Radio Malayalam 98.6 FM

In India's ordering this is number 303 of 565, which is the middle of the list. The stations either side of it are a better guide to what the country sounds like than the head of the list is, because the head is the same few famous streams in every country.

The country's dial has two sizeable languages on it and this station is on the smaller one. 56 entries in India broadcast in Malayalam, against a listing whose commonest language is Hindi.

The shelf for the language holds 57 stations, led by Bahrain. A station like this one broadcasting from India is what stops that shelf from being a second copy of one country's hub.

128 kbps matches India's median almost exactly. Most stations cluster here because most of them are using the same handful of hosting providers with the same default settings.

The audio comes from stream.zeno.fm, and 108 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.

Of everything the directory lists in India, the entry this page reads closest to is KJ Yesudas Malayalam radio, so it is worth setting out what separates the two. This entry is named for a number, ninety-eight point six, and the other is not.