I have just moved from London from Merseyside. One of my digital radios shows BBC Radio London as unavailable, but there is no listing for BBC Radio Merseyside or Radio City. The other radio does show BBC Radio Merseyside. Can you help with this?
– Julie
An advantage of DAB digital radio is that as you move around the country you don’t need to retune your radio to keep listening to national stations. Unfortunately this isn’t the case for stations like BBC Radio Merseyside.
The solution to this problem is usually to perform a retune or rescan on the radio. There may be a dedicated button marked ‘rescan’ or you may have to go into a menu first. When the retune is started the radio will automatically scan for all available stations and store them in the station list.
As you can receive BBC Radio Merseyside on one radio in your home it’s likely the other radio will also find it.
Digital radio stations in and around Liverpool are broadcast from five transmitters on Merseyside. Once your radio finds BBC Radio Merseyside it will also pick up Radio City, Radio City Talk, Hits Radio, Heart, Capital, Greatest Hits Radio and Smooth. You should receive Absolute Classic Rock, Magic Soul and KISS Fresh too.
If the radio still doesn’t find the Merseyside stations the signal might not be strong enough in that particular location. Ensure the aerial is vertical and fully extended and try moving the radio to another location and performing a retune again. If it then finds all of the stations you can experiment by moving the radio back to its intended location.
Some radio models appear to have a limit to the number of digital stations they can receive. We recently saw an older radio which had been used in London unable to complete a scan for stations outside the capital. A factory reset cleared the entire station list and a retune found all of the available local and national stations. You could look for a reset or factory default option in the menu if the previous steps do not help.
Finally, you may find that your radio now shows stations in both London and Merseyside. However, the London stations won’t be available or could be prefixed with a question mark. These can be removed with the prune function, which is often found in the radio’s menu. This will remove the unavailable radio stations from the list, leaving you with just those that are available in Merseyside.