Range of radio stations

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Seems like a fun project to start

As for directional antennas for specific areas - this can be somewhat solved by simply adding frequencies for propaganda in various languages, having like "BBC_Italy", "BBC_Germany" etc. and making sure target area is covered by station range. I'd be more worried about the disk space it would take to have enough multi-language news to make listening to the channel worth it.

That, and one would need people fluent in languages used, to search for and understand the content of broadcasts in order to put them in correct time.

yes, my point is that if you use real antenna coordinates, most shortwave (= long range) radio programs will be audible outside their historical reception ranges.

[kapuhy]

Well, the range "border" works really nice, just checked it by sailing out of station's range - radio gradually is replaced by white noise as you get close to the border, it feels very natural.

Bad news is we apparently can't have several transmitters sharing one audio folder - I made two "copies" of a radio station with the same folder but different names and antenna coords, and the game simply ignored the second one. So there goes my idea of having for example several time-limited transmitters for Grossdeustcher Rundfunk from occupied countries.

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Well, the range "border" works really nice, just checked it by sailing out of station's range - radio gradually is replaced by white noise as you get close to the border, it feels very natural.

From your answer I understand that I didn't make myself clear enough. I will try with another example. During WWII, EIAR (the national radio broadcaster of the time) had in its schedule programs of Japanese music and news which were intended for the Far East. If I made those programs into a radio station with its antenna located in Rome and a range factor big enough to reach Japan, the same station would be audible not only in Japan but in the Western hemisphere as well, as far the East Coast of the States. This is obviously wrong: if I wanted the said programs to be only audible over Asia and maybe Eastern Europe, I should place its antenna in an arbitrary location somewhere between Italy and Japan, and reduce its range accordingly...

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Bad news is we apparently can't have several transmitters sharing one audio folder - I made two "copies" of a radio station with the same folder but different names and antenna coords, and the game simply ignored the second one. So there goes my idea of having for example several time-limited transmitters for Grossdeustcher Rundfunk from occupied countries.

Good news for you: what you want to do has been achieved for SHIV, using a little trick:

Originally Posted by tedhealy

In order to get new stations to feed off of the same folder, you seem to have to add a backslash to the front of the folder name for every new station.

So you end up with

[GENERAL]
RadioRealism=Yes
StartCh=1

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington
Folder=Washington
Freq=22
Antenna=01.01.1930-01.01.2000:21.36,-157.96:6000

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington-Midway
Folder=\Washington
Freq=42
Antenna=01.01.1930-01.01.2000:28.00,179.00:2800

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington-Manila
Folder=\\Washington
Freq=52
Antenna=01.01.1930-02.01.1942:14.40,120.35:1600

My recommendation for you is to read carefully the following threads, as they contain information and ideas that you might find useful

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...720#post461720

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...630#post465630

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by gap

From your answer I understand that I didn't make myself clear enough.

No no, I got it This wasn't answer re directional transmitters, I was happy to see exiting radio range won't cause strange effects like audio suddenly popping in and out.

As for directional transmitters, if we can make several radio stations use the same folder and very close frequencies, theoretically you could make a directional transmitter by stacking "fake" transmitters along the common axis, like this (of course, since this is sea game we'd skip ones that only cover land):



Thanks for the links, reading these threads now!

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

No no, I got it This wasn't answer re directional transmitters, I was happy to see exiting radio range won't cause strange effects like audio suddenly popping in and out.

Okay

Originally Posted by kapuhy

As for directional transmitters, if we can make several radio stations use the same folder and very close frequencies, theoretically you could make a directional transmitter by stacking "fake" transmitters along the common axis, like this (of course, since this is sea game we'd skip ones that only cover land):

That's a nice idea, but I am afraid it has some shortcomings. The programs of two or more radio stations broadcasting on very close frequencies are mixed together where their respective ranges overlap with each other. That wouldn't be a big problem if those stations broadcast the same programs at the same time, but I think that even if two stations shared the same music folder, they will never play the same music at the same time, due to that game shuffling the music for us

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Thanks for the links, reading these threads now!

My pleasure kapuhy. Let us know if they help

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by gap

That's a nice idea, but I am afraid it has some shortcomings. The programs of two or more radio stations broadcasting on very close frequencies are mixed together where their respective ranges overlap with each other. That wouldn't be a big problem if those stations broadcast the same programs at the same time, but I think that even if two stations shared the same music folder, they will never play the same music at the same time, due to that game shuffling the music for us

Just tried this and you're right, I was hearing two different songs from the playlist at the same time. Perhaps if one could arrange the transmitters in such a way that their range circles overlap mostly over land...

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Just tried this and you're right, I was hearing two different songs from the playlist at the same time. Perhaps if one could arrange the transmitters in such a way that their range circles overlap mostly over land...

I don't think that's going to be practically feasible, but maybe you could make the "fake" transmitter ranges not to overlap with each other, or to overlap only with their "poor signal" external circles. Of course there would be some gaps between a transmitter and the other where we could only hear static noise or nothing at all, but with some fantasy we could pretend that this is caused by atmospheric disturbances, radio interference, etc.

An alternative solution could be making two overlapping stations to have frequencies close enough that when the signal of one of them is getting poor, the player can immediately tune their receiver on the next station, but not so close that you can hear them at the same time...