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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.
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
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.