51–60 of 289 posts
Don't most smartphones have emergency broadcasts built-in these days? Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car?
Don't most smartphones have emergency broadcasts built-in these days? Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car?
What do we do with more channels that we can't listen? If you really need a little bit of bandwidth around 100 MHz for other use, you could cut the spectrum from FM radio and still keep it running. The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers. They all have FM receivers. And these days most cars have radio units that are integrated to the car electronics, steering wheel co…
Most newish cars in the UK come with DAB as standard now.
However, receivers vary wildly.
I rent cars frequently and while all new cars have DAB, the quality of implementation is not consistent.
There's a huge difference between the crappy ones that constantly drop the signal and the good ones that almost never do, even in really remote (and hilly) areas.
The populist party that kicked it off in the first place is now the only party to oppose it, now that they know it is too late to do something about it...
I dont remember when I last listened to radio. Even in the car the entertainment is one or more of the following from the connected phone:
- Streaming or locally stored music - Podcasts (which may include shows produced by radio stations). - Audiobooks.
At home its the same, either played directly on the playback device (sonos) or from the phone.
I really dont see the allure of flow radio, I hate listening to something I have no control over and if there are commercials its even worse.
For my sake they could shutdown all radio broadcasts and use the bandwidth for mobile broadband. (Ok, maybe keep a single station running for emergency broadcasts).
Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then. I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too. In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones. They all work and…
In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging.
For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it?
The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.
I wonder how smooth the switch will be (the article says cars are a big problem due to the price). I'd imagine quite a few people won't upgrade their car radio and you'd think...so what radio is way to retro let's just stream stuff and listen to mp3s/ogg. I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what? The biggest i…
There's a huge marketing / awareness campaign going on right now in Norway to get people to upgrade their FM radios. I wonder if the radio stations will realize too late that they're throwing away their one advantage (ubiquity) and maybe the option some people will choose when the car radio stops working is to not listen to radio at all.