Norway To Become First Country To Switch Off FM Radio (reuters.com) 303
Norway is set to become the first country to switch off its FM radio network next week, as it takes the unpopular leap to digital technology. Reuters reports: Critics say the government is rushing the move and many people may miss warnings on emergencies that have until now been broadcast via the radio. Of particular concern are the 2 million cars on Norway's roads that are not equipped with Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) receivers, they say. Sixty-six percent of Norwegians oppose switching off FM, with just 17 percent in favor and the rest undecided, according to an opinion poll published by the daily Dagbladet last month. Nevertheless, parliament gave the final go-ahead for the move last month, swayed by the fact that digital networks can carry more radio channels. By the end of the year, all national FM broadcasts will be closed in favor of DAB, which backers say carries less hiss and clearer sound throughout the large nation of 5 million people cut by fjords and mountains. Torvmark said cars were the "biggest challenge" - a good digital adapter for an FM car radio costs 1,500 Norwegian crowns ($174.70), he said. For the same cost, digital radio in Norway allows eight times more radio stations than FM. The current system of parallel FM and digital networks, each of which cost about 250 million crowns ($29 million), saps investments in programs.
Less hiss and clearer sound (Score:4, Insightful)
carries less hiss and clearer sound
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
Re:Less hiss and clearer sound (Score:5, Informative)
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That was one thing I found interesting when TV went digital: a weak analog signal is just noisy, but easy for people to pick out the information from. a weak digital signal is chunky in ways my brain certainly isn't as capable of parsing through.
You should probably upgrade your MPEG decoder. When was the last time you upgraded your neural net?
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carries less hiss and clearer sound
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
Well, OP is kinda right. If you have a really good signal, the results will be a nice clear hiss free result.
If you don't, you won't hear anything at all. It's called the digital cliff. Less range, higher power requirements. A bold technological step backwards.
There are emergency communicators who want to switch from FM to digital, and its maddening to hear people who want to have nice static free voice versus knowing a signal is there at all.
We're moving into an age of pulling signals out from below
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carries less hiss and clearer sound
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
This gets into one of the biggest problems with digital broadcasting - it's generally all or nothing. With analog, there's graceful degradation as the signal quality falls, and in an emergency situation that's preferable as people can still determine what's being broadcast even if it's very faint and low quality. With digital, if your signal isn't strong enough you'll get nothing.
It seems to me that the best way forward for Norway would be to get rid of *some* FM stations to open up the bandwidth but leav
DAB is garbage. (Score:4, Interesting)
And compared to FM, DAB is mostly nothing. At a fraction of the range where you'd still be pulling in very usable FM audio. DAB is gone entirely, or slamming open and closed like a berserk doorman on meth.
There have been a series of really bad decisions along these lines. In the US, CQUAM is available for AM stereo, and it, like standard AM, doesn't cause you to lose distant stations or take up extra bandwidth. So what do we see? AM digital stereo modes that take up three AM channels, plus they have the extra feature that they really don't sound very good, whereas CQUAM... well, it does. Analog television: same as DAB, in that you can catch a broadcast at distance and you can still get a picture, where at the same distance, digital television is long gone.
Previous poster who said they should have maintained current infrastructure and put the new garbage elsewhere was spot-bloody-on. But, you know, government. They don't have to do anything well; they just think they have to do something, anything. If it wrecks a bunch of people's circumstance, well, so what. Besides, corporations were slavering to get at that bit of spectrum, and we know who really runs the government.
Re:DAB is garbage. (Score:5, Informative)
And compared to FM, DAB is mostly nothing. At a fraction of the range where you'd still be pulling in very usable FM audio. DAB is gone entirely, or slamming open and closed like a berserk doorman on meth.
This is where commercial interests have won. DAB+ is actually quite nice in populated areas, more channels and better sound. We're building tunnel coverage and such so along the main roads it'll be okay. But when you start to consider the streaming capabilities of cell phones and particularly compared to the antenna and battery = power of a car we should have dropped radio altogether and just built out data transfer for streaming.
