talkSPORT on 1089 kHz: Britain's commercial sports station, loud across Europe at night

What you hear

talkSPORT is sport as conversation: presenters and ex-players arguing about football for hours, listeners phoning in, transfer gossip, betting adverts, and in the evenings and at weekends live commentary from Premier League and European matches. The tone is louder and more partisan than the BBC's, and the adverts every quarter of an hour make it easy to tell the two apart. It is in English, round the clock, and on medium wave it comes through as fairly compressed AM, processed to sound punchy on a car radio, which also helps it ride over noise at a distance.

Who transmits and why

The station uses two frequencies, 1089 and 1053 kHz, from a chain of transmitters spread across the United Kingdom; there is no single site, which is why the catalogue gives none. These were the BBC Radio 1 channels until the mid-1990s, when they were put up for sale as one of three national commercial licences and went to Talk Radio, which turned itself into talkSPORT at the end of the decade. The network is owned today by News UK, part of the Murdoch group, and medium wave is still the only way it reaches every car in the country, which for a sports station on a Saturday afternoon is the whole business.

Commercial broadcasters pay their own electricity, and talkSPORT has been reducing its medium-wave network, switching off smaller relays while keeping the big transmitters. The catalogue does not record a closing date for the main sites, and the station has stayed on the band longer than many expected.

When and where to listen

Medium wave carries far only after dark, and this is the station that proves it. By day the signal is British: the ground wave covers the UK and the near coast of the continent. After sunset the high-power transmitters, which share the frequency and all arrive together at a distant receiver, turn 1089 kHz into one of the loudest signals on the band from Norway to Italy; the catalogue calls it one of the strongest medium-wave signals in Europe at night, and listeners in central Europe routinely find it at the top of the waterfall. Winter evenings are best, with full darkness from late afternoon to morning; in June there are only a few dark hours.

On 1089 kHz there are also stations in eastern Europe and Russia's neighbours, so from the far east of the continent the British signal is weaker and may be under another one. Receivers in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and France hear it almost like a local; receivers in Britain hear it any time. The program tunes AM; at night the several British transmitters on the same channel can produce a hollow, echoing sound where their signals mix, and a narrower filter or a single sideband often makes the speech clearer. If 1089 is poor, 1053 kHz carries the same programme from other transmitters.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Medium and long wave → talkSPORT (1089 kHz). ShackDeck picks a public receiver that hears 1089 kHz, tunes it and sets AM. No receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed; after dark almost any receiver in western or central Europe will do.