Minnal FM

This is one of the quieter entries in India's listing, at 384 of 565. Stations at this depth are usually community, religious or single genre broadcasters rather than national networks, and the country's numbered pages are the only route to them.

The country's dial has two sizeable languages on it and this station is on the smaller one. 161 entries in India broadcast in Tamil, against a listing whose commonest language is Hindi.

The Tamil shelf on this site collects every station in the language regardless of where it transmits from, and the directory's Tamil entries are concentrated in Canada, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Reading the shelf next to this page is the quickest way to see how far the language's dial actually reaches.

Minnal FM streams at 64 kbps against India's median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 61% of stations reach 128 kbps, a rate this low stands out, and it usually means either a speech station that never needed more or an encoder that has not been touched in years.

The audio comes from playerservices.streamtheworld.com, and 9 other stations in India are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of India's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.