GOAT Radio

GOAT Radio is at 38 in a listing of 126. Read the rank as a rough position rather than a standing: the click counts in the middle of a long national list are close enough together that a handful of opens moves a station several places.

No language is recorded against this station. The field is optional in the public directory and a great many entries skip it, so an empty language says nothing about what you will hear when you press play. It does keep the station off the language shelves, since a shelf built on guesses would be worse than a shelf with holes.

The gap here is large: 63 kbps where Switzerland'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.

GOAT Radio streams in AAC+ while most of Switzerland's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

The stream is served from 20min.dmd2streaming.com, which no other entry in Switzerland 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.