Radio Ga Ga

Sometime near the beginning of time, when I first started off blogging, Delhi was already a quasi-modern city. Even in the ancient days of 2004, the city boasted 3 or 4 FM stations. Some of those stations were passably good, some weren't. One knew which was which - There weren't too many alternates and each station had its musical leanings (broadly angrezi, punjaabi-based-khichdi, akaaswani-based-oldies+social-message-trash). They also had well separated frequencies- one knew them by heart (hardly surprising since there weren't too many channels ... moreover it helped if you receiver had the tendency to lose "stored stations list" on each power cut)

All this has changed now.

Delhi, these days, has well over 11 FM stations and the list is growing fast. I found this out when I sat down to configure FM channels on my mobile phone (small miracle of convergence ... sometime in near future I hope to write about configuring a few zillion TV channels on my "portable electronic sustenance thing" - PEST) . Now my phone also has the "feature" of assigning channel-names to stored frequencies - This forced me to spend about an hour trying to figure out the names of various FM Stations ... it was not a very difficult exercise, the RJs helped me in this ... every 5-10 minutes the RJs tend to announce something like "its a gloomy day and you are listening ABCXYZ FM". On the whole this might look like a huge waste of time, but it wasn't - my efforts revealed two well-hidden facts - that "Meaoon" is the only FM station which is "just for women" and that "Gyanvaani" is Delhi's only full time "educational" FM radio channel ("educational" should not be confused with "educational films" like the classic legend "mysore mallige" which used to be afloat in hostel LANs)

So here's the current list of Delhi's FM stations. (hope it helps you in configuring your PEST or in case your receiver has the habit of losing "stored stations list" helps you in tuning into your fav FM station)

91.10 MHz - Radio City
92.70 MHz - Big 92.7 FM
93.50 MHz - Red FM
94.30 MHz - Radio One
95.00 MHz - Hit 95 FM
98.30 MHz - Radio Mirchi
102.6 MHz - AIR FM "Rainbow"
104.0 MHz - Fever 104
104.8 MHz - "Meaoon" 104.8 FM
105.6 MHz - "Gyanvaani"
106.4 MHz - AIR FM "Gold"


Point to note ... While most channels are separated by multiples of 0.8 MHz ... this rule does have some exceptions ... I wonder if some sort of optimized-station-separation is mandated in the policy for spectrum distribution.