La Melinkana FM

La Melinkana FM sits in the tail of Chile's 99 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

No opens have been recorded against La Melinkana FM in the public directory. Plenty of working stations sit at zero, because the count only rises when somebody plays the stream from a client that reports back, and most listening never touches the directory at all.

Nothing else in Chile's listing leads with folk. The tag is self-declared, which makes it a statement of how the broadcaster positions itself rather than a classification anyone audited, and on this dial that statement is unique.

La Melinkana FM streams at 96 kbps, under Chile's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

Its audio comes from audio3.tustreaming.cl. Two other stations in Chile stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.