Radio Algérienne Chaîne 3 on 252 kHz: Algeria's French channel on long wave from Tipaza

What you hear

Chaîne 3 is the French-language channel of Radio Algérienne, the state broadcaster. It sounds like a French general station with an Algerian accent: news on the hour, morning talk, sport, business, interviews, and a wide spread of music from raï and chaabi to French and international pop. The catalogue lists it as a 24-hour service, with a warning that the transmitter is sometimes off, so an empty channel does not mean you have the wrong frequency. On 252 kHz the audio is long-wave AM with limited bandwidth and a solid carrier.

Chaîne 1, the Arabic channel, is on long wave too, on 153 kHz from Kénadsa in the Sahara at 2000 kW; the catalogue notes that despite the power it is hard to hear in Europe, and Romania shares that channel. Chaîne 3 on 252 kHz is the easier Algerian catch by far.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter is at Tipaza, on the coast about seventy kilometres west of Algiers, and the catalogue gives 750 kW. Algeria is a huge country with most of its people along the northern coast and a thin scatter across the desert, and long wave from a coastal site covers both the cities and the roads south with one signal. The French channel exists because French remains a working language in Algeria and among the large Algerian community in France, and 252 kHz reaches that community: by night the signal from Tipaza is audible in Marseille, Lyon and Paris.

The channel number is a coincidence of history. 252 kHz was the frequency of Atlantic 252, the Irish pop station of the 1990s, and later of RTÉ Radio 1 on long wave, which closed in 2023; Algeria has used it in parallel since Soviet-era frequency plans, and since the Irish closure Tipaza has had the channel to itself in Europe.

When and where to listen

Long wave does not need darkness the way medium wave does: by day the ground wave of 750 kW covers Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain, the Balearics and the south of France. After dark the sky wave takes the signal across France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and, on winter nights, Poland and Scandinavia, with slow fading. From central Europe it is a reliable evening and night signal; from the north a winter one. As on all of long wave, local electrical noise is the limit, so a receiver in the countryside hears it better than a city one.

Receivers in Spain, southern France and Italy give the station at any hour; those in Germany, the Netherlands and Britain after sunset. The program tunes AM; a sideband mode with a 4 kHz filter cuts noise on a weak night. If the carrier is missing altogether, the transmitter may simply be off, as the catalogue warns; try again another day.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Medium and long wave → Radio Algérienne Chaîne 3 252 kHz (LW). ShackDeck looks for a public receiver that covers long wave and hears 252 kHz, tunes it and sets AM. Fewer public receivers tune this low, but no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed.