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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.
. . . 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"
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 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?
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.
A lot of Norway is pretty remote though. Mass transit can't get everywhere, even for a well run country like Norway.
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?
I doubt that the radio is what keeps people in their cars. More likely, drivers will just switch to using their phones to stream audio or listen to MP3s, and the radio stations will take the hit when nobody buys new radios.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
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.
This is pretty true. I've been to many small places in Norway... and once the population hits about two thousand, there seems to be mass transit via buses but not to the way off places. To be fair though, I've seen bus stops outside of most farms I've driven past. There is a pretty complete taxi system in Norway... even in the somewhat tiny places, but they're absolutely stupidly expensive. There is always a taxi when you need one, but most taxi drivers can sit for an hour or more waiting for a fare... and they make sure to charge you appropriately for that.
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
Indeed, we have digital TVs in both the living room and kitchen. When tuned to the same channel the audio is hardly ever in synch.
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)
Why change?
I listen to FM radio everyday. It works great. I already have the receivers.
Get off my lawn.
-Dave
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