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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.
RTFA, it seems the fight is over the AM band! Interesting, given the fact that I am over 30 but still I don't remember a time when anyone cared about the AM band...
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Seems like these guys really know what they are talking about. Not only are they criticizing a position - they actually back it up with a bit of science. It really is disgusting to see any proprietary format, complete with royalty payments, forced by the government onto the populace. Makes me hate Clear Channel, et. al. even more.
Yup, a French name and the acronym is DRM. It's like they were intentionally trying to make sure it had no adoption in the US.
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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.
There is always going to be a new, better technology if you just wait a few minutes, but they have to pick something at sometime. If you wait because there was something better around the corner you would wait forever.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
True, but at least with hybrid DRM you aren't stuck paying outrageous royalty fees to a company backed by your big-station competitors.
I've been with the biggest manufacturer of HD Radio (and TV) transmitters in the US working I've worked closely with iBiquity (holder of patents for IBOC being used in the US) engineers in rolling out the newest HD Radio technologies for many years.
In my opinion it's a moot issue. I've worked on HD Radio exciters for some years, first with great enthusiasm and now with very little. It's a great idea on paper but when you listen to an actual radio in the real world the difference is VERY underwhelming. AM is a lot bigger improvement but FM is almost a wash. I can't imagine anyone paying for so minimal an improvement. If you're into AM talk radio I can see it but I don't think anyone is going to pay the iBiquity tax (every radio manufacturer has to pay for iBiquity IP to have an HD decoder) to have a radio that "sounds a little better". The ability to send multiple programs over the same signal benefits the radio station owner far more than the listener and it doesn't seem to be taking off. The stations don't seem to know what to do with the extra programming time (that could change though). I've heard the market penetration reports weekly (from iBiquity) for years. At first it was going like gangbusters. Now it's just dying and iBiquity is in BIG trouble. They've been considered for acquisition by both Apple and Google and apparently neither found them worthy. That should tell you something.... My company doesn't even want to continue updating the software for these devices because there simply isn't enough payback to make it worth doing. Radio stations aren't buying because it's not making much difference to their advertisers.
IBOC or Radio Mondiale? Who cares? I think we'll have both out there eventually with Radio's that contain decoders for either. Particularly when iBiquity folds (couple years maybe...) and their licensing fee's go away. Market penetration for IBOC is pretty damn deep in the US already (I think my company has about 2500 HD exciters in the field) and radio stations are not big spenders. I can't see them switching and if they haven't gone IBOC yet it makes no sense to do anything but IBOC because, however few HD Radio's are out there, there aren't ANY for Radio Mondiale. Being open (free) doesn't make any difference because you still have to BUY a radio with the free decoder.
This is America, damnit! We set the standards. None of this foreign stuff for us like GSM, the metric system, or any of that other crap that will never make it in the market.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
And there's a damn good reason to maintain an analog system of broadcast... inexpensive, plentiful, ubiquitous radio's that can be used for communicating with the population should something terrible happen. Like a Marxist regime in the White House, Oh wait....
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.
According to TFA, the (more) open system is actually relying on a number of not-so-open protocols and formats.
* Open source system. Royalties are paid by the transmitter manufactures only (and do date, most major US transmitter manufactures have already paid these). There is no royalties paid by the broadcaster to install DRM or by the consumer when purchasing a DRM capable receiver. One company does not own the rights to the modulation system for all the broadcasters in the country.
It's good that no royalties have to be paid by broadcasters or consumers, but given that I was just at the Open Hardware Summit and have a curiosity about things like GNU Radio, hopefully the amateurs won't be shaken down if they build their own receivers or transmitters.
* The CODEC is HE-AAC 4, which is widely used world wide.
AAC is patented, and they make you pay money.
In addition to that, DRM30 station have the ability to transmit low frame rate H. 264 video.
H.264 is patented, and they make you pay money.
The thing is, even if this isn't a completely open format, it's entirely plausible that this is the closest that anyone has gotten. While we could consider using this for now, we should always look forward and try to figure out how open we want the next set of standards to be.
coding is life
Both Digital Radio Mondale and IBOC (Ibiquity) are bad. Both require a host of patented codecs to run (go over to the DRM project page and look at the requirements to build it - DRM suffers from the classic design by committee issues.
But IBOC is worse: Ibiquity has, as a part of the required standard, that all transmissions SHALL be encrypted with a key you have to license from Ibiquity. If they don't like what you are doing, NO KEY FOR YOU! For example Griffin was going to offer a IBOC tuner on USB (their Radio Shark HD), that would have allowed you to record the bit stream for time shifting purposes. Ibiquity says "THOU SHALT NOT RECORD THE STREAM" - and Griffin had to cancel the Radio Shark HD (after they had announced it, BTW).
Read that last again: this isn't a "you MAY encrypt, if you want to" - this is "You SHALL encrypt. Get over it."
Personally, I'd rather see a truly Free solution out there, but where's the profit in that?
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No, antenna size is not a function of distance you want to cover. It's a function of wavelength, at 2.4GHz it's 12.5cm, and at 1000kHz, smack in the middle of the US AM band, it's 300m.
I think you would be interested in my Noise Generator cum Equalizer that can turn any good quality FM/MP3/FLAC audio into AM quality audio.
I am a broadcast engineer with over 30 years of experience.
IBOC is a true joke. It's the FIRST broadcast service ever authorized by the FCC that actually CAUSES interference-mostly to your NEIGHBORS above and below you on the dial! IBOC is also an FCC sanctioned PRIVATELY owned system that costs broadcasters over $25K in upfront licensing fees-and then more in continuing royalty payments.
What most of us want (broadcast engineers) is for the FCC to authorize TV channels 5 and 6 for a dedicated digital radio band using DRM. Low band VHF is the WORST place for Digital Television (it goes in order UHF channels 20-40, UHF channels 14-20, UHF channels 40-51 , VHF channels 7-13 and finally VHF channels 2-6). Right now there are about 25 DTV stations on channels 5 and 6 in the entire country-and it's been proven that EVERY ONE can be accomodated on UHF (To accomodate the station in Philadelphia on channel 6, a station in Reading, PA would have to move to a different UHF channel and give Philly its current channel, OR Philadelphia can move to channel 3 if they insist on staying on low band VHF-a BAD idea!).
If the FCC got off their ever widening ASS and did this, every AM station that wanted a digital FM could have one-with enough left over for every FM station too-AND a nationwide FM frequency for the National Weather Service/Homeland Security to operate on!