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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.
So in other words they're going to cause problems for nearly half the households?
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.
One of the things about FM radio is it's so easily accessible - you can (in the UK at least) buy a rubbish FM radio from a pound shop - it might not be great of course, but it makes it a medium practically everyone can enjoy. DAB is comparatively quite expensive.
There was one station I would listen to, the local rock station (yes, it played real rock, not that poser stuff) and as of late, it sounds like crap.
The only way I can describe what it now sounds like would be tinny and clipped. Songs which used to have a roundness to them sound horrible. It's as if the treble has been tripled and the bass halved. Reminds me of when my work went from analog phones to the "new and improved" digital phones. Immediately voices sounded off and messages and voicemail could and would be jittery.
Fortunately there are still a few stations to flip through, including NPR, but it's the only time I listen to the radio. Normally I just bring my cds to listen to.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Norway's population is concentrated into three urban zones which makes Digital appropriate. The off-shore fishers, rig workers. etc. need Long Wave radio signals.
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.
the whole digital radio never caught on hear in the states despite a hard push or it and even including them in newer cars.
When analog tv went away, the signals got very weak and undependable.
FM will do the same there
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.
It is only the fact that have been too busy to rip the radio out of my car. I have a screen/computer to put into it that will then play lectures, audio books, podcasts, etc. Also I have it ready to replace my dashcam with a series of cameras that not only can record but also upload via a dataplan if needed.
At no point in my buying did I even look for an FM or even AM option to add on. And certainly I never looked for a satellite radio technology (those things just piss me off in rentals).
To me even satellite radio is so 20th century. DAB is also just a bandaid to try to keep the radio station media companies relevant.
But the reality is that this isn't a technology issue. For the last portion of the 20th century a variety of media conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and turned them into MBA masturbatory dreams. All profit with no content. About the last time I listened to radio was just before a DJ that I know told me that his new format was to go into work, record all his blurps between songs in one long scripted 1.5 hour session including interviews, and then go home. The songs and his blurps were all run automatically by the computer.
The few things that come off NPR, BBC, or the CBC that I care about "Art of persuasion, quirks, this american life, etc" I download. But even the CBC is just on a march further and further to the PC left and I can't stomach having one great feature cut short so they can give massive amounts of time to someone with some extreme view on some stupid social issue and listen to them grind their axe endlessly.
So the best of radio on today is worse than silence. But my own playlist is awesome and the technology is sitting in a drawer so that I don't have to use my stupid FM transmitter to get crap off my iPhone.
So like my car not coming with an ashtray, I want my next car to not come with a radio, DAB or not.
As I understand it, that's only one of the possible modes of operation for the "HD" FM stereo used in the USA right now.
Up here in the DC area, that seems to be exactly what stations like DC 101FM are doing. If the digital signal cuts out, the radio falls back to the analog broadcast until it can switch back to digital.
The problem with FM HD though is they often opt to broadcast 1 or 2 additional digital stations, and there are no analog equivalents for those. So they just abruptly cut out when the signal gets weak. (And it happens OFTEN when driving around a metropolitan area with tall buildings and the like which intermittently block part of the signal.) Makes the whole thing unusable, IMO.
In Vinnland there was experimental DAB broadcasting set up during years 1997-2005, but it was discontinued due to low interest. It's like how Blu-Ray had a bit stiff adoption over DVD -- people felt that FM was good enough.
In addition to this DAB/DAB+ is obsoleted by internet streaming services.
Of course - it sucks to stream in a car, and the result may be that people won't be able to listen to radio in their cars at all and instead play their MP3s or whatever and miss out on traffic information and other important information.
I just wait for FM to be turned off and then a major event to happen where information is sent on the DAB+ net where nobody listens and then we have a lot of people driving into a closed off area.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If you want to be pedantic about acceptable variations choosing something with such a long history and such wide use in various disciplines is a terrible plan.
"Percent" is probably the most common flavor currently; but 'per cent', 'per cent.', 'pct', 'pc', and likely others are still within the realm of accepted use. Hell, the '%' sign isn't even entirely settled, unicode has something like four defined variants. And that doesn't count the archaic, but historically used and still recognizable, specimens that cropped up between Latin and the present day.
I take it that you were exposed to basic literacy and only basic literacy, none of that messy intermediate stuff.
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.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
If you set up your playlists properly, and sync things at your house, all of this and more is easily doable on a phone nowadays.
I do have an iphone, so my specific use case applies to that, but the same general steps apply to any phone/mp3 player. I have ripped my entire collection of CDs etc via AAC lossless (used to be FLAC, you can convert between them easily and quickly these days) in my server library, about 500GB or so at this point. I choose what songs etc I'd like in my playlists, and sync only those to my phone. When I get a new album, I tend to sync that album for an initial listen. So I get everything you're talking about plus I don't have to look at the phone because I use a swiping app to change songs. The songs are already preselected, and can be changed at will whenever I'm at home. Given the storage on the device, that's enough play time for between home syncs.
When I push those songs to my phone, I use a 256 kbps bitrate AAC as I found it doesn't make any real difference in the car or phone. (I used to use 320kbps MP3s) I may change back to lossless since the device storage has gotten significantly larger and the size may not matter and as a bonus, I can drive the home stereo purely from the phone and not need the home server running all the time. For home listening the lossless is noticeably better and the fact that lossless is, well, lossless and I can convert to anything later on is the decision to store everything in the home library.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.