Because the places you don't have good cell phone coverage DAB+ isn't very good either. Remote cabins, deep in the mountains, far out at sea out of cell phone coverage where you don't care about DAB+ and 20 channels of music. You want to hear the weather forecast and know if there's a storm coming. I'm sure we could find some other alternative for that.
Re:DAB is garbage. (Score:4, Interesting)
He wasn't completely wrong. They should keep the existing FM stations how they are. And nothing in the summary above mentions that the spectrum used is different. It says the decision was "swayed by the fact that digital networks can carry more radio channels." Most of us readers probably assumed it used the same spectrum. Especially since the American system does do that. And we were wrong in only that one aspect.
And if digital audio broadcasting is anything like the digital TV broadcasting here in the US, digital FM is going to be a nightmare. We don't have cable TV at the moment (the past year so far), and my wife doesn't want to watch local broadcast TV because of the lousy reception. So we have Netflix and Hulu instead of free digital broadcast. With digital FM, I expect Norway is going to see a surge in music streaming, or maybe cassette decks will make a comeback. I still have tapes I can listen to.
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And switching to digital improves that how?
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Good luck setting up an IP multicast to the entire city. Or are you recommending a unicast to each subscriber over cellular at $40 per subscriber per month (source: T-Mobile)?
Can you get cellular data under $20/yr? (Score:2)
Or are you recommending a unicast to each subscriber over cellular at $40 per subscriber per month (source: T-Mobile)?
I'm mostly suggesting fiber and whatever generation cellular coverage
Say someone owns a car for ten years. Your suggestion of "whatever generation cellular coverage" will incur a recurring bill which totals thousands of dollars over those ten years. A $200 DAB+ radio is likely to be far cheaper.
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So do CDs, and presumably digital TV.
What's your point?
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How was that out of context? Reading comprehension much?
Longer range and more reliable reception (Score:4, Insightful)
When you have a FM demodulator designed for 180 KHz (200 KHz is the channel width, not the sideband extent, which you can calculate using Carson’s rule), that same demodulator, when encountering half the width signal, will produce 1/2 the output volume; because FM encodes the audio waveform with frequency deviation. If the deviation is half, then so is the output waveform. Though I should point out that +/-75 KHz is the actual audio deviation, so really. 150 KHz.
Additionally, within the standard FM signal, encoded at rates of deviation, there is a stereo pilot at 19 KHz, a stereo subcarrier at 38 Khz, as well as digital information (RDS/RDBS) and two mode narrow-band monophonic audio channels up higher yet.
Another thing: The wide bandwidth is part of what gives broadcast FM its capacity for reasonably high fidelity. You drop down to 25...50 KHz total bandwidth, and you'd going to see some noticeable reduction in fidelity; cram a stereo subcarrier in there, and you'll see even more.
So it's not a matter of "just make it narrower" because compatibility with older receivers, of which there are a huge number still happily being used by their owners, would be unable to make useful audio out of the signal and because audio fidelity and stereo imaging would suffer (and that's not what FM listeners would call an "advance".) Oh, and you'd lose the capability for the RDBS and the extra audio channels, too.
The right answer is leave the current FM band alone. The FCC wants new transmission types with reduced range that won't work with the gear people already have in order to fluff the corporations? Fine. Put it somewhere where it won't wreck 70-ish years worth of radio gear owned by a huge portion of the population. Maybe someone will even listen. Stop forcing citizens to make expensive changes they have no need to make.
Corporations drive these consumer-level stupidities. Of course, for the corporations, it's not stupid: They're intending to make a lot more money off of us citizens. And with the FCC (in the US) or whatever other government coercion backing their play, they will succeed, too.
