How we checked The Prog Rock Machine
Everything published about this station was read from the station's own website or its own stream, and every fact below names the page it came from and the year it was read. We changed 1 thing about this entry. We also found 3 things we could have published and decided not to.
What we publish, and where each part came from
| What we say | Read from | When |
|---|---|---|
|
Description
Prog Rock Machine Radio presents itself as "Music and Shows 24/7 worldwide web Radio", a one-man station built around long-form presenter shows on progressive rock and neighbouring genres. Its own pages say the shows examine artists, music and albums "across music from the early 50's until now", and that the catalogue now runs to roughly 800 two-hour shows. The operator, who signs himself Rael, writes that he presented a show on community station Voice FM in Ballarat for ten years and started his own internet station when the pandemic closed that station down. The shows and selected track playlists now run around the clock, with the week's show changed daily and played three times a day.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Artists
The site's own artist feature pages are for Ben Craven, The Franky Valentyn Project and Geof Whitely Project; there is no now-playing panel and no track log anywhere on the site, so nothing further can be sourced from its own output.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Contact route
A named human is reachable. The contact page carries a "Send Us a Message" form with name, email and website fields and publishes a personal Gmail address for Fred Spittle, and the site links a Facebook page along with Instagram, X and a WordPress profile; there is no studio phone, request line or WhatsApp.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Contact page
https://progrockmachine.com/contact/
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Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Era
Music from the early 1950s to the present, with the progressive rock canon of the late 1960s and 1970s at the centre of the show catalogue.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Music
Presenter-led progressive rock plus rock and a wider spread of genres, built as themed documentary-style shows on bands, eras and styles rather than as a music rotation.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Language
English; every page, show note and artist-submission instruction on the site is in English.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Kind
Automated playout of pre-recorded presenter shows. The operator writes that the shows "are playing 24/7 on the world wide web" through airtime.pro, and the player on his own page is a theproganrockmachine.airtime.pro embed.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Worth knowing
It takes submissions straight from artists and publishes the exact terms, asking for a biography of no more than 50 words, one or two mp3s and a purchase link, and expressly refusing promo packs, dropbox links, membership-gated files and video, with new-artist shows scheduled two in every ten.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Where
Ballarat and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; no FM frequency of its own, times published in AEST, and the operator's earlier community-radio slot is given as Voice FM Ballarat on Wednesday nights at 9.30pm.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
On air
Rael is the only presenter named, and the contact page gives his name as Fred Spittle; the weekly schedule images carry "Fred Spittle" as their credit.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
|
Programmes
The current week is published as "Weekly Program" for 27-09-2026 to 03-10-2026 with four further weeks listed ahead, and a separate "Show List" page offers the series 2 show list as a download; the grid itself is posted only as scanned page images, so no individual show title or clock time can be read from the page text.
|
Prog Rock Machine Radio | 2026 |
What we corrected
Each of these changed a field in our own entry. The reasoning is the researcher's own, recorded when the change was made.
| Field | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| language code |
en
what it said before was not recorded; the
reasoning usually states it
|
Filled from the station's own site, which publishes nothing in any other language. The operator's biography page at https://progrockmachine.com/rael/ is written in English throughout, as are the artist-submission instructions at https://progrockmachine.com/artists/ and the contact page at https://progrockmachine.com/contact/, and the site's own strapline reads 'Music and Shows 24/7 worldwide web Radio'. The operator writes on the Rael page that he presented for ten years on Voice FM in Ballarat, Victoria, which is an English-language Australian community station. The stored AU country is correct and I am not touching it. |
What we found and did not publish
Material that would have made this page fuller, and was refused. A page with five named presenters looks better than a page with none even when the five are a website theme's demonstration content, and the difference is invisible to a reader. So it is recorded here instead.
| What we could have said | Why we did not |
|---|---|
| The entire weekly schedule, which exists on the Weekly Program page as five JPEG page scans and nothing else | A schedule published only as an image cannot be turned into text facts without reading times off a picture, which is how wrong airtimes get into a catalogue.
source |
| "The Prog Mothership was launched in 2015. A huge 1 kilometre sized ship launched from the Cape York Space centre and in low earth orbit transmitting the prog rock machine shows down to earth." | This is the operator's own joke at the foot of his Rael page, and quoting it would read as a claim about how the station is transmitted.
source |
| The string "EasyWPGuide_WP67" printed in the middle of the Rael page body | A leftover theme or tutorial token, not content the operator meant to publish.
source |
If you think something here is wrong
Tell us which fact and what you found instead. Everything above names its source and its date, so a disagreement can be settled by looking rather than argued. Where another site disagrees with us, it is usually because it is repeating a radio directory, and occasionally because we got it wrong. We would like to know which.
Read from the station's own material; this page is generated from the
catalogue as it stands now, so it changes when the research does. Research
current as at 2026.
This entry began as: The Prog Rock Machine — listed via Radio Browser · https://progrockmachine.com/