Norway Will Switch Off FM Radio In 2017

New submitter titten writes The Norwegian Ministry of Culture has announced that the transition to DAB will be completed in 2017. This means that Norway, as the first country in the world to do so, has decided to switch off the FM network. Norway began the transition to DAB in 1995. In recent years two national and several local DAB-networks has been established. 56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day. 55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio, according to Digitalradio survey by TNS Gallup, continuously measuring the Norwegian`s digital radio habits.

Comments

Re:Less accessible

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Two days later the Chinese will flood the same dollar stores with one cell, one button digital receivers, don't worry about that.

So much for long distance Listening

[FlyingGuy]

Digital ANYTHING over the air for listening just plain sucks.

If your signal is not perfect you simply don't hear anything. If I am WAY away from an analog broadcast, it might be fuzzy, it might in and out of stereo but I can still HEAR and understand it. With digital, one the signal gets fuzzy is just does not decode it.

This is only one of the reasons why cops and fire fighters hate the new digital radios.

Re:So much for long distance Listening

[Anonymous Coward]

This effect is called "digital cliff". In theory, digitally encoded information (in this case, sound we want to hear) does not suffer the quality degradation no matter that there is actual degradation in signal. Until signal quality becomes so horrible that is not possible to get encoded information from the signal. With analog modulation, you would get more noise in information when you get more noise in signal. Illustrated as: http://www.aerialsandtv.com/_wp_generated/wpea5bfb21_01_1a.jpg In practice this works ok for digital television. You get best possible* image with DTV where you would get unwatchable static-covered picture.

The problem here is that digitalization is often used to decrease the power of the emitter, so you cannot compare digital and analog case directly.

Honestly, I don't have an idea if this works well with sound. Sound is rarely distorted in analog TV, even when video itself is completely ruined. And this depends heavily on modulation and encoding.

*) As much as MPEG2 and MPEG4 can give you

Re:So much for long distance Listening

[thegarbz]

Digital ANYTHING over the air for listening just plain sucks.

If your signal is not perfect you simply don't hear anything. If I am WAY away from an analog broadcast, it might be fuzzy, it might in and out of stereo but I can still HEAR and understand it.

You're assuming the goal of listening radio is simply to understand. For most people it most definitely isn't. There's nothing more fatiguing than trying to understand content through static in the background. Heck when FM drops out of stereo most people typically change the channel, and and many intelligent radios consider the signal lost at this point and look for another station.

This is only one of the reasons why cops and fire fighters hate the new digital radios.

The cops and firefighters have a rosy view of the past. The reality is that modern digital radios have receivers with far greater sensitivities than those analogue counterparts. TETRA or P25 on a power for power basis with older analogue equipment works well over 3 times the distance where analogue becomes unintelligible. The modern equipment is now so good they've started downrating the equipment's power output.

If you have a coverage issue at all then it's never the fault of the radio standard.

Re:So much for long distance Listening

[Paradise Pete]

Used to be a thunderstorm just meant a fussy TV.

Used to be a fussy TV no matter the weather. And a pair of pliers to change the channel because the crappy plastic knob fell off.

Re:So much for long distance Listening

[Z00L00K]

AM is only used in a few areas in central Europe like Germany and France, but it's a dead end in Europe.

About That Now Available 20 MHz...

[Anonymous Coward]

All the (Not necessarily compatible...) DAB systems use High-VHF/UHF frequencies.

So what then happens to the 88-108 MHZ "FM" Band when DAB is forced upon us/US? (Lost in the Noise is the fact that Norway's Plan only effects the State Broadcasting System- Commercial and Private Stations can continue with Analog for now...)
Somebody has plans for that very valuable 20MHz Spectrum, and they are being very quiet on what they plan to do with it, once they have it.

Re:About half

[Kjella]

Ooh, found my answer, "20 % of private cars are equipped with DAB radio." So 80% aren't. I think 80% of people are going to not like this once it happens.

That doesn't even begin to cover it, many people have an FM radio that they occasionally use for example at cabins or whatever, more than 80% will probably have to replace some radio. And note that they asked for "digital listeners" not "DAB listeners" meaning if you use your smartphone or tablet or PC to listen to radio, you get counted in favor of DAB even though you don't use DAB.

Actually this (Norwegian) is the truth, in 2014 about 64% of the population listened to radio daily and only 19% on DAB. There's no numbers for it but even less exclusively used DAB. I don't have a DAB radio. It sucks for any kind of battery-driven device, meaning just the kind of remote places and mobile appliances where you'd want radio. We'd do better just upgrading so we'd get 3G/4G coverage everywhere rather than DAB.

Nobody else is phasing out FM or even planning to phase out FM. This is just Norway going off on its own crusade urged on by commercial interests of 10+ new channels, fuck whether it makes sense to throw out millions of radios. On the bright side, I expect this to lead to a massive interest in building out 3G/4G coverage as ex-FMers give DAB the middle finger. Streaming with Spotify + offline playlists is likely to be the new "radio".

Re:I don't get why the government is involved at a

[Xolotl]

The governenet cares because they sell spectrum allocations, and can re-sell the ones taken back from analog. Furthermore because the digital broadcasts use less bandwidth per station and are less susceptible to crosstalk they can sell more of them per Mhz of spectrum.

Not Applicable to North America

[Freshly Exhumed]

The DAB radio system was not adopted in the U.S.A. or Canada. The Canadian authorities permitted testing of DAB for quite awhile but eventually allowed it to die off due to lack of interest.

Instead, the iBiquity HDRadio IBOC standard was adopted in North America, which is a hybrid digital/analogue system that retains the traditional FM Radio band. While DAB and FM Radio occupy different parts of the spectrum, in North America you can think of digital radio as being a "superset" of the traditional analogue stations in the same band (IBOC means "In Band, On Channel).

So, a tuner with HDRadio capability and an old analogue FM tuner will both tune in the exact same station, but the former will process the digital portion of the station's signal in all its superior quality.

For broadcasters, the iBiquity HDRadio IBOC system can also be switched to 100% digital someday, but it is not likely to happen for a very long time if ever due to all the legacy analogue FM radios out there even in brand new consumer electronic gear. The automakers have come onboard with HDRadio-equipped tuners for the North American market.