1.)
Deutschlandradio will in next year abandon this name as a media
brand. What is now Deutschlandradio Kultur will then become "Deutschlandfunk
Kultur" while DRadio Wissen, the digital-only station with a whopping market
share of at present 0.03 percent (16,000 listeners per day in the whole of
Germany), will be called "Deutschlandfunk Nova".
Goal of this move is to
use only a single brand, the most widely known one they have. They consider it
as essential for being clearly recognized in the digital world (i.e. outside the
broadcasting zoo) where they already see a great rise in the use of their
offerings.
This
move is a bit sensitive because Deutschlandfunk at Cologne had considered itself
the only legitimate national broadcaster until the federal states decided to
have a Berlin branch as well, created by merging RIAS and Deutschlandsender.
This merge did not go well at all (thus history is not history in this case), as
described in this newspaper report from 2014 which, I'm told, does not make up
the situation.
2.)
Of
course it is not true that the last mediumwave transmitter in Germany has been
switched off on New Year's Day, with Vilseck 1107 kHz still being on air. That's
just the narrative successfully established by Deutschlandradio PR.
And
"covering Central Europe": You can check out for yourself now, the transmitter
has been turned on a few days ago with a special test loop (not the audio on the
web stream that goes out on FM, too) of a voice announcement and morse code. At
night I found this morse code poking through the jumble of Italy and Spain in
the Netherlands and likewise, except that 1575 is mostly Italy here, also 100 km
east of Halle. But that's about all.
The mediumwave transmitter was
supposed to achieve 0.5...0.6 kW, to be installed at the same ham radio facility
as the temporary FM transmitter (on a frequency used already on earlier
occassions).
Kai
Ludwig (via dxld yg)
