ with John Nutting, ABC Regional Radio, 10pm-midnight.
Commercial Radio Stations:
- KIX Country FM
Non-stop country music beamed throughout much of eastern Queensland as well as South Australia’s Riverland, by Larrican. Check out the coverage map.
Remote reception
Why part of the ABC’s under-funded budget has been spent on the much shorter range FM radio transmitters, beaming into already well serviced areas, while there are still large parts of Australia that cannot even receive any AM radio broadcasts of listenable quality — either ABC or commercial stations — is a mystery to me.
No doubt this inequitable and socially unjust decision is explained by the fact that the bean counters who decide where the money is spent have never lived in a remote area, and have absolutely no understanding of how vital a clear radio signal is when you only receive mail once weekly (and not at all during wet weather), television via satellite (transmissions are interrupted during very heavy rain and dense cloud, and sometimes the decoders break down), and telephone services via DRCS (Digital Radio Concentrator System) or satellite systems.
Radio broadcasts can be picked up on television using the satellite signal decoders, but having to listen to the radio via your TV is hardly what you’d call practical. Radio is still by far the most reliable way of transmitting a signal, and during power outages all you need is a small radio with a couple of batteries to hear vital news broadcasts.
Perhaps the icing on the idiocy cake though is ABC’s Radio National beaming into the metropolis of Tennant Creek, instead of local ABC radio. One year as I was driving through this part of the Northern Territory, the only thing I could pick up was an lengthy discussion on Canberra town planning. It was excruciatingly hideously dull and irrelevant in the extreme; absolutely disrespectful to remote residents, and those responsible should be pegged out on antbeds.