Dipol FM

In Russia's ordering this is number 271 of 471, 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.

With two recorded opens, Dipol FM sits in the part of the directory where the numbers stop discriminating. The station's position in Russia's list should be read as approximate for exactly that reason.

At 256 kbps, Dipol FM streams at more than double Russia's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

The stream is served from icecast-sibinformburo.cdnvideo.ru, which no other entry in Russia 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 dipol.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.