Nepal: Why digital?
Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the premises of Radio Nepal here in Kathmandu. My colleagues and I were shown around the buildings, the master control room and some studios. Most of it was built by Japanese companies with Japanese development money during the early eighties. It looks as if the station could break down any moment and its director general is aware of this. The reason is that spare parts for most of the equipment aren’t available anymore. Radio Nepal still uses quite a lot of reel-to-reel machines and has not really succeeded in making the transition to digital technology. Some of the production is done on PC’s with the network dysfunctional due to software issues (they had bought a server-client solution in Italy and now don’t get a new software key after changing the hardware following two hard-disk crashes…).
So at least for production, but also for archiving, Radio Nepal would love to go digital. But, even though its operation should be funded by the government, allegedly no payments have been made. Consequently the state owned broadcaster has to rely on revenue from commercials which seems to be just about enough to keep the place running.
Radio Nepal uses a network of FM stations, relaying the signal using satellites, a medium wave network and also two short wave frequencies for remote areas. The price of a receiver to listen to any of this (and many more FM stations, as radio is booming in this country) is 35 Nepalese Rupees, that’s about 40 €uro-cent.
Pictures courtesy Helmut Osang.