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It's just a shame the sound quality is so poor. They should use OGG/Vorbis instead ;-)

Well, at least they are going to add AAC+ to the DAB standard... :)

http://www.worlddab.org/upload/uploaddocs/WorldDMB Press%20Release_November.pdf

Want hand held digital radio in europe?
Use one of these:
http://www.worlddab.org/dabprodinfo.aspx?prodid=4& manuId=0

That switch in your radio was to allow for different channel spacing, and different frequency ranges for those bands. Most notably, in Europe, the AM/MW stations are 9 KHz apart. In the US and other places, they are 10 KHz apart. That's no problem if your radio indicates frequency by an orange stick making a vague reference to a printed frequency scale (old radios), but is murder if you've got a digital tuner.

DAB uses 217.5 MHz to 230 MHz (UK currently, called Band III) and also 1452 to 1492 MHz (Canada and Germany, called L-band). Radios being built are designed to work on both bands. DAB transmitters in Band III can cover the same area as an FM station using a fraction of the energy. The L-band is more problematic in terms of coverage, and let's not even begin to talk about comparing either to the reach of high power clear channel AM stations.

There's a bunch of info on it, buried in this very pretty website Near as I can tell the encoding is the same, but I couldn't tell you about what the frequency intervals are, etc.

Then get a DAB radio, here in Norway there's at least four (or five) stations (and we're 4.5m people in a quite large area) broadcasting on DAB. Not sure about the general coverage, thou. The quality is dependent on the station, but is mainly 128kbps or 160kbps IIRC.

WorldDAB for more information about DAB. Another option would of course be to just get music from online broadcasting services, the norwegian public radio broadcasts are available for free on the net (http://radio.hiof.no/) f.ex.

It's astonishing to see how far the USA is prepared to be isolated from the rest of the world when it comes to technological standards like this. The rest of the world is switching to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) for digital radio as a replacement for FM, with countries like the UK being particularly advanced in their adoption. Here's a map showing DAB adoption across the world - notice the big empty space where the US is? Instead the US have decided to go it alone with this hybrid solution that will be the NTSC of the radio world. What a pity...

I've had a DAB radio for six months now and have been really impressed with the sound quality, ease of tuning and extra information that's displayed with each broadcast. No more trying to guess the band playing a particular song - it scrolls automatically along the LCD display. Want to see what stations are available? Just scroll through the list, rather than speculatively twiddling a knob and trying to identify something through the white noise. There's a whole world out there that the US is missing out on...

"HD" Radio (formerly known as IBOC, or In Band on Channel), is an inferior technology which many have found less than awe inspiring. It's adoption in the U.S. is the result of politics and money, not technological superiority.

One reviewer above described IBOC thus: "Let's start with audio quality. It's my opinion that the current 96kb/s codec is incapable of reproducing even a simple male voice without generating objectionable artifacts. It gets worse with music. On the classical cut the strings were thin and harsh. For those of you who are broadcasting contemporary formats, the codec removes sibilance unnaturally, changes the timber of symbols and makes back up vocals strident. This is not CD-quality by a long shot. In fact, during my listening test I found that our station's plain old analog signal sounded better than the 96kb/s codec."

At the same time that the U.S. has locked themselves into IBOC, the rest of the world has been moving ahead with Eureka 147 DAB, a purely Digital technology without the legacy concerns. Fifty countries and counting, with DAB building steadily, especially in Europe.

Hello!? Every other country on Earth is standardizing on DAB [worlddab.org], and Americans a futzing about with XM, Sirius and (please let it die) IBOC...

and the article from the ex-Qualcomm guy has it wrong... The US will not deploy quicker because the futzed with other techs'. They might deploy quicker because the tech they have (ie. not GSM) sucks, so the market for the next-gen gear will be bigger.

Hypothesis: disparaging US incites replies.

Man, why can't you guys use DAB like everyone else?

Some FAQs

Some technical FAQs (from the BBC)

We've had DAB in the UK since 1995. (Don't know why the UK is so ahead on some of the broadcasting innovations, but hey. Maybe it's the BBC :)

Takeup has been slow, gradually starting to take off with a) Cheap (~150USD) sets and b) digital radio being able to be received on Digital TV sets as well

Sound quality is excellent, reception seems miles better than analogue radio, usability great - tune via genre, station, etc. Newer DAB sets have track/ artists info displayed on the set.

I haven't yet succumbed, as I get many new channels through my DTV set, and also as I live in London where there are many, many local/ pirate stations to choose between

If I lived outside a city, you betcha.

Anybody have any experience with it? I'm curious, but I haven't heard anything about it, except ads on local radio.

Anybody have any experience with it? I'm curious, but I haven't heard anything about it, except ads on local radio.

DAB would be useful, robust radio reception, EPG's and the dataservices for travel, news.

"doh... it's an UK thing. :-("

"doh... it's an UK thing. :-("

"And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now)."

