Sidekick Radio — every country’s radio, one phone call away

Live radio, by phone

Every station on earth, one call away.

Connect your PBX by SIP trunk and dial a station’s code. The caller is put in that station’s queue and hears it live, in Opus. A code is the country’s calling code and five digits.

Connect your PBX Browse stations

For example, dialfor BBC World Service

1 caller is listening now.

On airSIP · Opus

BBC World Service

United Kingdom

Press play to hear it here

Try it: press the keys or type a code such as 44 00001, then call. Play is the station itself, in your browser.

Coverage

The world’s radio, numbered like the telephone network.

The catalogue is the Radio Browser directory, synced every day. Each station is given a dial code under its country’s calling code, and that code is never changed and never reused.

67,934
stations: Every one has a dial code and its own queue.; 240
countries: Countries that share a calling code share one sequence.; 679
languages: As the stations describe themselves.

Where the most stations are

All countries

Tune in

Hear any station here, before you connect anything.

Pick a country, search by name, narrow by a tag and press play. What you hear is the station itself, and the code beside it is what your PBX will dial.

How it works

Follow one call, from a desk phone to a broadcast.

Your PBX sends a call down the trunk; the platform answers with the station. Four things happen on the way, and none of them is on your side of the trunk except the first.

01Your PBX

Somebody dials a station’s code.

Nothing changes for the people on your phones. An outbound route on your PBX takes a prefix you choose, strips it, and sends the rest down a trunk: the country’s calling code and the station’s five digits.

Any PBX that can add a SIP trunk: Asterisk, FreePBX, 3CX, FreeSWITCH, Sidekick PBX.
A prefix of your own keeps station codes clear of your extensions and of outside numbers.
A number of your own can be mapped to one station, for a wall phone or a waiting room.

Hear the difference

Radio in Opus, not in telephone audio.

A station is encoded once, to Opus at 48 kHz, tuned for music, and those packets reach the caller untouched. A PBX that does not offer Opus is given the same station at 16 kHz, in G.722 or G.711. Play a station and switch between the three.

Press play for Radio Paradise Main Mix (EU) 320k AAC, then switch codecs.

The switch filters the sound in your browser to each codec’s bandwidth, and the spectrum is read after the filter. It shows what the bandwidth costs; it is not the codecs themselves.

The browse menu

One number on the trunk is a menu: 0, unless the operator changes it. Key in a calling code and it plays that code’s first station. Step through the others with # and *.

0Call the menuDial 0 down the trunk, with your prefix in front like any other code. The menu answers and asks for a calling code.
44Key in a calling code44 is the United Kingdom, 1 is North America. No calling code begins another, so the first station starts the moment the digits make one.
#*Step through the stations# is the next station, * the one before. They come in dial-code order, which began as the order of their popularity.
1Hear its dial code1 reads out the dial code of the station you are on, then takes you back to it. Next time you can dial it directly.
0Start again0 leaves the station and asks for another calling code.

Connect your PBX

A trunk and one dialling rule. That is the whole job.

Point a SIP trunk at the gateway and send it whatever your users dial after a prefix. Here it is for the systems we are asked about most, with this platform’s own address in it.

By address
We know your PBX by the address its calls come from. Nothing to store on your side.
By user name and password
We issue them; your PBX answers the gateway’s challenge. For a PBX whose address changes.

What it is for

Four uses for a radio that answers the phone.

None of them needs anything on the handset. If it can make a call, it can listen.

Hold music that is actually live
Send waiting callers to a station instead of a loop: a transfer to its code, or a number of your own mapped to it. They hear this morning’s programme, with the news on the hour.
A dial-a-radio service
Give stations numbers your users can remember, or publish the codes as they are. One trunk carries all of them, and the browse menu finds the rest.

Questions

Asked before the first call.

Plain answers. If yours is not here, ask, and a person replies.

Ask something else

Which codecs can callers hear a station in?

Opus, G.722 and G.711 (µ-law and A-law). The trunk agrees exactly one, best first. Opus is the station at 48 kHz, passed through untouched; the others are the same station at 16 kHz, encoded by the gateway. What a caller finally hears is as wide as their own PBX and phone carry.

How much bandwidth does a call use, and who pays for it?

About 80 kbit/s per call, whichever codec is agreed: Opus is encoded at 64 kbit/s by default, G.722 and G.711 are 64 kbit/s by design, and packet headers add around 16. That is on the trunk between your PBX and the gateway, the usual cost of a phone call. Fetching the station itself is the operator’s, and it is one stream per station however many callers share it.

Put the world’s radio on your phone system.

Tell us what you run and we will send what your PBX needs: a trunk, and the codes to dial.

Connect your PBX Browse stations

/etc/asterisk/pjsip.conf
[sidekick-radio]
type = endpoint
context = from-sidekick-radio   ; nothing calls back: this only has to exist
disallow = all
allow = opus,g722,ulaw,alaw     ; Opus first
aors = sidekick-radio
direct_media = no
rtp_symmetric = yes

; no user name or password: we know you by the address you call from

[sidekick-radio]
type = aor
contact = sip:18.133.93.19:5060

/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf
; in the context your phones dial from
; 74400001 plays the station at 4400001
exten => _7X.,1,Dial(PJSIP/${EXTEN:1}@sidekick-radio)
 same => n,Hangup()
; 70 is the browse menu
exten => 70,1,Dial(PJSIP/0@sidekick-radio)
 same => n,Hangup()/etc/asterisk/pjsip.conf[sidekick-radio]
type = endpoint
context = from-sidekick-radio   ; nothing calls back: this only has to exist
disallow = all
allow = opus,g722,ulaw,alaw     ; Opus first
aors = sidekick-radio
direct_media = no
rtp_symmetric = yes

; no user name or password: we know you by the address you call from

[sidekick-radio]
type = aor
contact = sip:18.133.93.19:5060/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf; in the context your phones dial from
; 74400001 plays the station at 4400001
exten => _7X.,1,Dial(PJSIP/${EXTEN:1}@sidekick-radio)
 same => n,Hangup()
; 70 is the browse menu
exten => 70,1,Dial(PJSIP/0@sidekick-radio)
 same => n,Hangup()

Then 7 44 00001 from any extension plays BBC World Service.

Every station on earth, one call away.

The world’s radio, numbered like the telephone network.

Where the most stations are

Hear any station here, before you connect anything.

Follow one call, from a desk phone to a broadcast.

Somebody dials a station’s code.

Radio in Opus, not in telephone audio.

Don’t know the code? One number finds the rest.

A trunk and one dialling rule. That is the whole job.

Four uses for a radio that answers the phone.

Hold music that is actually live

A dial-a-radio service

Asked before the first call.

Put the world’s radio on your phone system.

One trunk, three ways to be known.

The caller joins the station’s own queue.

One stream, shared by everybody listening.

Hospitality and care homes

Expats and language learners