I tried this one two years ago earlier, but without success. But maybe Radio North has a new QSL manager in Chrissy, who was so kind to confirm my report via radionorth846mwads(at)gmail.com with a very nice fully detailed eQSL.
Radio North is broadcasting from Redcastle, Ireland with 3 kW. The station is unlicensed. And I know this led to annoyance with Dutch LPAM stations as they have to pay quite a hefty fee for their license allowing them to broadcast with 100 W max, only to find that a relatively high powered unlicensed station is causing interference on a frequency allocated to the Netherlands. It was one of the reasons why Album AM went off the air. MCB from Alphen aan de Rijn has taken over operations on 846 AM since.
I listened to oldies, but at 0300 h UTC they brought a Gospel broadcast from father John Morrison. These are heard quite often on Radio North. Chrissy had to print my email for him, as father John is old school and doesn’t have email. Below a brief clip of my reception:
It is interesting that more people have reacted to the laxity of the Irish COMREG regarding radio pirates on medium wave on the green island. The only language this authority may understand is if the authority is inundated with reports of interference from abroad.
There are a few more examples of radio stations from Ireland that seem to have received some kind of “free pass”, Coast FM on 1494/ 1575 kHz, Energy Power 208 from Dublin on 1440 kHz.
The most effective thing must be that we radio station owners abroad together report these illegal transmitters to comreg, the Irish radio licensing authority!
https://www.comreg.ie/industry/radio-spectrum/spectrum-compliance/radio-interference/
It should be pointed out that the 846kHz frequency is in fact registered to Ireland with the ITU, since over 20 years ago when there were plans to licence religious broadcasts on AM.
I seriously doubt Radio North is 3kW radiated, in my experience when travelling in Ireland its daytime signal strength was weaker than (now discontinued) legitimate AM signals of around 1kW in Northern Ireland, when similar distances from each.
Thank you for this comment. I did some research and indeed, the frequency is allocated to Ireland by the ITU. Max power allowed by the ITU GE75 regulations seems to be 10 kW. But as the name says: these regulations are from 1975 when the mediumwave was still dominated by national broadcasters with 50-100 kW and more. It seems almost as if the regulations need an update to reflect and accommodate current reality where LPAM is 100 Watt and high power is anything between 1 to 10 kW.