Radio 4

Radio 4 may refer to:

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a radio station owned and operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is Gwyneth Williams; and the station is part of BBC Radio and the BBC Radio department. The station is broadcast from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London.

It is the second most popular domestic radio station in the UK, broadcast throughout the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands on FM, LW and DAB; and can be received in the north of France and Northern Europe. It is also available through Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and on the Internet. Its sister station, BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly BBC 7), complements the main channel by broadcasting repeats from the Radio 4 archive, extended versions of Radio 4 programmes and supplements to series such as The Archers and Desert Island Discs.

It is notable for its news bulletins and programmes such as Today and The World at One, heralded on air by the Greenwich Time Signal "pips" or the chimes of Big Ben.

Radio 4 News FM

Radio 4 News FM was the BBC radio rolling news service that was on air during the first Gulf War from 16 January until 2 March 1991. It used BBC Radio 4's FM frequencies, whilst their regular scheduled service continued on long wave. This service was also broadcast on BBC World Service. Some journalists chose to give it the nickname Scud FM from the Scud missiles used by Iraqi forces in the war.

The long-term impact of Radio 4 News FM was that the popularity of the station was taken as evidence that a rolling news service was required. In response, BBC Radio 5 Live was launched in 1994.

History

When coalition forces began military operations against Iraq following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait the previous year, the BBC discontinued broadcasting the usual mixed schedule on BBC Radio 4's FM frequency and replaced it with a rolling news service, known by the emergency staff as "Scud FM", named after "Saddam Hussein's most notorious weapon," the Russian-made Scud missile which Iraq was firing at Tel Aviv.

1991

1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (dominical letter F) of the Gregorian calendar, the 1991st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 991st year of the 2nd millennium, the 91st year of the 20th century, and the 2nd year of the 1990s decade.

It was the year that is usually considered the final year of the Cold War that had begun in the late 1940s. During the year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed into fifteen sovereign republics. India also abandoned its policies of socialism and autarky and began extensive neoliberal changes to its economy in July 1991 which would increase the GDP but also economic inequality over the next two decades. A U.N.-authorized coalition force from thirty-four nations fought against Iraq, which had invaded Kuwait in the previous year, 1990. The conflict would be called the Gulf War and would mark the beginning of a since-constant American military presence in the Middle East. The clash between Serbia and the other Yugoslav republics would lead into the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars, which ran through the rest of the decade.

Radio

Radio is the use of radio waves is to carry information, such as sound, by systematically modulating some property of electromagnetic energy waves transmitted through space, such as their amplitude, frequency, phase, or pulse width. When radio waves strike an electrical conductor, the oscillating fields induce an alternating current in the conductor. The information in the waves can be extracted and transformed back into its original form.

Radio systems need a transmitter to modulate (change) some property of the energy produced to impress a signal on it, for example using amplitude modulation or angle modulation (which can be frequency modulation or phase modulation). Radio systems also need an antenna to convert electric currents into radio waves, and vice versa. An antenna can be used for both transmitting and receiving. The electrical resonance of tuned circuits in radios allow individual stations to be selected. The electromagnetic wave is intercepted by a tuned receiving antenna. A radio receiver receives its input from an antenna and converts it into a form usable for the consumer, such as sound, pictures, digital data, measurement values, navigational positions, etc. Radio frequencies occupy the range from a 3 kHz to 300 GHz, although commercially important uses of radio use only a small part of this spectrum.