88.6

88.6 sits at 30 of 67 in New Zealand's listing, in the body of the list rather than at either end. This is where most of a national dial actually lives, and it is the part a country hub's first fifty rows never reach.

The alternative corner of New Zealand's dial is three stations deep in this snapshot. Small clusters like that are usually the most rewarding thing on a country page, because they are what the national broadcasters at the top of the list are not.

Twice the local median and then some: 320 kbps where New Zealand's stations typically manage 128. Whether you can hear the difference depends entirely on what you are listening on, but the headroom is there.

The stream is served from radio123-gecko.radioca.st, which no other entry in New Zealand uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.

The station's own site is radioactive.fm. The .fm domain has nothing to do with FM radio or with where a station is: it belongs to the Federated States of Micronesia and has been sold to broadcasters worldwide for years, so read it as branding rather than as a location.