A few weeks back I visited Tamworth . I tuned into 2TM whilst I was driving down the main street and to my utter disappointment my radio went on the blink ( or so I thought ) then it came on and off at least 5 or 6 times in the 10 minutes I was listening. To my utter disgust I was able to find out that my radio was fine and that was a normal occurrence with 2TM and the local people were having to put up with it.

When I was a child growing up in Tamworth 2TM was the only alternative to the ABC in regards to radio entertainment and all they offered was country music 6 nights a week and the American top 40 with Casey Kaysen on Saturday night of which I would listen to from go to wooa and this spawned my love of Valve radios as they were really the only ones I knew of that could pickup long distance so I could listen to my sort of music on 2mn ( Maitland) .I really hated having no choice.

Now the thing is that Looking at things now days , 2TM is now a network station which plays no or very little country music and the fact that it goes off the air frequently on a daily basis is letting the people of Tamworth down very badly, I mean it is almost like a afterthought the way it is run. Or is this the future for all AM radio?.

Tell me if I am wrong but is it not illegal for a station to broadcast nothing but a carrier signal?

Tell me if I am wrong but is it not illegal for a station to broadcast nothing but a carrier signal?

Do you mean carrier with a tone?

Broadcast transmitters usually need to be fed a continuous signal to avoid their shutting themselves down.

Couldn't hear a tone but there may have been.

What the people of the New England region and Tamworth in particular know as Radio Centre which encompassed 2TM and NEN9 at the TV station next door is almost a ghost town now due to the pillage of local media. It's a shame because the region has provided many of the reporters that now work for the big stations. Kylie Gillies used to be the weather girl on NEN9 and former ATN7 reporter Neil Warren was a reporter and newsreader on NEN9. Australia's most esteemed authority on country music, Nick Erby, who now manages the website CMR, worked at 2TM for years. Tony Gillies, Kylie Gillies' husband, who is the Editor in Chief at AAP was the Editor of Tamworth's major newspaper, The Northern Daily Leader, which I might add is now owned by Fairfax.

There's very little in the way of local media in Australia these days, yet local media outlets right around Australia have given so much to their larger city-based brethren. Almost all non-local content on all forms of media now comes out of Sydney.

In the USA a town that small (Wikipedia says 47595 people) a local station would be automated with noone around except maybe once a week. It's probably driven by a server that looks like Brad's. So the station transmitter cutting in and out won't be noticed for a while, probably only when something in the transmitter gets overstressed and quits completely. Then their listener (no s ) may or may not know who to call to complain.

One would think they'd be like the TV stations and have two transmitters. Even with the old and defunct analogue transmitters the reserve would pick up the slack if the main one went belly-up and viewers only notice a brief flicker of the picture. With digital it is a seamless failover because two digital transmitters can transmit the same signals at the same time.

Then again, in the case of 2TM it could just be the programme source that is clagging.

Interesting note about populations: Tamworth has about 55,000 so the listening area is about the same size though at night around 20 years ago when 2TM played country music all night, every night the listening area would have been much bigger with people in surrounding towns tuning in.

Station 2TM would formally identify as VK2TM, but every commercial station omits the national prefix.
I presume it’s because they licence a particular frequency that no other entity should be using in the same region.
The Amberly military air base near me identifies with synthesised voice “Amberly Terminal Information”, over the top of Morse “AMB”.
Neither of those are the station’s call sign, and they can probably also do that because the transmitter is licensed to operate on 359kHz.
Maybe your mate down there would know about that for sure.

For every level of amateur radio licence in Australia, full identification is required every ten minutes of continuous contact.
It is definitely lawful (current LCD) to transmit short overs for the purpose of testing.