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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.
For pirate FM stations to fly their flags.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I find here in the UK the DAB stations often sound worse than their FM equivalents, thanks to an antiquated codec (MP2!). DAB+ was supposed to fix this by using AAC+, but that doesn't seem to have been deployed here. Backwards compatibility issues I guess.
When analog tv went away, the signals got very weak and undependable.
FM will do the same there
You post repeatedly like you have an interest in DAB.
Bubbling to silence is way more "fatiguing" than a bit of fuzz which never stops the signal from being intelligible. Having to recharge batteries daily instead of every few weeks is also tiresome. And, in the UK at least, FM audio is better than the low bitrate MP2 most channels use - i.e. even at perfect reception, it sounds awful.
And there's nothing like a dork sitting in a lab to tell people actually using their equipment whether it works or not. Maybe they are more sensitive on paper. Maybe on paper they do work "well over 3 times the distance". But, no matter how big the kickback to those responsible for buying proprietary digital solutions, they still frustrate people on the ground whose radios don't work in theoretical or simplified lab environments.
Nobody else is phasing out FM or even planning to phase out FM.
That's not true, actually. The UK, for one, is clearly mulling the idea, in fact, trying very hard to make up numbers to justify proposing it... and failing. Given their habit to make up numbers for other things they want to set policy for, that's telling. Other countries are doing similar things, eg. the Netherlands badly wants to "get with the times", just doesn't dare come out and say so (yet). That makes this really a tidy little lobbyist victory in Norway that they'll inevitably use elsewhere.
Doesn't make it less stupid, of course. In case of disaster FM radio is a good way to still reach people otherwise unreachable, since many people "just happen" to have a receiver around. That includes car radios, kitchen radios, even (and do spot the irony) smartphones and feature phones that have an FM receiver thrown into their RF handling chippery, as a trivial extra.
DAB (with or without added +) for many reasons is a really poor choice to try and run disaster relief radio service over, but it'll be all they have. Go Norway.