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The real reason for the digitalization (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The real reason for the digitalization (Score:5, Interesting)
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THIS!!! Previously, I had the same mindset of not paying for radio. Until I got Sirius XM w/ my car
This was a godsend. W/ FM stations, I'd struggle to find a station that carries my type of music. Sirius has channels each dedicated to one's favorite type of music, making it a constant: I don't have to worry about certain songs disappearing. The icing on the cake - the name of the song and artist is on display as well, and that's how I've gathered quite a collection by downloading from youtube. Not j
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Not quite.... they want more channels so they can sell more ads. Sure, some paid sub channels may pop-up, but I would suspect they instead want more channels to play their back catalogs of content and generate more ad revenue.
If broadcast services wanted to force a paid only model, then ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox would have turned off their antennas ages ago. The radio networks (iHeartMedia) have the same business model and want that same ad money.
Digital Killed the Radio Star (Score:2, Interesting)
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There is basically no AM radio in Europe anymore
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That's not true: peruse through this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Geography is not your strong point obviously. And there are still plenty of AM stations in France too - I can pick a lot of them up from where I live in the UK.
Re:Digital Killed the Radio Star (Score:5, Informative)
...Do you think they have crazed conservative personalities ranting about the fact they live in a Socialist welfare state there?
Probably not to anywhere near the extent that you 'enjoy' those cranks in America. Socialist welfare states have the same corporate shills and their deluded hangers-on, but on the whole that rhetoric doesn't play nearly as well here as it does in the US.
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The Anti socialism cranks here are simply the result of the closing down of mental institutions back in the 80's and how bad our public schools are.
When you have mentally deficient that never get education wandering the streets you get these kinds of cranks everywhere. Now they are old enough to confuse people into thinking they actually know something. In reality they all are simply that rambling nutjob screaming the world was going to end 10 years ago.
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FM Radio is built into the SoC of many phones (Snapdragon) but only the budget models seem to enable it these days.
I didn't know DAB+ was a common thing on phones; certainly LG made a fuss with their "LG Stylus DAB+" model recently.
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5+? both my 10 year old cars have bluetooth.
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DAB portable radios have high power usage (Score:4, Informative)
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"Democracy" (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, "social democracy". Where they do what's "best for you", not what you want.
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Re:"Democracy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the god damn socialist roads, fire departments, and fucking police departments.
God dam socialists forcing themselves on me. Where they put the roads are stupid, and they should let most homes burn to the ground.
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As opposed to the nimble sole proprietorship like way that megacorps carefully manage? Where salaries are set by merit alone based on the manager's manager's manager personally knowing each and every worker and being intimately familiar with the quality of their output?
Most of the problems you see in socialism are better attributed to the fact that management structures as we understand them do not work well on a large scale. Socialism has in the past tended to build larger organizations with all of the man
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Apply your extremist position to a guy who owns one auto repair shop. Or the family that owns a grocery store. Or a woman who makes exceptional lampwork beads, but can only sell them for X% over her cost to make because that's what's dictated by a government bureaucrat.
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Ah, "social democracy". Where they do what's "best for you", not what you want.
Because in the US the politicians never do what people are against. You're like a guy in a wheelchair making fun of another man's limp. We voted for these clowns. We continue voting for these clowns. And if the latest polls are any indication we're moving to a more socialist government in this year's election. Democracy is working fine. The voters, eh.... but at least we haven't stooped to electing reality show celebrity billionaires.
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I could only imagine how hard it would be to kill analog FM broadcasts in the US, considering that many NEW radios being produced still do not support the "HD Radio" digital signals yet. It's still considered to be a premium option for most radio models in this country.
We would probably need a good 5 or 6 years to plan an analog to digital switchover, and the big media conglomerates like ClearChannel would not be happy about having to upgrade their receivers in rural markets.
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I could only imagine how hard it would be to kill analog FM broadcasts in the US, considering that many NEW radios being produced still do not support the "HD Radio" digital signals yet.
In turn because "HD Radio" is heavily encumbered by exclusive rights, with parts patented and other parts a trade secret.
