Shakthi Fm

Near the top of Sri Lanka's list, at 2 of 39. Positions this high tend to be stable between snapshots, which is more than can be said for the middle of a long national listing.

The directory counts 23 opens against this stream. That is well above Sri Lanka'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 Tamil station transmitting from Sri Lanka is a rarity in this data: two of the country's entries carry that language, against a listing whose commonest is Sinhala. Combinations like this are the reason the site indexes language separately from country.

Where else Tamil is on air, according to the same snapshot: mostly India, Canada and Singapore. The shelf lists all 169 of them together, which is the view a country hub cannot give.

The local news corner of Sri Lanka's dial is two 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.

Worldwide it ranks 7 among 95 local news entries, which is worth roughly as much as the count behind it and no more.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where Sri Lanka'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.