The station's studios were located 12 km (7 mi) away in Mornington House, Summerhill Road, Trim, County Meath.

The concept of Atlantic 252 can be traced to as far back as August 1986, when Irish state broadcaster RTÉ announced it was to use its allocated longwave frequency for a new pop music station.

The station's official "first record ever played" – on the launch date of 1 September 1989 – was "Sowing the Seeds of Love" by Tears for Fears, followed by "Monkey" by George Michael.

The first record played during the period of Atlantic 252's test transmissions had been "Ain't Nobody" by Rufus and Chaka Khan ('89 Remix).

At launch there were no UK-wide commercial stations (the first would be Classic FM in 1992), and the lack of a UK broadcast licence attracted the attention of the IBA.

At the peak of its popularity in 1993, Atlantic 252 had six million listeners aged 15+ in the UK and Ireland, but vastly increased competition from local radio stations with similar formats saw this decline yearly.

In late 1998, under the direction of David Dunne, the station responded to dropping audiences by shifting its format to concentrate on indie and dance music, but it continued to lose listeners.

Money was spent on advertising and a high-profile breakfast show was attempted fronted by Marc Brow (including several innovative ideas like travel news backed by new age chill out music called 'Traffic Calming', and specially re-formatted youth news presented by Specialist Producer Mark Ovenden which included one of the first broadcast uses of the term 'The Noughties'), in 1999 the station suffered its lowest Rajar ratings since it first came on the air, with the audience falling to just under one million UK listeners in the last quarter of the year.

The format was changed to urban contemporary music (such as garage, house, hip hop and R&B) and the station was rebranded with the slogan "Non-stop Rhythm and Dance".

Notable presenters included: Atlantic 252 was briefly replaced by a sports station TEAMtalk 252, which opened in the early days of January 2002.

In 2008, Radio 1 stopped broadcasting on MW and the opt-outs, mostly for weekend sports coverage and for religious programming, were transferred to 252 long wave.

The LW service was due to be withdrawn in 2014[7] but this was postponed several times and long wave transmissions continued until Friday night into Saturday morning of 14/15 April 2023.