Misguided Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
The NUMBER of Analog FM stations which the bands can accommodate are MORE THAN NEEDED.
And switching them off is a major public detriment, Because of the loss of the major advantage which Analog FM radio has....
Receivers for FM are CHEAP, UBIQUITOUS, Easy to receive transmissions, And Analog signals are very forgiving.
Also, the relatively small NUMBER IS AN ADVANTAGE. When FM receivers are being used for THEIR MAIN PURPOSE, which.....
Is to receive broadcast messages, potentially during a time of emergency when aLL THE DIGITAL STUFF is broken.....
(E.g. Due to EMP)
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Receivers for FM are CHEAP, UBIQUITOUS, Easy to receive transmissions, And Analog signals are very forgiving.
That is precisely the problem. There is no money to be made anymore in making or selling FM receivers. It takes courage, to ditch the headphone jack and make everyone buy new hardware. It takes courage to obsolete (yes, I am verbing obsolete. BTW that also obsoletes rules regarding intransitive verbs.) all existing ubiquitous, cheap hardware and force every one to buy new hardware. And, think! Once people get used to the idea of monopolies (defacto or de-fiat) obsoleting hardware, we can force them upgrade
Re:Misguided Priorities (Score:5, Funny)
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Analog AM is even cheaper and can be built with trash found in most homes. we should ditch this FM radio and go back to AM radio!
and dammit Spark Gap is even more effective! I can eliminate pesky frequency tuning!
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You are making a really bad assumption - that they can't cut the FM spectrum in half, use the digital version to maintain the existing number of stations. That frees up VALUABLE spectrum to give to other technology.
We desperately need radio spectrum for other services. Ever have trouble using bluetooth? Not enough spectrum. Cell phone can't connect? not enough spectrum.
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You are making a really bad assumption - that they can't cut the FM spectrum in half
Reducing the bandwidth reduces the range and eliminates the capability to receive weak signals.
These are extremely valuable traits that analog radio has..... Under BAD conditions, you can still get a signal.
The Digital audio is higher quality when you can get it, But when conditions are bad you don't hear static, it cuts out 100% instead.
That frees up VALUABLE spectrum to give to other technology.
The additional service
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Ever have trouble using bluetooth?
I've never had a problem using bluetooth that wasn't caused by a poor implementation.
Cell phone can't connect?
That has nothing to do with spectrum where I live, and everything to do with capitalism.
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>> That frees up VALUABLE spectrum to give to other technology.
Please tell me what makes 10 MHZ of VHF bandwidth (i.e.WAY too low for decent data rate) so desperately needed/valuable in Norway?
why do you need more stations (Score:3)
when they all play the same thing? Generic music, generic news, generic humor.
DAB is awesome (Score:2)
Lower powers can transmit farther, so it really makes a difference in the RF background noise.
And honestly, I blame the turdtastic car makers putting in garbage radios and "infotainment" that does not support HDFM. it's been a standard for well over 10 years now. so it's high time the car makers and car stereo makers are forced to put it in place.
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note to you, it's < or setting your posting mode to plaintext.
Maybe Team Rock can move to Norway (Score:2)
Team Rock Radio was the only station I listened to when I had DAB in the car. Then they decided not to renew the £1M per year rent for the use of that space, and a religious organisation took over their frequency. Just before Christmas 2016 they had to shut down what was left of the business. Internet radio is also a tough place to be, even without paying rent to the DAB people.
Courage (Score:2)
This is a courageous decision. They should also ban 3.5mm jacks whilst they are passing legislation.
How can a nation "switch off" FM radio? (Score:2)
"Norway is set to become the first nation to start switching off its FM radio network..."
How???
I've read read several articles and none of them describe the mechanism by which they will accomplish this. If it was only broadcasts by the state-owned "Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation" I could understand, but it seems like they're talking about all FM radio. It's not like they can just flip a switch and "turn off" part of the EM spectrum. Does it mean that the Norwegian government is going to make it illeg
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Something like that I imagine. They'll probably just not renew the FM licenses of stations - they'll be forced to go digital if not already on it.
