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Norway Becomes First Country To Switch Off FM Radio (thelocal.no)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Local Norway: Norway on Wednesday completed its transition to digital radio, becoming the first country in the world to shut down national broadcasts of its FM radio network despite some grumblings. As scheduled, the country's most northern regions and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic switched to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) in the late morning, said Digitalradio Norge (DRN) which groups Norway's public and commercial radio. The transition, which began on January 11th, allows for better sound quality, a greater number of channels and more functions, all at a cost eight times lower than FM radio, according to authorities. The move has however been met with some criticism linked to technical incidents and claims that there is not sufficient DAB coverage across the country. In addition, radio users have complained about the cost of having to buy new receivers or adapters, usually priced around 100 to 200 euros. Currently, fewer than half of motorists (49 percent) are able to listen to DAB in their cars, according to DRN figures. According to a study cited by local media, the share of Norwegians who listen to the radio on a daily basis has dropped by 10 percent in one year, and public broadcaster NRK has lost 21 percent of its audience.
Do they use the same patent-laden system as here in the US, or is there a chance to use an open decoder?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Some car audio systems are extremely integrated into the vehicle. They may be stuck with a nonfunctional radio for years.
I know people who are still complaining about the digital TV transition here in the US, because they used to be able to get a weak signal with analog, and now they get nothing. Sounds like Norway is having the same problem.
They should have transitioned this over ten years like digital TV in the US.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
DAB has worse battery life than FM, a shorter reception range for the same TX power, and often (depending on bit rate and codec) poorer audio quality. No one was asking for it, its purely politicians grandstanding and looking like they have their finger on the pulse of technology. Also the FM band being 30Mhz wide - less bandwidth than a modern ethernet cable - isn absoltely not use for modern data comms so it can't even be sold off for that to raise money.
I suspect all that will happen is legal broadcasters lose listeners hand over fist especially in car, and pirate radio takes over the FM band.
Currently, fewer than half of motorists (49 percent) are able to listen to DAB in their cars
I'd imagine most Scandinavians would consider that a feature if it got people out of their cars and onto mass transit.
. . . when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. (Sansui 3000A tuned to KCRW)
The law is not an ass. No really.
but that's because of Spotify and online news feeds. I expect because of that, the U.S. has seen a comparable drop in FM listeners.
If you post it, they will read.
Remember the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
More for Pirate Radio
It's a good thing you stopped writing because you where only a dozen sentences away from asking for the end of the universe.
#DeleteFacebook
It's interesting but with every advance in broadcast radio technology it has required a massive jump in radio equipment. AM could for example be received in an unpowered crystal radio set with virtually no components! (Yes it could run off radio waves like magic!) FM required significantly more parts and I imagine DAB requires a much more advanced digital receiver. Frankly I don't see the advantage of doing this, it's not like most cars have super high quality sound systems with all the road noise. I think this is probably just a bad idea in most areas.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can tell you that there is a plethora of digital FM stations that my car stereo simply cannot receive. Their FM counterparts come in just fine. A lot of listeners are likely to find that listening dead zones are going to increase significantly.
Norway doesn't have any poor people. Not in any true sense of the word.
Norway is a country who apparently thinks like Apple. Just dump older technology in favor of new just because we can.
It's nothing but mind control rays anyway.
So the government bowed down to corporations just like they are now with 'canning net neutrality'.
It used to be that America was the leader on tech and pushed open source and effective solutions. DAB is absolutely the RIGHT way to do that.
Then we have America. We picked not only a closed architecture, but one that sux.
Keep up the good work Europe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
allows for better sound quality
By better sound quality, do they mean the signal isn't compressed six ways to Tuesday so music sounds tinny, weak and as if it's coming through a wire a raccoon is chewing on?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
DAB radio does not provide more channels and better quality.
It provides the option between more channels or better quality: pick one!
And we all know what gets picked every time.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Hate-filled AM radio
Oh you mean blacks and other minorities 'hating' white supremacist and neonazi types who want them all dead? Yeah that's just horrible, how dare they demand to live and let live!
ham radio
You do realize that's got nothing to do with pigs, right?
Go back to 4chan/b/, faggot, and stay there.
