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

What was broken about FM radio?

[cybersquid]

Remember the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

The range of digital is pretty awful

[TomR teh Pirate]

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.

Re:this kills me

[amorsen]

DAB is a horrible standard. DAB+ is not so bad, except it is useless for local radio stations.

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).

DAB+ is almost as good as DVB-T2, but DVB-T2 was out years before. It makes zero sense to switch TO DAB+, it is legacy before it gets implemented.

Re:Patent?

[Ol Olsoc]

The problem is that if you lose enough bits you get nothing, whereas with FM you just get more static. also it doesn't have to be "pretty much perfect", whatever that means, that's why there's something called error correction.

I deal with Digital and analog signals every day, being at present involved in Emergency communications. The digital repeaters and radios we use do have a striking difference in range. Digital is much less. The manifestation of this is that at high signal strengths, a traditional FM signal and a Digital signal sound for practical purposes, identical. The Digital signal has a more silent background, but for all practical purposes, they are the same.

As the signal strength from one radio to another is decreased, a point comes where hiss is introduced to the received signal. This is the point where what we call "Full Quieting" is lost. It is basically a change in the signal to noise ratio. The signal is fading, and the noise is a larger component of the signal.

A digital signal is not immune to this change in Signal to Noise ratio. It shows Full Quieting until you don't hear it any more.

What happens is at some point, is that this increase in noise makes it impossible for the D to A and A to D converter to do it's job. At this point the signal goes away.

The FM analog signal is still intelligible to human ears long after the digital signal is not.

There have been efforts to alleviate some of the problem by a lot more tolerance, which is to say, allowing the less egregious errors to be passed along as if they were part of a good decode. But now imagine when this happens twice, say one station with a sub par input to a repeater, which then resends the message to other stations, some of which might have non-optimal receiving conditions.

There are some other attempts to allay this problem, such as MELP https://www.vocal.com/speech-c... which instead of a normal digital encoding, the receiving end uses lookup tables of phonemes to reconstruct a person's voice. You can get some pretty weird sounding results. It's hard to determine the fidelity of turining a human voice into a sort of robotic one.

the fading is due to loss of signal strength at distance. there is no "FM fades slowly over distance", the signal, regardless of analog or digital, fades slowly over distance as 1/r^2.

I really have to stop ya for a second. First you say that an FM signal does not slowly fade over distance, then you say thay all fade over distance.

So which is it? FM does not fade? SRSLY, you here just to troll or something? I challenge you to show that FM signals do not fade.

All Radio frequency signals, regardless of origin, race, sexual orientation, or creed, lose signal strength as the distance between a transmitting station and a receiving station is increased. The only part where the rules are a little different is that there is what is called a Near Field, and a Far Field. The size of the near field is related to the frequency , the Near Field becoming smaller as the frequency increases.

it's only a really shitty radio where "nothing happens at a much closer range.". generally that's impossible.

Now you are just playing games I must congratulate you not not only taking my quote out of context,. but quoting only part of my sentence.

Congratulations - in your world, there is no such thing as a digital cliff. Now scoot on over to Wikipedia and inform them how and why the are wrong. Here's the link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So i'd really like to see a system that does that without it being the result of a shit radio that can't do automatic gain control properly, because that sounds exactly like a shit radio with a bad AGC implementation.

So what you are saying is tha