What's up with the Americans that they can't do digital radio the standard way like everyone else?

DAB is the future of radio. Get with the program guys!

Needs a Digital Radio (DAB) reciever so it can pickup audio and data broadcasts.

It's a going concern in pretty well every civilized country outside the US.

Look at the world-DAB forum to get started.

The official launch of Digital Radio in Canada took place on 1st November 1999. Stations in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have been operating since early 1999. For specific information on DAB in Canada, there's DigitalRadio.ca

They have Digital Radio in Europe, the BBC has been broadcasting since 1995 in its final format, it's based round the DAB standard, basically MPEG2 with COFDM encoding with the provision for datacasts or any type of data for that matter.

It's totally abstracted from the old FM system and uses a new set of frequencies, Band-III which around 200-230mhz, this used to be used for the very old 405 B&W TV service that dates back to WW2.

They shut of the service in the early eighties because it was clear absolutely everyone had moved onto colour/PAL. Then they started the 'Eureka 147' project to develop Digital Radio.

Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of room left in the US spectrum to separately allocate bandwidth for digital radio, so Lucent have been developing IBOC, which resides as a FM subcarrier, so no need to allocate new frequencies. It works a little like the European RDS (Radio Data Services, station titles etc) except the performance is obviously better than RDS's 8bits/s (in fall fairness it is quite old). The problem is the standard at the moment is susceptible to multipath problems and can degrade the existing FM broadcasts, the standard also relies on the old FM analogue broadcast at times, which kind of defeats the object.

However, if they get the problems sorted out and produce a reasonably cheap chipset it means you can have digital radio without new spectrum, a big plus! But Lucent could potentially be swimming against the tide since DAB has world-wide adoption and has been in use for a while (i.e. it's proven). I doubt the standard will reach very far internationally, but the US is obviously a big market in its own right.

They have Digital Radio in Europe, the BBC has been broadcasting since 1995 in its final format, it's based round the DAB standard, basically MPEG2 with COFDM encoding with the provision for datacasts or any type of data for that matter.

It's totally abstracted from the old FM system and uses a new set of frequencies, Band-III which around 200-230mhz, this used to be used for the very old 405 B&W TV service that dates back to WW2.

They shut of the service in the early eighties because it was clear absolutely everyone had moved onto colour/PAL. Then they started the 'Eureka 147' project to develop Digital Radio.

Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of room left in the US spectrum to separately allocate bandwidth for digital radio, so Lucent have been developing IBOC, which resides as a FM subcarrier, so no need to allocate new frequencies. It works a little like the European RDS (Radio Data Services, station titles etc) except the performance is obviously better than RDS's 8bits/s (in fall fairness it is quite old). The problem is the standard at the moment is susceptible to multipath problems and can degrade the existing FM broadcasts, the standard also relies on the old FM analogue broadcast at times, which kind of defeats the object.

However, if they get the problems sorted out and produce a reasonably cheap chipset it means you can have digital radio without new spectrum, a big plus! But Lucent could potentially be swimming against the tide since DAB has world-wide adoption and has been in use for a while (i.e. it's proven). I doubt the standard will reach very far internationally, but the US is obviously a big market in its own right.

This is similar to what Lucent are doing for their Digital Radio encoding, it's called "In Band On Channel" (IBOC), it's a nice idea since you don't need to allocate new spectrum. The first widespread commercial application originated in RDS radio services in Europe, where stations encode a few bytes of data along with the FM channel, such as station titles, genre's, time, and traffic alerts, auto-tunning. (this is at a low bitrate).

However, IBOC suffers from multipath problems (propagation of frequencies when they bounce of buildings, causing a delay, and therefore 'ghosting'), the power of the transmitter has to be greater, and the transmitter proximity has to be closer, otherwise you just drop back to the anologue signal.

It's a nice idea, but as always there's no such thing as a free lunch, it's always nicer and more efficient to allocate a specific block of frequency to specific device or application.

The Digital Radio (DAB) standard in Europe uses the old Band-III channel (~200Mhz) that was once used for very old 405 line B&W broadcasts, I think the BBC used this frequency back in the 1930's.

DVB, Digital Video Broadcasting is the standard for European (and propably worldwide) digital television broadcasts.

The standard defines several modes for different transmission mediums, DVB-T for terrestrial, DVB-C for cable networks, and DVB-S for satellite.

And there are already digital AUDIO broadcasts, check this DAB, Digital Audio Broadcast site for more information.

The nice thing about DAB is that its channel allocation can be changed on the fly: You can add channels to an ensemble but you can also change the bandwidth requirements of a particular channel. You can even change the bandwidth you allocate to audio versus PAD dynamically (e.g., music part get all the bandwidth, as soon as you have a talk show, say, you decrease the audio bandwidth to 30 kbit/s and increase the bandwidth for the PAD part).

DAB is being deployed all over the world (with the exception of the US, there apparently the NAB is opposing it vehemently).

Have a look at the World DAB site.