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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!
... is monetization. They can sell more channel licenses, encrypt their radio streams, and sell paid subscriptions. This is the beginning of the end of free radio.
DAB uses a different part of the spectrum. FM will be shut down to save on maintenance, not to make room from DAB.
---- Sig. gone.
Not those with a USA high school education. I'll wager most EE grads could not build an FM radio without a drawing.
DAB already uses a different part of the spectrum, particularly L-Band. The US and Canada got around this "problem" (it was mostly howling by the NAB and its members), by cramming in the digital signals with the existing analog AM/FM broadcasts using IBOC/HD Radio..... which hasn't been a success. Its actually harder to find aftermarket HD Radio tuners now then it was when it launched!
And compared to FM, DAB is mostly nothing. At a fraction of the range where you'd still be pulling in very usable FM audio. DAB is gone entirely, or slamming open and closed like a berserk doorman on meth.
There have been a series of really bad decisions along these lines. In the US, CQUAM is available for AM stereo, and it, like standard AM, doesn't cause you to lose distant stations or take up extra bandwidth. So what do we see? AM digital stereo modes that take up three AM channels, plus they have the extra feature that they really don't sound very good, whereas CQUAM... well, it does. Analog television: same as DAB, in that you can catch a broadcast at distance and you can still get a picture, where at the same distance, digital television is long gone.
Previous poster who said they should have maintained current infrastructure and put the new garbage elsewhere was spot-bloody-on. But, you know, government. They don't have to do anything well; they just think they have to do something, anything. If it wrecks a bunch of people's circumstance, well, so what. Besides, corporations were slavering to get at that bit of spectrum, and we know who really runs the government.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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?
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. Most of our stations including many music stations broadcast in 64kbps mono MP2 (no joke). So here, DAB sounds like shit, frankly, and because of the many DAB radios out there that don't support DAB+, it will be a long time before we can move on now. I have a good DAB radio in my car, but I primarily listen to internet streams and FM.
Oh no... it's the future.
There is basically no AM radio in Europe anymore
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
My DAB portable radio has a high power usage and chews through AA's at an alarming rate, far far higher than my old FM analog radio. I would be very concerned about the suitability of DAB in sitiations of emergency, where people are asked to have portable radios with a fresh set of batteries, they wouldn't last long at all! And one other problem with DAB, try tuning one in the dark, or otherwise looking at the display. Trying to navigate the stations is extremely difficult compared to a simple tune up or down. And if you have gone off onto a sub menu then it's really difficlt to find where you are. I spare a thought to think how blind or poorly-sighted people have to navigate DAB radio channels.
Due to government requirements, our local public radio and television agency is soon switching to DAB+. This means that all devices that understand only DAB (without the +, very common until only a few years ago) will no longer be able to receive any channels and therefore be obsolete. Fortunately, FM will still be available, so my receiver from the 1980s will still be working fine. Everybody who bought into DAB too soon will have to buy a new device, though.
...Do you think they have crazed conservative personalities ranting about the fact they live in a Socialist welfare state there?
Probably not to anywhere near the extent that you 'enjoy' those cranks in America. Socialist welfare states have the same corporate shills and their deluded hangers-on, but on the whole that rhetoric doesn't play nearly as well here as it does in the US.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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 NUMBER of Analog FM stations which the bands can accommodate are MORE THAN NEEDED.
And switching them off is a major public detriment, Because of the loss of the major advantage which Analog FM radio has....
Receivers for FM are CHEAP, UBIQUITOUS, Easy to receive transmissions, And Analog signals are very forgiving.
Also, the relatively small NUMBER IS AN ADVANTAGE. When FM receivers are being used for THEIR MAIN PURPOSE, which.....
Is to receive broadcast messages, potentially during a time of emergency when aLL THE DIGITAL STUFF is broken.....
(E.g. Due to EMP)
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
DAB uses the MPEG-1 Layer 2 codec due to being an earlier standard. HD Radio and DAB+ use HE-AAC based codecs. The biggest difference is DAB usually has dedicated spectrum, vs sharing the FM band. Also, HD Radio is patent encumbered and has tons of licensing fees while DAB is an open standard. Norway could be planning on re-farming the FM band for something else, or moving existing DAB broadcasts there and freeing up the current DAB broadcast band.
Except that the HD Radio """standard""" is full of patents, so even if you knew how to make a digital receiver, you couldn't sell it without paying license fees.
And they call it HD to make you think "high definition" when in reality it's barely up to the quality of a 128K MP3. The HD stands for "Hybrid Digital". There is really no need for it to exist other than ZOMG DIGITAL.
Also, nobody cares about stereo on AM anymore, so there's no need for it there, either. AM (in the US) has become talk radio and low-income music for people who don't give a fuck about audio quality. (The AM band is full of Mexican-style music down here in Texas, with the occasional country or rap station in between.) It is also extremely susceptible to RFI, making the sound quality even worse. I even know of two talk radio stations that have LP FM simulcasts so you can get better audio within the metro area limits.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB... keep the old FM going, everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much. I fail to see how DAB makes any sense at all.
Um... FM reception is a bit tricky actually... And I'm an Extra Ham Radio operator who has a BSEE. I seriously doubt high school grads would posses the necessary technical knowledge to bias the detector properly, much less build a proper FM receiver that requires more than a handful of discrete parts or a pretty complicated IC...
Now AM... THAT'S easy to do with a pretty low parts count... With a set of high impedance earphones, a razor blade, wire and a variable capacitor you can whip up one of those...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That's not true: peruse through this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
when they all play the same thing? Generic music, generic news, generic humor.
