96.3 Rock of Virginia

Among the 1,481 stations in the United States with pages, 96.3 Rock of Virginia is around the halfway mark. Anything in this stretch is reachable from the country's numbered pages rather than from its front table, which is why those pages exist.

Two recorded opens in the public directory. That is a trace rather than a measurement, and it is the reason this page describes where the station sits rather than how popular it is.

The gap here is large: 24 kbps where the United States' 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.

This one is HLS, a segmented format rather than a single continuous stream. It is worth knowing because the failure is specific and fixable rather than a dead station: the address works, the browser just cannot open that shape of address unaided.

The audio comes from stream.revma.ihrhls.com, and 176 other stations in the United States are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of the United States' listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.

The nearest thing to this entry in United States is 97.1 The Eagle Rocks. They are not the same station, and these are the facts the catalogue holds that tell them apart. The number each one is named for is the difference between them: ninety-six point three here and ninety-seven point one there. They are filed in different parts of the country: this one under Virginia, that one under Dallas, Texas. The broadcasters publish at different addresses of their own, rovrocks.iheart.com and 971theeagle.iheart.com.