I've had a car with a data connection and streaming built in for the past three years. I never listen to the radio. I do have a few radio stations I listen to over the data stream but they are all in distant cities and I couldn't receive their FM broadcasts even if I wanted. Most of the time I just listen to various streaming music channels. It's much more reliable than radio reception. No noise. Doesn't drop out.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Even versus analog it sounds worse, it's crappy 128Kbit MPEG-1 Layer 2. Norway and a handful of other European countries have wasted everyone's time standardizing and transitioning to something that is going to be obsolete in 10 years. (and is in some ways already obsolete)
In the US, there won't be any need to switch systems because we'll never run out of spectrum for FM. The reason is purely economic, soon every radio station will be owned by the same company and we won't be so inefficient to need competitive programming. Just a Top-40 format for every genre, plus traffic and weather. (also American cities are generally further apart than European ones so there is less interference).
We may never switch to HD Radio in the US. for us it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Someone must have thought they were very clever to force a proprietary standard on an entire nation. But the joke's on them, Americans either don't care about any kind of radio or they don't mind analog. With millennials, FM is a rapidly shrinking market.
Certainly not the people who need to buy a new radio.
Hate-filled? The AM radio bands are pretty much entirely filled with long-distance public broadcasting services.
Buy FM transmitters folks, use em in your house, your car!
Oftentimes the audio signal now is not synced with the video as a result of either clock skew, transcoding, or simple incompetence.
The old NTSC systems almost never had unsynced audio except in some rare cases where they were rebroadcasting a satellite feed or something where the audio and video were being transmitted as separate channels through equipment performing analog or digital buffering and retransmission, and usually as a result of said equipment malfunctioning or otherwise falling out of sync.
Nowadays with digital any minor issue can lead to desyncing between video and audio, and if it is stuck like that for hours at a time it can be quite jarring to one's enjoyment of the media.
You realize you got that ass backwards right?
I still don't know why cars need their own cellular service rather than just tethering off the phone that nearly everyone has inside the car.
I have a cell phone, but my plan doesn't include data. And even some plans that do include data don't include tetherable data.
There are two sensible digital radio standards. DVB-T2 (because the transmitters already exist for TV, so the first 50 or so radio channels are practically free) and DRM+ (Digital Radio Mondiale).
Does Digital Radio Mondiale have digital restrictions management?
This switch will lead to losing reception unless a certain expense is taken to retrofit all tunnels. Given limited benefits, is it worth it for the public purse?
American has a long history of protectionist crap. Explain why you drive on the wrong side of the road and had NTSC and only half the volts for your elecricity...
That's flat-out nonsense.
You can have a perfectly steady FM signal at low levels with a constant noise level - and a pretty low one at that if you keep the stereo decoding off - at ranges where digital signals are flat-out gone due to high error rates. And it's not just range - multipath will eat digital signals for lunch (that's reflections off buildings, etc.)
So how do I know? I write SDR software. I deal with this stuff directly, meaning, I write the demodulators and the rest of the signal processing chain. I get better performance than any FM tuner you ever heard of; so I know the range tradeoff for digital is severe. I have RF recordings of many examples. They can be played back, (re—)demodulated, and A:b comparisons made at the drop of a hat. There's no doubt about it: FM analog is superior for use other than local. Likewise the atrocity that is AM digital, IBOC. Quite aside from blowing out two AM channels besides the one the station is actually on, it suffers from the same range and decode fragility that FM digital does.
These are really bad ideas: for services like this, new bands should be allocated rather than shitting all over the existing ones.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Codecs are so much better these days. Now, due to government mandate, we're stuck with shite from the last decade.
It would have been better to let the broadcasters duke it out. Chances are, we'd have instead gotten Internet streaming services a lot earlier, and no one would have been forced to upgrade equipment, or grab taxpayer-funded adapters.
Government is ALWAYS the wrong solution; not only is it a monopoly, but it's a monopoly that makes you buy it's crappy services at the point of a gun.
Their numbers are so insignificant, and their ranks so foolish, that it's laughable to hold up "Nazis" and their ilk as some kind of threat.
Please. White folks came late to the slave trade, and then were the ones who basically ended it; white people were the ones who came up with the very ideas of multiculturalism, tolerance, and equality under the law; to this very day, majority-white countries are still the best practitioners of these ideas. White people are one of the few groups in the world (if not the only) who not only protect minority groups explicitly, but also put in place benefits for the at the expense of other white people.