Change for change's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
If they wanted to reuse the FM band for some public service then I could just about understand it - but 20Mhz of VHF spectrum is useless for any modern data comms so I can't see who'd use it. Seems to me this is simply the worst kind of "we know best" patrician politics forcing people to go digital for no other reason that some political idiots think digital is The Future so must be embrased. By force if necessary. Never mind that analog is better in a lot of case particularly a mountainous country like norway and thats before we get onto the issue of electronic waste from all the junked FM radios.
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That is very interesting. Of course in the US, we don't and have never had such a grid (AM, FM or TV).
While satellite distribution for large networks has become standard (and it why so many small networks can be national), IN THE PAST a lot of systems distributed their signal by such a "grid". In Oregon, for example, with a few large cities and lots of open space, many broadcast stations used a system of translators to serve more rural areas. A receiver on a high spot picked up the main broadcast signal and retransmitted it locally on a different channel. The "PBS" in this state is one service -- OPB -- gen
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http://radiomap.eu/ [radiomap.eu]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Norway switching off FM ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Is DAB approximately the same thing as HD-Radio, just a different part of the spectrum?
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"...cramming in the digital signals with the existing analog AM/FM broadcasts using IBOC/HD Radio..... which hasn't been a success."
I'm probably incredibly stupid, but I never saw much point to US FM/HD. If the content broadcast on HD is already on the analog channel, the quality on the analog channel will be fine. Why do I need a super duper, new, digital technology to get an improvement I can't notice? And if they just want to broadcast alternate content there's subcarrier audio which works fine, still
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Except that the HD Radio """standard""" is full of patents, so even if you knew how to make a digital receiver, you couldn't sell it without paying license fees.
And they call it HD to make you think "high definition" when in reality it's barely up to the quality of a 128K MP3. The HD stands for "Hybrid Digital". There is really no need for it to exist other than ZOMG DIGITAL.
Also, nobody cares about stereo on AM anymore, so there's no need for it there, either. AM (in the US) has become talk radio and low
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Even if its only 128kbps MP3 quality, I can definitely hear the difference when the digital signal syncs. The soundstage sounds a lot broader.
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Re:DAB is useless nowadays, ever heard of streamin (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would I build one without drawing a schematic first? I'd at least have to calculate the values for the components - those would need to be recorded somewhere.
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I'll wager most EE grads could not build an FM radio without a drawing.
Why would I build one without drawing a schematic first?
I think rfengr was implying that recent graduates from U.S. electrical engineering colleges would have to look at someone else's existing schematic rather than creating an original schematic on paper.
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the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB... keep the old FM going, everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much. I fail to see how DAB makes any sense at all.
Um... FM reception is a bit tricky actually... And I'm an Extra Ham Radio operator who has a BSEE. I seriously doubt high school grads would posses the necessary technical knowledge to bias the detector properly, much less build a proper FM receiver that requires more than a handful of discrete parts or a pretty complicated IC...
Now AM... THAT'S easy to do with a pretty low parts count... With a set of high impedance earphones, a razor blade, wire and a variable capacitor you can whip up one of those...
DAB vs. Streaming (Score:5, Informative)
the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB...
...but requires a working Internet connection. Please take notice that the summary speaks about Norway. A country that is in Europe, and not even in the EU.
Europe is not a single country, but a lot of different countries, each with its local cellular service providers.
As soon as you travel abroad, you're roaming, and internet connection can get quite expensive.
Whereas DAB and FM are just available for free from the air.
Also :
- FM (RDS TMC) and DAB (TPEG) have very clear standard for emitting traffic informations, which - at least in Europe - is supported by the vast majority of hardware (in-vehicle infotainment, standalone GPS receivers, etc.)
There isn't such a clear widely supported standard on internet. Google can provide a traffic overlay on their Maps service/app, but there's no standard way for that information to be propagated to your car's computer or your tomtom.
