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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.
From where I sit, digital radio is a solution looking for a problem. In the UK, the BBC spent vast amounts of license fee payer's money (i.e. my money) investing in new DAB (the digital radio standard approved over here) stations. Then when it found no one was listening to DAB, and private stations were bailing out, rather than give it up, they spent more vast quantities advertising the f@*k out of DAB to try and boost take-up. And yet still I can count the number of people I personally know who own DAB radios on the finger of ... well, one finger, actually. It's four times as expensive to run a DAB station as an FM station, the coverage is worse, receivers are expensive, and the benefits are minimal. From what I can tell, both IBOC and DRM may suffer mny of the same issues as DAB, although maybe the US market for radio is different enough that it will work out differently.
Oh no... it's the future.
IBOC was designed to prevent broadcasters from competition. One of the alternative schemes was to use spread-spectrum across the entire AM broadcast band, on top of existing stations. This would make the "properties" of incumbent stations far less valuable.
It's worth keeping analog AM as an emergency broadcast medium. The receivers are simple, dumb, and reliable, and the transmitters have huge range. That's useful during floods, hurricanes, and such.