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The 'One Big Chill' that went out around 5am GMT is blissful, I'm just listening to it now after setting it to record yesterday, I saved the native stream from Digital Radio, they dropped to MP2 @ 128k joint stereo by this time, earlier recordings were at 160k js, and everything was at 192k stereo a couple of weeks ago.

It still has the edge over FM, if only slight at 128k (you have more dynamic range though).

1. I'm not in London and can recieve 5 DAB multiplexes, with a total of 39 stations excluding the test broadcasts, which is certainly more than FM & AM stations, which total around 20 at most. There are two national networks on a Single Frequency Network, one is the BBC and DigitalOne a commercial provider, these can be found everywhere, which is 60% of the country at the moment (85% soon).

2. It's MPEG1 Layer II, BBC 1-4 are 192kbps which sound great, certainly an improvement on FM, the mono stations are around 96kbps such as Five-Live, this is certainly and improvement on MW/LW. Remember XM Radio is using 64kbps for stereo music stations, mono speech stations are below that.

I have to agree that the quality of digital terrestrial TV is quite poor on some multiplexes, the BBC and Channel4 one is quite good but some of the pay ones are strikingly poor, the film ones are very good though. It's worth noting the Radio Authority set minimum datarates for DAB stations, you will not find a stereo music station below 128kbps, doesn't sound like much it's certainly better than FM.

3. Yeah, the digital transmitters are only a few KW, many times lower than anologue and the COFDM encoding is very robust, considering you can get a whole multiplex on 1.5mhz of bandwidth it's very spectrum efficient, and even more so if you're using a Single Frequency Network, where the same frequency is used right across the country.

4. The costs of the sets have been a sticking point, but TI release a cheap single chip implementation a few months ago, have faith in moore's law. You can get a reciever for your PC for £49 now, this has the bonus of being able to save the baseband MP2 transport stream, and also transcodes to MP3, you can also listen/record any number of stations in the same multiplex simultaneously.

WorldSpace is a nice system but I have to agree the content isn't all that great since the transponder is actually aimed at Africa. There's loads of stations on the Astra satellites, but of cource it's not mobile.

Have faith in DAB :)

I do have a Radio PVR (or should that be PRR?) actually ;)

I bought a DAB Digital Radio for my PC and it records all the stuff in my schedule, because of the nature of DAB you can also record everything in the same multiplex simultaneously. For instance, at the moment it's recording BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4, I can also listen or record anything other stations within the BBC mux. I don't have to worry about adverts on the BBC stations but you can edit tunes from the commercial stations using Cool Edit or something like that.

Everything is recorded in the native MP2 format (with 48,000 sampling :), and can be transcoded into MP3 easily. A little known fact is MPEG1/2 audio was originally created for DAB, of course it's developed a life of its own on the net.

There's loads of £49 Psion Wavefinders about, that isn't some one time special deal.

The Wavefinder is pretty smooth, you can record all the stations within the same multiplex simultaneously and pickup the datacasts. If they got DAB into mobile phones and PDA's then it would give 3G a run for its money when it comes to universal information like news, sports, weather reports, stock prices, schedules etc (the BBC already datacast that).

And to celebrate they've just started selling DAB (Digital) Radio's for under £100, you can get one for your PC for £49, great for recording stuff in native MP2 (MPEG audio was originally created for this).

The stuff is still too expensive for mainstream though.

Just like the Hauppauge DVB boards... I have one here in the UK and the kick ass, Linux TV not only produce Linux drivers for them but a whole suite of utilities that do PVR functionality, time shiting and 'dvbstream' that actually lets you redirect the MPEG2 transport stream to various other PC's over the network.

On a related note, I picked up a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) digtal radio receiver the other day, I can save the MP2 baseband strem directly to disk... no loss of quality, you can actually record all the stations within the same multiplex at once since they all come through the same COFDM transport stream. The datacasts are pretty smooth (and quick) too.. take a look at radio, if they get this into portable devices then this will give 3G a run for its money when it comes to rudimentary information like news, sports scores etc :)

The DAB standard is pretty sweet when it comes to this, it can reieve standard digital anologue broadcasts and also had a band to receive digital signals from satellites.

I wouldn't mind a WaveFinder for christmas.