Brother, as a black man, let me tell you that I love white people; this world would be a much worse place without them.
I don't think the FCC has the ability to end the universe. But if they did, the current Republican commisioners would surely require us to pay to keep them from ending it and would be happy to explain why that is good for America and the world.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
To speed up the shutdown of the Norwegian FM network statistics where misused by the proponents of DAB. It was not about the users on FM vs. users on DAB. It became number of FM listeners vs. number of Digital Radio listeners. And Digital Radio includes everyone listening in via internet streaming services, digital TV network etc.
The Norwegian communications watchdog (Nasjonal kommunikasjonsmyndighet) let it slide.
And even refused to give out their measurement data of the actual DAB coverage, and pointed to the highly optimistic DAB coverage chart created by the DAB proponents (Digitalradio Norge)
(When comparing DAB coverage to FM coverage. DAB was compared to FM Stereo, but FM degrades to FM mono when coverage if poor which will be acceptable for most listeners as many radios only have one speaker)
"The transition concerns only national radio channels. Most local stations continue to broadcast in FM."
Why change?
I listen to FM radio everyday. It works great. I already have the receivers.
Get off my lawn.
-Dave
Living in norway I can say that buying a dab radio is no fun at all, because the quality of the radios on sale seem utterly mediocre, and I shouldn't have to pay $1000 for a decent dab radio.
When asked, the people DID NOT want it. Cost, reception, lousy audio quality. But as those hundreds of billions that opposed Blair's Iraq War discovered, the opinions of ordianry people count for nothing in so-called western 'democracies'. And Scandanavian countries are far worse.
But dirty dirty DAB comes from the BBC- an astonishingly incompetent and public hating entity. If DAB had any concept of after-the-fact programmable CODECS, it would at least offer decent sound quality now- but dirty dirty DAB was designed to use minimal programming power- a choice that now seems moronic to an endless degree. Software is something the braindead old school engineers of the BBC knew nothing about (see BBC's dreadful text on video services for proof).
Sometimes low tech solutions are simply better. At least as alternatives. But lo-tech means people-power, something our orwellian governments hate. How many pirate ratio stations broadcast on DAB?
Clearly, with the advances in tech, the ALTERNATIVE to AM/FM should have been satellite. Best of all words. Keep analogue radio, and have access to the astonishing numbers of satellite radio stations as well. For sure a satellite radio reciever needs some clever tech to automatically point its receiver at the satellite, but nothing we can't do trivially in this computer age.
The expense of DAB is pretty much a government issue. In the UK, where the government activily (but secretly) subsidises tech it wants to succeed (most brits have attics FULL of the new light bulbs from the year when you could buy them for 10-20 US cents a piece), DAB radios can be found for 15 dollars. But they're not good on batteries, and reception outside major urban areas can be an issue.
I've yet to listen to any DAB station which doesn't sound like overcompressed shite like listening to a 64kbps MP3 or worse.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I've always had a problem with this new digital formats (TV, AM and FM). Whatever happened to backwards compatibility? Let's take standard AM for an example. OK, I'll admit it is ancient technology. And also, the AM-Radio in my Kia is a total piece of junk. BUT, consider this. One day there is going to be some sort of crisis that requires the Government to communicate with the people after some sort of Apocalypse. Say North Korea detonating a nuke above us to create an EMP. Guess what, all that digital hardware is fried. Satellites? Gone. Cell phones. Fried. But guess what? Grandpa's old Atwater-Kent is still working. And even if I can't get power, I can build a crystal set out of a toilet paper roll, some wire, a razor blade, a pencil point, and an old earphone from someplace (It's called a Foxhole radio).
In this rush to the future, we forget that these new formats are fragile. It is my opinion that the Government should at least protect AM radio forever, as a means of emergency communications. Every car radio in the galaxy has an AM radio. AM radios have been made since the 1920's, and a radio of 1920 can pick up a broadcast of today. And you can make a receiving set from junk around the house.
Instead of rushing to digital, they should once again authorize those hyper-power clear-channel stations. WLW (where I'm from) used to be able to send out 500,000 watts. Guess what? The president could give an emergency message to the entire country at night over that transmitter. And it is still economically sound. WLW is still #1 in drive time.