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.

Comments

Re:Patent?

[squiggleslash]

The US standard is HD Radio, which is a proprietary system (not merely patent encumbered, it's controlled by one company and uses things like a custom audio codec that's similar to, but not identical to, AAC-HE) and it remains a mystery as to why the FCC blessed it, as it was opposed by most of the industry and, like I said, is proprietary.

It is not the same as either of the European standards (they have one for FM, and one for AM). The system has one advantage over Europe's DAB for FM system, in that each station can transmit an analog signal and two or more digital channels over the same frequency. The first digital channel is always a digital version of the analog channel, while the others are alternative audio stations.

Re:Patent?

[harrkev]

Yeah, we have it. I even have a couple of FM tuners that pick it up. I have never seen a digital AM radio in the wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Here is a tuner that you can likely pick up in a store today:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/i...

However, there is not enough compelling reason to invest in HD radio in the US, at least from my experience.

Re:What was broken about FM radio?

[should_be_linear]

It is wasteful. You can replace 1 FM station with 13 DAB+ stations. Anyway, I would encourage switching to full 4G internet coverage everywhere, which enables infinite TV and radio capacity, among other things.

Re:What was broken about FM radio?

[ThosLives]

What some consider "waste" I consider a "feature": the extra redundant analog information in AM/FM that allows me to listen to (or watch) a distant signal with fairly high noise. Now you either get a station or you don't, there is no "I'm beyond the design signal to noise ratio so I get a little static but otherwise no big deal."

Re:What was broken about FM radio?

[Anonymous Coward]

DAB+ has audible compression artefacts, depending on what is played. Also, if the signal strength goes down, FM will just have more noise, but you can still understand it, DAB+ goes from 'OK' to 'bad' to 'silent' quickly.

And then 'inifinite TV and radio capacity' on 4G? Right... infinite capacity on a shared medium. Care to explain how that is supposed to work?

The summary is borderline criminally incorrect

[Misagon]

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.

Re: Sounds Rough

[fyngyrz]

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.

A cellphone inside the car body has only a fraction of the receive sensitivity of a system with a proper antenna mounted outside the vehicle. Transmit suffers likewise. So the answer as to why is "way better performance."

That's just nonsense

[fyngyrz]

FM is already to intermittent and noisy to be of any use at the point where DAB+ becomes silent.

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.

Re:Patent?

[caseih]

Dunno about you, but I find XM radio audio quality to be terrible. Sounds like 48 kbit MP3s. Talk channels are even worse.