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Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

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Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#71

Post by kieranelby »

dagss wrote: post #58
kriro wrote: post #48

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…

It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.

Not if the crisis involves mains power outage - cell towers don't generally have backup power so mobile phones will be useless.

Edit: Adding generators/batteries to a significant fraction of cell towers is (probably) impractical due to them being bulky, expensive, and attractive to thieves.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#72

Post by dtech »

gravypod wrote: post #68

Well congrats to the hams in this country. They're going to get a huge bandwidth that others would be envious enough. They could also explain to people that just switching modes isn't going to make reception better. If you're having propagation issues then you'd be much better off working on getting repeaters setup on high mountains.

Won't the spectrum be used/sold for other purposes? Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#73

Post by agnsaft »

meddlepal wrote: post #33
trprog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who doesn't own a mobile/cell phone?

A quickly vanishing segment of people. Probably not worth worrying about.

Probably less people than the number of people that have the radio turned off anyway, so that could be considered "good enough"

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#74

Post by mrweasel »

ptaipale wrote: post #24

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…

The whole car radio situation hasn't be handled correctly by politicians, at least not here in Denmark. When regular service began, in 2002 in the case of Denmark, politicians should have parsed regulation that required all new cars to be delivered with DAB radio within a certain time frame.

You can get a DAB/DAB+ radio in your new car, but you'll have to pay extra. At this point is should simply be the default, otherwise a migration will never be well received.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#76

Post by snom380 »

dagss wrote: post #58
kriro wrote: post #48

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…

It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.

Many municipalities already have that in place (for sending out alerts about water quality etc).

The problem with cell towers is that the infrastructure is more brittle with more moving parts. There's been cases where fires, power outages etc in small towns have caused base stations to go offline, cutting whole towns off from communication.

Not to mention the recent case where penetration testing done by another operator in Europe accidentally caused the entire cell phone network of the largest operator in Norway to go offline for half a day.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#77

Post by dtech »

ptaipale wrote: post #24

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…

Well, that's a chicken-egg situation, cars won't get DAB+ radio's until there's DAB+ broadcasts and it won't really be accelerated until FM is closely on the horizon to be shut off.

Similarly it took quite a while for the first CD players to appear in cars, and a lot of older cars only had casette tapes, keeping casettes alive for quite a while longer just for car use.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#78

Post by Aoyagi »

ptaipale wrote: post #24

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…

>The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers.

It's not like anyone was asked when digital TV was the only thing left working..

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#79

Post by mgv11 »

khedoros1 wrote: post #42
a1studmuffin wrote: post #28

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?

If I remember, it plays some kind of tone, and pops the alert up in text. > Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car? Who's checking their texts when they're driving a car? Thankfully, that's a ticketable offense in my area now.

Ticketable offense probably most of the places. Still something that happens all the effin time.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#80

Post by audunw »

dtech wrote: post #72
gravypod wrote: post #68

Well congrats to the hams in this country. They're going to get a huge bandwidth that others would be envious enough. They could also explain to people that just switching modes isn't going to make reception better. If you're having propagation issues then you'd be much better off working on getting repeaters setup on high mountains.

Won't the spectrum be used/sold for other purposes? Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

> Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

I think the main motivation to shut down FM is that now that DAB is built-out sufficiently (or so they say), running both at the same time is expensive. FM transmitters are supposedly quite power hungry and expensive to operate.

It will take at least a decade or two to free up the FM band for other uses anyway. Norway will probably wait and use it in a way that aligns with the rest of the world, rather than finding its own local use for the spectrum.

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