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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

#131

Post by lb1lf »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #118
lb1lf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct in the case of Norway, at least - I believe (mind, believe, I do not know for sure) that telcos are mandated by law to have emergency power supplies available; whenever we have a massive power outage, cell service stays up for hours, if not days afterwards. Them being bulky is a major deterrent to theft, as a lot of our cellphone infrastructure is way out in the boonies and not really accessible u…

It isn't the Telcos I think about in this situation. It is my own phone batter. Or my spouse's - he has a dying phone with a dying battery, which doesn't always like to hold a charge. I'll be good for a while, sure, but once I'm dead... I'm dead. If something would happen late at night, after I've fiddled with my phone all day, I might start out with very little power. Early in the day, and I could make it last most…

Ah, that figures. Mea culpa. In that case, a $20 power bank should provide at least a couple of full charges - but if you're anything like me, you'll forget to top it up at regular intervals and will find that its capacity is greatly reduced when you need it... :-/ (I cheat; I have a small diesel generator for use during outages - we're typically without utility power a couple of days every winter.

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

#132

Post by wbl »

varjag wrote: post #100
timonoko wrote: post #23

FM radio in Norway sucked so much because of mountains. Every fjord had its own tiny repeater, but only if there was at least one inhabitant, otherwise you heard nothing. The cell-phone digital network is much more advanced, the antennas are on mountain tops and there is always coverage within few hundred meters.

Problem is DAB coverage sucks compared to FM, it's not an improvement. In the Western Norway with hundreds of tunnels only the bigger ones are equipped with radio relays. Plenty of dead spots outside major highways too. I had to drive Bergen-Voss 4x last June around the time a landslide ruined E16, taking a different detour each time. Very spotty in the tunnels along Hardanger, which is a major route. Even worse out…

Radio is great at broadcast, sucks at point to point with thousands of people. Multicast doesn't work on the internet. Broadcasting digital signals is a better way to use bandwidth.

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

#134

Post by douche »

lb1lf wrote: post #131
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the Telcos I think about in this situation. It is my own phone batter. Or my spouse's - he has a dying phone with a dying battery, which doesn't always like to hold a charge. I'll be good for a while, sure, but once I'm dead... I'm dead. If something would happen late at night, after I've fiddled with my phone all day, I might start out with very little power. Early in the day, and I could make it last most…

Ah, that figures. Mea culpa. In that case, a $20 power bank should provide at least a couple of full charges - but if you're anything like me, you'll forget to top it up at regular intervals and will find that its capacity is greatly reduced when you need it... :-/ (I cheat; I have a small diesel generator for use during outages - we're typically without utility power a couple of days every winter.

Still, any solution based around a smartphone is going to be subpar, compared to the dirt-cheap FM receiver that can run for weeks or months on a couple of ubiquitous AA batteries.

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

#135

Post by Retric »

kagamine wrote: post #57
anexprogrammer wrote: post #5

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…

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. 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…

When you hand in an old cellphone they just resell it the same for used cars, so lease programs don't result wast the way you are thinking.

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

#136

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kagamine wrote: post #115
varjag wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :) "Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manuf…

Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and…

Anti-environmental conspiracy theories (the evil electric car lobby are ruining the business of the nice oil providers for no good reason) aren't really any more useful than environmental conspiracy theories and biases ("chemicals" are bad, "natural" means good etc).

EVs are better for the environment, both local and global, than ICE cars. That's true on average and even truer for Norway with its cleaner grid.

Biodiesals etc. should really be saved for the things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft. But, at this very moment I believe various places including the US mandate that the diesel is mixed with these fuels to a certain percentage, so there's no big conspiracy here against this type of fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biofuel_policies...

If someone buys a brand new EV then a) presumably they would have bought a brand new ICE instead, b) they do not set their older car on fire and push it over a cliff, but rather sell it to someone, who in turn sells their car to somoene else. In the end, particularly with punitive tax incentives in place, the oldest, least-safe, least-efficient, most polluting cars in the system are scrapped.

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

#137

Post by douche »

msh wrote: post #56

I know I am properly a outlier but how many people on HN actually listens to radio over FM/DAB/Other non IP systems? 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 t…

Every single day. I listen to the local sports radio, and the local rock stations in the car when I'm driving.

A lot of the places I go don't really have cellular data coverage strong enough to support solid streaming audio. Meanwhile, there is one FM station broadcasting from a mountain top that I can pick up everywhere within a 250 mile radius with ease.

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

#138

Post by ptaipale »

jdietrich wrote: post #111
ptaipale wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around here (Finland, neighbouring Norway), the average car on the road is 12 years old, so if we start to get DAB radios now, almost half of them will have it by 2025. Many more cars have right now Bluetooth connectivity in the audio system, so it'll be streaming from the phone then.

An aftermarket head unit with DAB+ costs about €150 with installation. Owners of older cars aren't stuck, but they will have to pay for the privilege of continuing to receive radio broadcasts.

Will that integrate into the car electronics, and be able to run e.g. the satnav UI if that is included in the previous one?

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

#139

Post by mavhc »

msh wrote: post #56

I know I am properly a outlier but how many people on HN actually listens to radio over FM/DAB/Other non IP systems? 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 t…

I've almost never listened to radio, but I don't like music. Been listening to podcasts since 2005, when I split them into 5 min segments and sent them via IR to my feature phone.

I don't get listening to things a) not from the beginning, b) not until the end, c) without pausing, skipping forward/back, d) not your favourite things, e) missing an episode, f) listening to the same thing twice

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

#140

Post by ringe »

This is all about lobbying politicians. Very hard to understand why they want to set aside separate bandwidth for different sorts of media, when Internet access would provide all we needed.

We have digital radio, digital television broadcast, separate emergency frequencies and so goes the list.

What about gathering around standard that work and are already in place? What about making cell phone and Internet connectivity more robust?

But no. Let's throw billions in taxes down the drain. For instance: The emergency network fails when there's a storm. Then we're back to RHF!

From the inhabitant perspective, this is all a power party. A few people with high positions get to make big decisions and pat each other's back. I'm sure the CEOs of the businesses getting the contracts are good at patting backs too.

Good thing we already pay so much taxes we don't even notice the difference.

Except for the bumpy roads and understaffed elderly homes.

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