Sabras Radio hits whole of Midlands & London

Mark the 7th of July in your diary now! Leicester based Sabras Radio will be expanding further with its signal being boosted to the whole of the Midlands, as well as London.

After last week’s exclusive announcement here on Biz Asia regarding the station expanding to London with Spectrum Radio, we now have more details. The Asian broadcaster will be transmitted on 558 KHz to Greater London and surrounding areas and also to a wider audience on DAB, satellite and online.

The new service has a large potential audience in view of the fact that 558 can be clearly heard as far north as Milton Keynes and 1260 can be clearly heard as far south as Milton Keynes. Sabras Radio can therefore legitimately claim that its potential audience is every catchment area within the M1 corridor everywhere southward from the Midlands. The boost will also mean direct competition with Birmingham based radio stations Radio XL, BBC Asian Network and London’s Sunrise Radio. The new sound and initiative by Sabras Radio will no doubt cause a stir. Whatever the case, something this big is always a good thing -1. Further choice for the public, 2. Time for change on the other mundane stations. We shall find out after 7th July.

?SABRAS means all tastes?, says Don Kotak the Managing Director, ?and that has been the secret of our success. A carefully balanced programming schedule incorporating appropriate music, languages and speech content to reflect and blend all the demands of today?s British Asian audience has proved to be a winning formula. I am confident that this winning formula can be extended to the potential listeners in London and the surrounding areas?.

Sabras Radio is regarded by many in the industry as the pioneer of Asian radio in the UK. The first broadcasts undertaken by the Sabras team were in 1976 with the local BBC radio station. Subsequently, and for many years, Sabras operated within the GWR Group, before becoming totally independent by winning its own licence in 1994 to broadcast on 1260 AM. It enjoys the largest average listening hours of any commercial station in the UK and is listened to by an estimated 80% of its target audience in the region.

Sabras Radio is also a shareholder in Now Digital (East Midland) Limited which owns two digital multiplexes in the East Midlands and on which in addition to simulcasting its AM programmes, it also broadcasts a unique mixture of formats on a new service ? ?A Plus?. Web streaming across the Internet has now made Sabras global and latest data shows that its streaming service has been listened to by people in no less than 76 countries.