Dire Straits

Dire Straits is deep in the United Kingdom's listing, at 314 of 466. Down here the ordering barely orders anything: the difference between one position and the next is often a single recorded open, so treat the neighbours below as a shelf rather than as a ranking.

No bitrate is recorded against this stream. It is a common gap: the value is scraped from the stream's headers and plenty of servers do not send them. Press play and your browser will tell you more in two seconds than the field would have.

Dire Straits streams in AAC while most of the United Kingdom'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.

10 of the United Kingdom's entries are served from stream.pcradio.ru, this one among them. A shared host means a shared fate. If this stream is silent, the fastest check is not this station's own site but whether its neighbours on the same platform are playing.

The station's site is at pcradio.ru, which sits under the .ru country domain rather than the United Kingdom's. That mismatch is usually mundane, a host or a parent organisation registered elsewhere, and it is the kind of small inconsistency worth seeing rather than smoothing over.