(And again, there's going to be a lot of people use offline maps in their car or using a standalone device, because streaming data from the internet while not it your country costs a lot in Europe, and thus using Google Maps for driving direction isn't that much practical. - Not only less features, but also requires you to download maps in advance using their fugly clumsy interface. at which point a standalone device starts to sound much better).
- FM and DAB also have a standard way to do to temporarily switch channels for some critical/emergency announcement (interrupt the radio you are listening to announce that there's an accident ahead on the highway you're driving on and you need to be careful to avoid the mess on the road. Or that because of the snow, there's a barrage of snow-plows driving at 30 km/h on the same highway where you're driving 130 km/h. You can't overtake them and you need to adapt your speed to avoid colliding).
This standard is supported by nearly any in-car radio for the past 20 years (i.e.: even old FM radios that might not be able to take advantage of all the other information available on the RDS channel can at least interrupt your music for an announcement). It even works while other media sources are playing (if you're listening to music on an USB stick, modern cars will pause their own media player, have you listen to the radio announcement, then resume your music). Even works over bluetooth (with the car emitting "pause" and "play" commands over bluetooth before/after the announcement, if the bluetooth player supports it).
As far as I know, Spotifiy on its own won't interrupt you for anything but advertisement (on free accounts). I doesn't support any traffic announcement. (and it would be problematic, because it would need GPS awareness and again costly data roaming).
You still need the car being able to catch FM/DAB information to be able to interrupt the spotify playing on your tablet.
- And that's the practical implication.
Then there's the matter of taste. Some people acutally enjoy listening to radio. Because of the music program, because of the talking heads, because of the news, etc. which currently aren't provided by internet streaming alternatives like spotify.
Only provided by web radios - ie.: radio that stream also on the internet - ie.: provide over costly internet connection what they also provide for free over the air with DAB.
everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much.
RTL-SDR [rtl-sdr.com] would like to disagree with you.
Yup, it's not the same concept of "scrapt parts" (you're referring to electronic component lying around: resistors, transistors, condos, etc.) (I'm referring on the kind of scraps I have around : RaspPis, Arduinos, etc.) but it's still quite close to what a modern geek might have lying around.
Even if QAM / QSPK are much more complicated than FM, it's still possible to hack some at home, and is much more relevant in the modern world (Except for analog broadcast radio and a few legacy handheld radio "walkie-talkie", who the hell gives a damn about Frequency modulation nowadays ?)
Re: DAB is useless nowadays, ever heard of streami (Score:5, Informative)
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+. I hope Norway is a bit more advanced. Most of our stations including many music stations broadcast in 64kbps mono MP2 (no joke). So here, DAB sounds like shit, frankly, and because of the many DAB radios out there that don't support DAB+, it will be a long time before we can move on now. I have a good DAB radio in my car, but I primarily listen to internet streams and FM.
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It's a shame because I just got my first car with DAB, and it actually works really well. Better than FM in fact, at least for Radio 4 (talk only, they don't play much music so I can't comment on quality). Drops out less than FM did, especially in tunnels and rural areas.
I know it sucks in many places, but if it had been done well it could have been good. I'm just lucky my area has good coverage. Such a missed opportunity.
Re: DAB is useless nowadays, ever heard of streami (Score:5, Insightful)
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+. I hope Norway is a bit more advanced.
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived. If you live in a sane country and need FM radios you can probably get them for a few bucks + shipping, there will be literally millions of them thrown away. To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country. We spend billions in tax relief for EVs... but trash millions of working radios, that's good environmentalism. /facepalm
DAB vs DAB+ (Score:2)
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived.
Depends on the type of radio receiver.
DAB and DAB+ are nearly exactly the same.
Same modulation, same DAB emmiter data stream, same list of radio channel, same menu of available stations.
