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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column Radio Silence A ll around the UK ­ – and the world – rafts of Internet radios with familiar brand names are being silenced because companies you have never heard of have pulled the plug on shadowy but vital enabling services. Set owners can do nothing to salvage the situation; neither can the set makers. At best, they can helpfully explain the situation; at worst, they will say nothing (in some cases because have gone out of business), leaving owners tearing their hair out, and their radios apart, looking for a non-existent hardware fault. First thing first. All Internet radios rely on a portal or aggregator service that collates and indexes all the addresses for the Internet radio stations all round the world. These portal services are run by independent specialist companies. Hardware and software in a radio accesses the index and offers the user a list of stations. The user chooses from the list and the radio goes off into the Internet and accesses the station by its URL. Because the concept is a bit hard to explain and grasp, this total but invisible reliance on a portal is not publicised; nor is which portal they use. Most radio owners, and often the people selling them, don’t care about portals. Until their radio’s portal shuts down, anyway. There is a separate reason why some Internet radios have gone silent. Internet broadcasters such as the BBC have been forced by the ever-increasing numbers of online listeners to stop using the simple Shoutcast Internet radio system. Shoutcast simply serves HTTP packets from each station to each radio. So a Shoutcast radio can be very simple, with little memory. But Shoutcast cannot handle the huge number of connections now needed. In 2023, the BBC changed to more modern and demanding systems: HLS (Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming) and DASH (the Open MPEG standard for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming). Many receivers have stopped receiving the BBC, but continue to receive other stations – but only for as long as their aggregator portal is supported. Among the Internet radios affected by the Shoutcast switch-off/portal shutdown is the compact Armour Q2 Cube once sold by QED. These neat little boxes Practical Electronics | May | 2025 cleverly cut production cost by using a repurposed Bluetooth headset chip. As well as using Shoutcast, Q2 Cubes relied on the vTuner aggregator/portal service. vTuner has shut down, taking the Cubes with it, along with other brand radios such as older devices from T+A. Both QED and T+A have now apologised to legacy listeners. Still, QED states, “We have no control over vTuner”. Similar problems arose with the Stream Internet Radios sold by Roberts Radio. These stopped playing and reported a “lost gateway” because they used Reciva chips, which rely on the Reciva portal service. Reciva was originally run by chip giant Qualcomm but is now defunct. Without a gateway, Reciva-based radios cannot download a software update, and if they have no USB socket, they cannot be updated offline – even if the maker were willing to offer the service. Roberts offered 20% off the price of a new radio if bought direct from Roberts. This brought the price down to around that of the same radio new from Amazon! Roberts radios now mostly use a Frontier Smart Technologies chipset (formerly Frontier Silicon, currently doing R&D in Cambridge). But between 2018 and 2020, Smart relied on the vTuner portal. So those owners are likely out of luck. Luckily for owners of later models, Frontier ditched vTuner in 2020 and switched to another company called Airable, which is based in Germany. A lot of other set-makers are also putting their eggs in the Airable basket. Internet Radios from Pure, the British company that pioneered DAB, were hit by portal bricking too. Initially, Pure radios used an aggregator system called Flow, which is now dead. Pure now uses the Frontier system with Airable. So owners of post-Flow radios are in luck. After the demise of Flow and Reciva, many set-makers turned to Californian company TuneIn for its portal service. But music companies Sony and Warner sued TuneIn under copyright law for letting Brits listen to American stations. As a result, in 2020, TuneIn blocked British access to some foreign stations. Answers to users can be garbled. Tune­ In first told listeners of a Californian station that it was blocked because “the broadcaster currently restricts access to this station to their country only”. The station angrily responded, “Tune-in’s response is totally inaccurate!”. TuneIn then changed their tune (ahem) and said, “Because of ‘Regional Restrictions’, this station is not available in your region”. Airable is capitalising on the TuneIn mess, stating, “Apart from the US Stations you find on products with Airable, and miss on other services, all national and regional BBC stations are available on products with Airable…... These likely are missing on other devices.” Only one thing about Internet radio is truly clear; which aggregator/portal a device uses is now an important factor in deciding whether to buy it. It’s always worth remembering that stations blocked when portals shut down or block zones can still be accessed direct from the station’s website or App. Footnote: Readers with an interest in the history of UK electronics may like to know how the Q2 Cube radio came to be. It was designed for QED by Cambridge Consultants, the lab founded in 1960 by three Cambridge graduates (Tim Eiloart, Rodney Dale and David Southward) who wanted to create clever electronics ‘stuff’. In 1968, CC spawned Cambridge Audio, with circuit designers Gordon Edge and Peter Lee. They twigged that their laboratory power amps might be good for hifi audio and a toroidal transformer could be lighter and smaller than a standard ‘box’ transformer of the same power. Their first baby was the legendary P40 (later P50) stereo amplifier, with a hefty toroidal transformer. In the early 1970s, Stan Curtis came on board and widened the range to include top-end CD players and digital decoders with oversampling. Stan was well known in audio journalism, eg, in Hi-Fi for Pleasure magazine, for using solvents to unseal sealed circuit modules and reporting on what circuitry secrets were revealed. He was known in the music biz for digging inside Hammond B3 organs; for instance, to tackle the conductive metal ‘whiskers’ that grew under the keys and spoiled the sound. Gordon Edge set up a technology wing for the PA Consulting Group that had been started during WW2. It was based in Melbourn, Herts and designed the illfated Strathearn range of stylish hifi gear, which was earmarked for production in Belfast at the height of the ‘troubles’ – alongside the equally ill-fated DeLorean car, now famous thanks to the movie PE Back to the Future. 69