And DAB+ is obsoleted by internet streaming for home use. In cars there's no need for the digital sound, FM is good enough.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This is a courageous decision. They should also ban 3.5mm jacks whilst they are passing legislation.
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.
the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB...
...but requires a working Internet connection. Please take notice that the summary speaks about Norway. A country that is in Europe, and not even in the EU.
Europe is not a single country, but a lot of different countries, each with its local cellular service providers.
As soon as you travel abroad, you're roaming, and internet connection can get quite expensive.
Whereas DAB and FM are just available for free from the air.
Also :
- FM (RDS TMC) and DAB (TPEG) have very clear standard for emitting traffic informations, which - at least in Europe - is supported by the vast majority of hardware (in-vehicle infotainment, standalone GPS receivers, etc.)
There isn't such a clear widely supported standard on internet. Google can provide a traffic overlay on their Maps service/app, but there's no standard way for that information to be propagated to your car's computer or your tomtom.
(And again, there's going to be a lot of people use offline maps in their car or using a standalone device, because streaming data from the internet while not it your country costs a lot in Europe, and thus using Google Maps for driving direction isn't that much practical. - Not only less features, but also requires you to download maps in advance using their fugly clumsy interface. at which point a standalone device starts to sound much better).
- FM and DAB also have a standard way to do to temporarily switch channels for some critical/emergency announcement (interrupt the radio you are listening to announce that there's an accident ahead on the highway you're driving on and you need to be careful to avoid the mess on the road. Or that because of the snow, there's a barrage of snow-plows driving at 30 km/h on the same highway where you're driving 130 km/h. You can't overtake them and you need to adapt your speed to avoid colliding).
This standard is supported by nearly any in-car radio for the past 20 years (i.e.: even old FM radios that might not be able to take advantage of all the other information available on the RDS channel can at least interrupt your music for an announcement). It even works while other media sources are playing (if you're listening to music on an USB stick, modern cars will pause their own media player, have you listen to the radio announcement, then resume your music). Even works over bluetooth (with the car emitting "pause" and "play" commands over bluetooth before/after the announcement, if the bluetooth player supports it).
As far as I know, Spotifiy on its own won't interrupt you for anything but advertisement (on free accounts). I doesn't support any traffic announcement. (and it would be problematic, because it would need GPS awareness and again costly data roaming).
You still need the car being able to catch FM/DAB information to be able to interrupt the spotify playing on your tablet.
- And that's the practical implication.
Then there's the matter of taste. Some people acutally enjoy listening to radio. Because of the music program, because of the talking heads, because of the news, etc. which currently aren't provided by internet streaming alternatives like spotify.
Only provided by web radios - ie.: radio that stream also on the internet - ie.: provide over costly internet connection what they also provide for free over the air with DAB.
everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much.
RTL-SDR would like to disagree with you.
Yup, it's not the same concept of "scrapt parts" (you're referring to electronic component lying around: resistors, transistors, condos, etc.) (I'm referring on the kind of scraps I have around : RaspPis, Arduinos, etc.) but it's still quite close to what a modern geek might have lying around.
Even if QAM / QSPK are much more complicated than FM, it's still possible to hack some at home, and is much more relevant in the modern world (Except for analog broadcast radio and a few legacy handheld radio "walkie-talkie", who the hell gives a damn about Frequency modulation nowadays ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Workers in 3rd world countries have few wage earning opportunities. This depresses wages and also makes it possible for companies to find workers to disassemble obsolete electronics at a (very) small profit and recycle any parts that have value.
Personally, I think this work should be done in the 1st world countries where the obsolete products are disassembled by robots and in adherence with the strict environmental standards of those countries.
Part of the attractiveness of sending those electronics to poor countries, in addition to low wages, are the lack of environmental protections.
Even if its only 128kbps MP3 quality, I can definitely hear the difference when the digital signal syncs. The soundstage sounds a lot broader.
Geography is not your strong point obviously. And there are still plenty of AM stations in France too - I can pick a lot of them up from where I live in the UK.
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.
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.
"Giving" your toxic waste to third world countries is neither charitable nor an environmentally friendly alternative to dumping them in your own landfills. WTF is someone living in the third world going to do with an obsolete DAB radio? They don't have DAB stations to listen to, and if they ever get them, they are far more likely to be the same HE-AACv2 DAB+ signals that have triggered you into throwing your radio away than the original MPEG-1 layer 2 based DAB that the radio can receive.
I think he was referring to the FM radios as usable radios not trash. The problem is that even in some place like the USA where we still use FM radios, factory radios are worthless. Every car comes with one and most all of them outlive their cars so you can get one for basically free at any junkyard. Even if you shipped 1M of them to the USA, unless you either start installing used radio in new cars or selling new cars without radios, there will be no market for them.
That is very interesting. Of course in the US, we don't and have never had such a grid (AM, FM or TV).
While satellite distribution for large networks has become standard (and it why so many small networks can be national), IN THE PAST a lot of systems distributed their signal by such a "grid". In Oregon, for example, with a few large cities and lots of open space, many broadcast stations used a system of translators to serve more rural areas. A receiver on a high spot picked up the main broadcast signal and retransmitted it locally on a different channel. The "PBS" in this state is one service -- OPB -- generated out of Portland and relayed to all the other transmitters. It is currently done vie the Internet, but it used to be done via TV. And much of the major network distribution was done via a microwave backbone. That's the "grid" you claim never existed.
No, it isn't a national grid because "national" in the US is so much larger than "national" in Norway or many other places in the world, but there were grids doing it.