OC Radio

This is one of the quieter entries in the United Kingdom's listing, at 394 of 466. Stations at this depth are usually community, religious or single genre broadcasters rather than national networks, and the country's numbered pages are the only route to them.

Among 466 stations in the United Kingdom here, this is the only one that puts chart first. The chart rail below therefore leaves the country entirely, which is the more interesting direction to travel from a page like this.

The encode is 192 kbps against a country median of 128. Comfortably above the middle of the United Kingdom's listing without being one of its outliers.

The format here is AAC, against a listing for the United Kingdom overwhelmingly made of MP3. Both play in a browser; the difference shows up in how much quality survives at a given bitrate, where AAC has the advantage at lower rates.

Its audio comes straight from stream.digilinkconnect.co.uk:2020, an address unique to this entry in the United Kingdom's listing. That is the simplest case there is, and it is the one where pressing play tells you the whole truth about whether the station is on air.

The station's site is at oldham.ac.uk, which sits under the .uk 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.