Radio Globe Prototype

—

0 stations in view · 0 on the globe

Curated stations aboard · live directory on

Stations here

Drag to spin · pinch or scroll to zoom deep · tap a dot — or a cluster — to pick a station

In view now

Stations on the side of the Earth facing you. Spin the globe and this list follows.

Dial deck colors on the globe

All of The Dial’s deck stations are on the globe — 188 deck entries, 186 unique stations (WRIF and WCSX each sit in two decks), dotted in their deck’s color, with deck pairs (I & II) sharing one color. Locations come from Radio Browser, Radio Garden, or the place in the station’s own name; a few web-only channels with no listed home are plotted at their network’s home instead. A few deck colors were rebalanced here so neighbouring decks read apart on the globe; The Dial itself is unchanged.

Prototype — testing the globe on its own before it joins The Dial.
Faint outlines now trace every country and continent border (Natural Earth map data) over the dotted land, so the map reads underneath the stations — and a lighter set of lines inside North America traces the US state and Canadian province borders, so states and provinces read on the globe too.
Hybrid directory: a curated set is baked in so the globe never opens empty, and as you spin it fetches more stations for the area facing you from the Radio Browser directory — working, direct MP3/AAC streams only, the same playback rules as The Dial. Duplicates are merged by station ID and stream address; a station that fails two checks (a play attempt or a background probe) is retired from the globe. Tap the star on any station to pin it to your Favorites list — tap the star again to unpin it.
Shared pins, spread out: plenty of stations only have a city-level location, so a whole city used to land on one dot. Stations sharing a pin are now fanned out around their city — wider in big countries, tighter in small ones — and a fanned dot’s card says so and still shows the station’s true coordinates. Zoom goes much deeper now — up to 20×, in more, smaller steps: scroll, pinch, the +/− buttons, or double-click a cluster to fly into it. The dots themselves grow as you zoom so they stay easy to see and tap, and if a tap lands on dots too bunched to call, a picker lists the stations in that cluster so you can choose one — or zoom straight into the middle of it. The “In view now” list narrows to what’s actually on screen.

Why some regions looked sparse — and what changed

Three reasons. First, the baked-in set started as a sampler: a few stations per country across 70+ countries, so the US had 12, Canada 5, Scandinavia 3, and most African countries only 1–3. Second, live fetching asked for one continent-sized area and kept only the 90 most-voted stations in it — a few high-vote stations from a handful of countries crowded out local stations everywhere else. Third, roughly half the directory’s listings carry no coordinates at all, and a station without coordinates can’t be dotted on a globe.

What changed on Nov 5, 2026: a 144-station regional booster was baked in from Radio Browser under the same playback rules as everything else — Nordics 41, United States 36, Canada 18, and Africa 49 across 16 countries, spread by place rather than picked purely by votes (a bake-time fetch of every stream caught a few the directory had mislabelled — iHeart HLS endpoints and one static programme file — and those were replaced). Live fetching now also queries the directory country by country for the region in view, so Scandinavia, Africa, and US/Canadian locals keep filling in as you spin. A few countries (Cameroon, Zambia, Botswana, Mali) had no further station that passed every rule on the day of the check, so they still rely on their original dots plus whatever live adds later.

A second pass later the same day went after the stretches that were still empty — Western Australia, southern New Zealand, North Africa, the US interior corridors (Seattle to Minneapolis, Los Angeles to Missouri, Missouri to North Carolina), northwest Mexico, Quintana Roo and the Yucatán, Brazil, Argentina, the coast south of Bonaire, and Canada's wide middle. Another 238 stations were baked in the same way: the US interior state by state and area by area (112), Canada's prairies, territories and Atlantic provinces (26), Mexico (18), Australia (17), Brazil (15), Argentina (10), New Zealand including the South Island (7), Venezuela and Colombia (12), and North Africa (8). Live fetching now also fills region by region — US states, Canadian provinces, Australian and Mexican states — so a rural stretch gets its own query instead of losing to the big metros. Three honest limits remain: regional Western Australia and the Northern Territory produced no stream that passes the playback rules (their ABC feeds are HLS-only), Egypt's listings almost all fail the https / direct-stream / coordinates rules, and China's entries rarely carry both coordinates and a playable codec, so those places still lean on the live fill. The directory's coordinates also turned out to be sometimes flat wrong, not just missing — a German station plotted in the mid-Atlantic, a Dutch one out by Cabo Verde, a Chinese one south of South Africa, an Iowa one in the open Pacific. Every pin is now checked against the map: a pin hundreds of kilometres from any land, any island, and its own listed state or country is moved to that state or country (or dropped if it lists neither), and the station's card says so. Stations listed with a place but no coordinates at all are placed from that place instead of being dropped.

A third pass on Nov 6, 2026 went after eleven views that still read empty: the Caribbean, Brazil's north and centre-west, Patagonia and Chile's ends, the Sahara and the Congo basin, South and Southeast Asia, Western Australia and the Pacific, Greenland and the Arctic, Alaska, and Central Asia. Another 147 verified stations were baked in — Alaska's first eight (Fairbanks to Sand Point, by way of Bethel, Kodiak and McGrath), Asian Russia from Barnaul to Kamchatka, Rio Gallegos and Bariloche in Patagonia, Manaus, Belém and São Luís in Amazonia, Yaoundé and Luanda, Kabul, Ulaanbaatar and Tashkent, Kuching on Borneo, Banjarmasin and Manado in Indonesia, and Suva's two Fijian stations among them. A third of them are stations the directory lists with a place but no coordinates, baked at their listed city or country the same way live arrivals are, and marked as such on their cards. Some places honestly yielded nothing that passes the playback rules: Greenland's few listings are http-only or misfiled foreign stations, Papua New Guinea's networks sit on the HLS platform the rules exclude, the Solomon Islands have no listings at all, Niger and Gabon are http-only, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have no usable listings, and Australia's Northern Territory and WA interior remain ABC-HLS only. The live fill now queries all of these countries — and Alaska, Amazonia, Patagonia and South India region by region — so they keep topping up as you spin.

Curated stations aboard · live counts loading…