PAC 98.7

PAC 98.7 is deep in the United States' listing, at 1365 of 1,481. 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.

PAC 98.7 has a zero in the directory's open count. It is the least interesting number on this page and the one most likely to be misread, so it is worth being plain: it measures traffic through radio-browser, not audience.

Nothing else in the United States' listing leads with 98.7. The tag is self-declared, which makes it a statement of how the broadcaster positions itself rather than a classification anyone audited, and on this dial that statement is unique.

The gap here is large: 32 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.

The audio comes from ice42.securenetsystems.net, and 7 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.