Only once you select a station inside the list available at the emitter, if it's a DAB one, you'll get an MP2-compressed audio stream with some old data correction scheme, if it's a DAB+ one, the audio stream will be AAC with Reed-Solomon error correction.
If you radio is a very low power one, with a single chip that handles
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Workers in 3rd world countries have few wage earning opportunities. This depresses wages and also makes it possible for companies to find workers to disassemble obsolete electronics at a (very) small profit and recycle any parts that have value.
Personally, I think this work should be done in the 1st world countries where the obsolete products are disassembled by robots and in adherence with the strict environmental standards of those countries.
Part of the attractiveness of sending those electronics to poor
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To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country.
"Giving" your toxic waste to third world countries is neither charitable nor an environmentally friendly alternative to dumping them in your own landfills. WTF is someone living in the third world going to do with an obsolete DAB radio? They don't have DAB stations to listen to, and if they ever get them, they are far more likely to be the same HE-AACv2 DAB+ signals that have triggered you into throwing your radio away than the original MPEG-1 layer 2 based DAB that the radio can receive.
I think he was referring to the FM radios as usable radios not trash. The problem is that even in some place like the USA where we still use FM radios, factory radios are worthless. Every car comes with one and most all of them outlive their cars so you can get one for basically free at any junkyard. Even if you shipped 1M of them to the USA, unless you either start installing used radio in new cars or selling new cars without radios, there will be no market for them.
Re: DAB is useless nowadays, ever heard of stream (Score:3)
And DAB+ is obsoleted by internet streaming for home use. In cars there's no need for the digital sound, FM is good enough.
DAB/DAB+ : upgrades and scams (Score:2)
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+
Lots of countries have upgraded to DAB+ since, you might be among the few remaining.
The actual upgrade is pretty simple : DAB and DAB+ are more or less the same. The only difference is that some of the channels can provide an audio stream using a better error correction (Reed-Solomon) and a better codec (AAC instead of MP2). All the rest (signal modulation and packing audio-streams from different radio channels, into a single digital radio emitter) is still exactly the same. (And thus an emitter can still f
DAB (Score:2)
I believed DAB failed because it was no big audio improvement since most people don't have high quality car stereos or just don't care.
There's a huge improvement that isn't qualitative but quantitative.
Using DAB/DAB+ its possible to pack a fuckton more radio channels in the same amount of frequencies.
That plays a critical role in the densely populated region that is continental Europe, where you might cross a border every few kilometers - each country having its own national radios, etc.
e.g.: In central europe, you have regions where Germany, France and Switzerland are all within reach of each others radio waves. And the last one has *4 fu
Giving "government" a bad name (Score:2)
Progress has a great name. It's government that has a bad name - which it wholly deserves.
Straight-up, this isn't progress. It's entropy.
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That's fine - let government sell off those frequencies. But why tell people to get rid of their analog TVs? Just work w/ the broadcast companies to go all digital, and then let the consumers decide whether they want a new TV or not
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Too bad we let the cell companies snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their outrageous prices for that sata. They talk about gigabit speeds and paper over the fact that if you ever actually used that speed you'd blow your entire month's allotment in 30 seconds.
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Perhaps someone at EIB thinks not everybody receiving Mr. Limbaugh's show thinks the convenience is worth $219 per year for the first receiver and $146 per year for each additional receiver.
That's $15 per month for the first receiver and $10 per month for each additional receiver [siriusxm.com], plus 13.9% music royalty cost recovery fee [siriusxm.com], plus state sales tax on the order of 7% [in.gov] that varies from one jurisdiction to another.
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Graham is a retard. It's one thing to say that Radio Free Europe is outdated b'cos Europe (aside from Russia) is already free, making this program redundant. It's another thing to say that it's outdated b'cos it should go to another medium, like TV or DAB.
But then again, this is someone who like Obama thinks that Russia, rather than the world Jihad, is the biggest threat to the US, and who would have the US brownnose countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while opposing Russia everywhere they can
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I can not see [cracked.com] where your joke is headed.