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Norway To Become First Country To Switch Off FM Radio (reuters.com)
Norway is set to become the first country to switch off its FM radio network next week, as it takes the unpopular leap to digital technology. Reuters reports: Critics say the government is rushing the move and many people may miss warnings on emergencies that have until now been broadcast via the radio. Of particular concern are the 2 million cars on Norway's roads that are not equipped with Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) receivers, they say. Sixty-six percent of Norwegians oppose switching off FM, with just 17 percent in favor and the rest undecided, according to an opinion poll published by the daily Dagbladet last month. Nevertheless, parliament gave the final go-ahead for the move last month, swayed by the fact that digital networks can carry more radio channels. By the end of the year, all national FM broadcasts will be closed in favor of DAB, which backers say carries less hiss and clearer sound throughout the large nation of 5 million people cut by fjords and mountains. Torvmark said cars were the "biggest challenge" - a good digital adapter for an FM car radio costs 1,500 Norwegian crowns ($174.70), he said. For the same cost, digital radio in Norway allows eight times more radio stations than FM. The current system of parallel FM and digital networks, each of which cost about 250 million crowns ($29 million), saps investments in programs.
carries less hiss and clearer sound
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Not those with a USA high school education. I'll wager most EE grads could not build an FM radio without a drawing.
Maintenance on what, exactly? It's not like the spectrum itself requires maintenance, and I haven't heard anything saying all radio stations are funded by the government, so as long as a particular business entity can continue to see a profit, while maintaining the same transmission hardware, why shut it down at all?
Why would I build one without drawing a schematic first? I'd at least have to calculate the values for the components - those would need to be recorded somewhere.
That is all.
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+. I hope Norway is a bit more advanced.
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived. If you live in a sane country and need FM radios you can probably get them for a few bucks + shipping, there will be literally millions of them thrown away. To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country. We spend billions in tax relief for EVs... but trash millions of working radios, that's good environmentalism. /facepalm
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ah, "social democracy". Where they do what's "best for you", not what you want.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The Anti socialism cranks here are simply the result of the closing down of mental institutions back in the 80's and how bad our public schools are.
When you have mentally deficient that never get education wandering the streets you get these kinds of cranks everywhere. Now they are old enough to confuse people into thinking they actually know something. In reality they all are simply that rambling nutjob screaming the world was going to end 10 years ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When you have a FM demodulator designed for 180 KHz (200 KHz is the channel width, not the sideband extent, which you can calculate using Carson’s rule), that same demodulator, when encountering half the width signal, will produce 1/2 the output volume; because FM encodes the audio waveform with frequency deviation. If the deviation is half, then so is the output waveform. Though I should point out that +/-75 KHz is the actual audio deviation, so really. 150 KHz.
Additionally, within the standard FM signal, encoded at rates of deviation, there is a stereo pilot at 19 KHz, a stereo subcarrier at 38 Khz, as well as digital information (RDS/RDBS) and two mode narrow-band monophonic audio channels up higher yet.
Another thing: The wide bandwidth is part of what gives broadcast FM its capacity for reasonably high fidelity. You drop down to 25...50 KHz total bandwidth, and you'd going to see some noticeable reduction in fidelity; cram a stereo subcarrier in there, and you'll see even more.
So it's not a matter of "just make it narrower" because compatibility with older receivers, of which there are a huge number still happily being used by their owners, would be unable to make useful audio out of the signal and because audio fidelity and stereo imaging would suffer (and that's not what FM listeners would call an "advance".) Oh, and you'd lose the capability for the RDBS and the extra audio channels, too.
The right answer is leave the current FM band alone. The FCC wants new transmission types with reduced range that won't work with the gear people already have in order to fluff the corporations? Fine. Put it somewhere where it won't wreck 70-ish years worth of radio gear owned by a huge portion of the population. Maybe someone will even listen. Stop forcing citizens to make expensive changes they have no need to make.
Corporations drive these consumer-level stupidities. Of course, for the corporations, it's not stupid: They're intending to make a lot more money off of us citizens. And with the FCC (in the US) or whatever other government coercion backing their play, they will succeed, too.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If they wanted to reuse the FM band for some public service then I could just about understand it - but 20Mhz of VHF spectrum is useless for any modern data comms so I can't see who'd use it. Seems to me this is simply the worst kind of "we know best" patrician politics forcing people to go digital for no other reason that some political idiots think digital is The Future so must be embrased. By force if necessary. Never mind that analog is better in a lot of case particularly a mountainous country like norway and thats before we get onto the issue of electronic waste from all the junked FM radios.