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(Short-, Medium-, Long)wave Radio Meets Digital Stereo
cryptec writes "Today shortwave radio will have some new life pumped into it as the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle will be the first full time shortwave broadcaster of DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale). DRM is a full stereo fully digital broadcast system. The quality of the broadcasts are close to that of FM radio. For samples check out this link." Akai adds this link to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle with some more information, like the involvement of the BBC and Voice of America in this undertaking.
RANGE man, range! worldwide FM quality shortwave is gonna be cool.
My potato gun was confiscated by the United Nations. They said I wasn't allowed to have weapons of mash destruction.
it will have to be a good signal, considering the kind of character drops I got when a friend (WB0POQ) was demonstrating PSK31, the bandwidth fits in normal SSB, and we get about line of text for every 10 seconds of tx.
-KC0NBY
You miss the big picture. Bandwith that onec was negelected due to poor quality can now be used to send reasonable quality sound around the world. There is NO radio technology currently used who's transmision has not been well understood since Maxwell. The change is in frequency hopping and digital encoding. It is doing neat stuff and provign over and over that there is no scarcity of available broadcast specturm. Whey you grok this, you might condlude that satellite is an expensive way to get the message around the world. If you don't grok it, I doubt anyone will miss your input.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Dude.... how much is a cellphone now? Aren't they giving them away in blister packs at the grocers?
It's just another digitial radio. The only thing hindering this is a standard; if there were a WARC approved standard and a few broadcasters using it there would be twenty dollar receivers being sold at ratshack - and handed out in the third world by peace corps volunteers.
"The quality of the broadcasts are close to that of FM radio."
Obviously, the person who commented thus had either a) never listened to the sample clips or b) never heard an FM radio that cost more than $5.
That was classic intercourse!
"Dude.... how much is a cellphone now? Aren't they giving them away in blister packs at the grocers?"
:)
In third world countries?!?!? The last time I was in one of those places they wern't giving anything away. Hell you couldn't even get a decent selection of sanitary food in some of those places.
It's true that cell phones cost far less than they used to due to the scale of mass production. Still most retail for $150 US on up. The ones being "given away" are usually refurbs as those have no other market value and it's a cheap way for the carrier to get you to spend an airtime dollar if you're too cheap to sign a contract and buy a phone.
The difference as I see it is that this radio market is going to be a tiny fraction of what the cellular communications market is. So I doubt there will be the kind of numbers you need to bring receiver price down that far that fast.
Maybe the MW market will help drive the price down somewhat and make it afordable for the SWL market. But MW is a hurting market too. If you're in the US you might remember how the MW broadcasters tried like hell to save their market share with the miracle of AM stereo. Or maybe you don't remember that...which would make my point. A lot of people just don't bother with that band because they can get all the programming they want on the VHF FM band without propagation flutter and fade.
Seems to me that the MW and SW listeners are a different breed with different requirements. They're not after high quality signal, they're just happy to have signal. They're not after full digital stereo news, they're just happy to hear the news at all.
Besides, Rush Limbaugh gets his point across in analog mono just the same as he would in digital stereo.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I listen to SW news to get a different perspective of the world. The local and network news in the US is politically slanted and full of sound bites. Where I live, the BBC, Radio Netherlands and Radio Cuba have strong signals at night.
I was listening to the BBC when it was first announced that Lady Di died in a car crash. It was a solemn moment The Brits did it with dignity. The American press handled it like the tabloids.