I was doing some radio callsign research & I came across this from the ACMA website:


http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib100059/stations-book-electronic-edition.pdf.

It features all AM, FM & Current DTV & DAB Stations aswell, also shows their transmission power & exact towns too, I found this quite interesting!

One thing I miss about rural television stations is their true identity. With the aggregation policies of governments over the past twenty years local programming on rural television stations is pretty much non-existant.

The Prime and Win networks have grown to become the largest television networks in the world in terms of the size of their broadcasting footprints but they, along with Southern Cross and Imparja, rely heavily on programming relays from Sydney. This is good if you are a TV junkie and want to make sure you can watch Home and Away where ever you are but not so good when you are a 'local' and want to promote what your town has to offer.

I was once privileged to tour the production studios and newsroom at NEN9 in Tamworth, NSW. The facility was large and well-equipped but network television has rendered most of the building's function obsolete and as far as I know the studios are only used to produce the local news bulletins.

Regarding the list of transmitters, I notice that there have been quite a few changes to callsigns. Callsigns such as ECN and CWN have been abolished, being replaced by the callsigns of their sister-stations NEN and CBN respectively and no station broadcasts on Channel 5 anymore - shifting to Channel 5A or a spot on the UHF band.

I have a station callsign book which was printed some years ago now before aggregation and the scene looked very different then.

With the dozen or more free channels most of Australia now gets has the quality of programming improved? My belief is that no it hasn't or is it a case that I have simply become a more discerning viewer?

As far as I know, TV in Australia has always been crap in my opinion, I have also noticed Our local AM radio station Callsign was changed from 3MA to 3ML, the original frequency was 1390, then the Government altered the regulation & changed it to 1467 I kind of miss the old Callsign now, they just call it Easymix 1467 AM instead of 3MA, They never officially called themselves 3ML

Sometimes callsigns change simply to make them easier to roll off the tongue, as was the case with 2UE when it was originally known as 2EU. Strange that they'd go to the expense of changing a callsign and then not Id'ing with the new one though.

Personally I'd prefer stations to use their callsigns instead of company names and slogans and generally find that the stations using callsigns seem to rate better. Sydney's market which has more than 20 stations is the perfect example. Most of the top ten stations and those that rate well for particular market segments still use their callsign: 2GB, 2UE, 2DAY, 2CH, etc. Mix, Edge, Nova Wega and Radio National are further down the list.

Australia would be one of few countries with channels on the AM band spaced 9kHz apart though this is probably so more stations could be squeezed onto the dial.