James Cridland

Will someone make my ideal radio?

My XHDATA D-808

This is Radioland, my radio newsletter.

Dear radio receiver manufacturers… could one of you please make me a proper global radio receiver to take with me on my travels?

  • I’d like it to have FM reception, with RDS (both the station name and the “scrolly text” please).
  • I’d like it to have AM reception, with adjustable bandwidth settings, and to support all the sensible SW bands.
  • Could it also support the AIR band, as well as the US Weather band?
  • I’d like it to have DAB+ (for Europe), HD Radio in AM/FM (for North America), and DRM Radio in AM (for India) please.
  • Please could it be chargeable via USB-C? And a Bluetooth speaker capability probably makes sense while we’re here. And a clock alarm.

This ideal radio doesn’t actually exist. The pictured XHDATA D-808 that I acquired last year is close, but not close enough, since it lacks the “DAB+ and HD Radio and DRM” part that I’d like. Without DAB+, it’s relatively useless taking this radio to Norway, for example, where analogue radio is turned off; or to the UK, where there’s significant numbers of DAB-only services. And in the US, I miss out on HD channels.

I’d be curious to know whether there are any global travel radio receivers with multiple digital standards in them. I’m curious as to why there aren’t, and can only think that the licence conditions to include some of these digital standards require platform exclusivity.

Does anyone know?

(Would it be possible with an SDR radio, a Raspberry Pi, and a fancy colour touch screen?)

RCS

  • Sitting on my desk is a new book, Maths, Art or Magic? from Robin Prior, who has worked for RCS in Africa for the last thirty years. It’s all about music radio scheduling, as well as today’s other fundamental parts of radio like news, websites, podcasting and social media. It’s a fun read, with some good stories about radio (in Africa and elsewhere), as well as plenty to learn. I’ve never really learnt much about music scheduling, so it’s interesting to see the mechanics about how it all works. It’s only US $39.99, plus $5 shipping wherever you are in the world; it should be worth buying and reading. Hopefully I can convince Robin to give us all a preview chapter to read next time.

  • Congratulations to Global, which has launched a new app for its LBC news and talkback radio station. It’s the same Global Player under the hood as the other Global radio stations use, but it has different UX - because LBC is a news station, not a music station. (It’s quite similar to Apple Classical, which is much the same app as Apple Music, but classical music needs a different UX to pop).

  • Ofcom posted its Audio Report 2025, which is good reading. A few highlights:

    • it splits out “music radio” (62% listen each week) and “speech radio” (36% listen each week), though this data doesn’t actually show that listeners want music rather than speech, of course
    • “Three in five smart speaker users say their device has played the wrong thing when asked to play a particular radio station” - yikes, that’s a data point to be worried about
    • total radio listening in cars (by time-spent-listening) was higher in 2024 than it has ever been in history. So much for Apple CarPlay meaning everyone’s listening to podcasts
    • There’s (even) more data from Adam Bowie who’s picked apart the data tables, because why not

  • Edison Research released the Infinite Dial UK. The full data will be in a webinar - here’s a link to subscribe. The beauty of this data is that it’s easily comparable to the US (and to Australia and New Zealand, both of which will get their own Infinite Dial this year too).

  • “I’m delighted to announce that Planet Rock has reached 1 million listeners in the latest RAJAR figures!” - Ric Blaxill, from Bauer Media, excitedly posting on LinkedIn. It’s entirely correct, but it’s a little odd - since the station has posted more than one million listeners every quarter since Dec 2016 … except last quarter, where it dipped to 956,000. (The hours per listener figure, though, is an impressive growth story since 2003.)

  • Irene Hulme wonders if “Radio killed the radio star” - or, perhaps, whether lazy, over-paid radio presenters have. Meanwhile Fred Jacobs kindly writes about my post last week about Google’s outage, and wonders what radio can learn from it.

Want to supercharge your radio show? Here’s a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep - from a world class radio consultant and the best show-prep writer in the UK. Great for UK stations, or for English-language stations everywhere, too. (ad)

Where I am speaking next

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