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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 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.
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.
...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
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)
Like the god damn socialist roads, fire departments, and fucking police departments.
God dam socialists forcing themselves on me. Where they put the roads are stupid, and they should let most homes burn to the ground.
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.
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 ]
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.