Al araby

Among 15 stations in Qatar with pages here, this one is opened most often. Being first on that list is worth knowing mostly because it says where other listeners started, which is a better opening move than an alphabet.

The directory counts 39 opens against this stream. That is well above Qatar's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

A Arabic station transmitting from Qatar is a rarity in this data: two of the country's entries carry that language, against a listing whose commonest is English. Combinations like this are the reason the site indexes language separately from country.

The Arabic shelf on this site collects every station in the language regardless of where it transmits from, and the directory's Arabic entries are concentrated in Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Reading the shelf next to this page is the quickest way to see how far the language's dial actually reaches.

The gap here is large: 56 kbps where Qatar's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.