Digital Radio Mondiale, a Better Standard Than US-Adopted IBOC?

Gsparky2004 writes "Over at Engineering Radio, Paul suggests that Digital Radio Mondiale (or 'Digital Radio Worldwide') may be a better alternative than the US-adopted, proprietary IBOC system. But he's concerned that the FCC is too far down the 'IBOC is the way!' road and won't accept an open source alternative, even one that may work better." For a slightly more pointed take on the matter, check out this anti-IBOC site, which paints IBOC as something akin to the devil himself.

Comments

Re:Does anyone care either way?

[TheRaven64]

The big problem that DAB suffers from is battery life - an FM radio can last far longer than a DAB radio on the same set of batteries. Do you have any figures for power usage for DRM+ decoders compared to FM radio? If it's just driving headphones, a pocket FM radio can go for quite a few days on single AA radio. DAB seems to use about ten times as much power.

For in-car use, power isn't such a problem, although hand-off between towers is. For in-home use, you're likely to have Internet Radio as an option, with a lot more channels (I'm in the UK, and I'm currently listening to a station in California...).

Re:Does anyone care either way?

[Anaerin]

Another issue with DAB in the UK is that we already have RDS on FM, which offers most of the benefits that DAB has for the average listener (Station Identification, frequency hopping, optional traffic/weather report switching, one-way data stream for now playing/next up information etc). The US doesn't have RDS at all (Believe it or not), so a digital radio system would be of more benefit to them.