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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

#161

Post by Retric »

kagamine wrote: post #160
Retric wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why have I read news reports over the last few years about the used-mobile mountain piling up and how hard they are to recycle?

For a 1 year old phones it's Reused not recycled. When you hand in a six year old phone that's when they need to be recycled and that costs a little money. So, old phones do end up in piles as actually recycling is more expensive than saying they will some day be recycled.

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

#163

Post by fredleblanc »

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'm in the USA, so my mileage varies.

As it turns out, areas without decent cell signal — not even LTE, just a signal in general — is much more prevalent than I assumed. We just moved, only 15 minutes from where we lived, and we went from 4 constant bars of LTE to sometimes we get 1 bar of 3G.

I'm still not used to this, and there are many times where I get in my car, plug in my phone, start driving, then realize I didn't download anything for the ride. So I switch back to FM radio. Up here, sports talk stations are on FM, music is on FM, etc. As much as I hate commercials, the serendipity of a one-way broadcast can be exciting.

Second case: my wife's phone "connects" to her car, but only for phone calls. She doesn't listen to music through her phone really, and still relies fully on music from FM in her car. I don't think that's that weird.

Third case: both of my parents still drive, and neither do these sorts of things with their phones. When my dad is working in his garden, he's got the radio on (FM, generally talk or sports channels). My mom will turn on the radio in the car to listen to while she drives.

So I guess the car is the biggest case I see, and though for me it's mostly a reliable plan b, there's an older generation that still listens to a decent amount of FM (or AM) radio out there.

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

#164

Post by noselasd »

audunw wrote: post #82
dagss wrote: post #55

Consensus from a lunch table in Norway: It was stupid to spend money on DAB now, it happens right as people move from radio to streaming. Many will move to streaming on 4G instead of DAB (which seems to have as good coverage or better, at least for me...then consider if the money spent on DAB had been spent on cellular instead). The populist party that kicked it off in the first place is now the only party to oppose…

I doubt that 4G is capabable of replacing FM/DAB. Radio is broadcast, 4G is individual streams. For a whole morning queue full of cars, that's a lot of bandwidth. Probably the next generation will be good enough to handle it. But this still ignores other benefits of DAB over mobile data. One is emergency broadcasts, the other is future-proofing. DAB will probably be a standard for decades. But what if you want built-…

LTE networks allows for muticasting data too though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast-broadcast_single-fre...

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

#165

Post by semi-extrinsic »

It is a complete and utter travesty perpetrated by politicians who were convinced by snake oil/electronics salesmen of the (highly dubious) superiority of DAB, and now have too much skin in the game to turn back.

Personally, I've been working lately on building an ESP8266/VS1053 based webradio into my nice old wooden 1960s radio. I'm using the variable plate capacitor for the AM tuner as input for channel selection, so for all the world it will look like a still-working FM tuner. Total BOM cost will be <$30.

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

#166

Post by mrswag »

w8rbt wrote: post #157
askvictor wrote: post #121

The article didn't talk about why? It's not as if the FM bandwidth is particularly valuable, being quite a low frequency. Unlike digital tv, there doesn't seem to be a particularly pressing reason to do this; if broadcasters are happy to keep broadcasting on FM, why stop them?

There is only one reason. It's much more efficient. Engineers have to keep slicing things thinner and thinner to accommodate more and more people and needs. This impacts everything . Food, water, shelter, medications, transportation, communications, etc. Efficiency is king. It has to be.

FM works, and doesn't need any addition when you increase the number of listeners. I don't get it. Why throw away millions of perfectly fine radios?

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

#169

Post by alkonaut »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #165

It is a complete and utter travesty perpetrated by politicians who were convinced by snake oil/electronics salesmen of the (highly dubious) superiority of DAB, and now have too much skin in the game to turn back. Personally, I've been working lately on building an ESP8266/VS1053 based webradio into my nice old wooden 1960s radio. I'm using the variable plate capacitor for the AM tuner as input for channel selection,…

Exactly. It nearly happened in neighboring Sweden, but luckily the plans were cancelled.

I mean just imagine that the plans to scrap FM and go digital were made before mobile broadband, podcasts and streaming music.

Before they would have sworn billions, every person and every car would already be streaming internet audio anyway.

That's what will happen in norway.

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

#170

Post by digi_owl »

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…

> I also believe this is primarily driven by money

Quite likely. I am not sure exactly when it came to be, but at some point the national broadcaster, NRK, transferred maintenance and such of the broadcast network to Telenor.

While Telenor is on paper the national telecom company, it has since the late 90s operated as a publically traded company with the government as a major share holder.

So what is likely going on is that Telenor has found the older FM equipment expensive to maintain, and thus want to replace it with DAB. Quite likely because they can then extract rent from all the extra channels being broadcast.

We had a similar transition to digital TV a few years back, and as best i can tell the analog channels were barely turned off before Telenor started lobbying for the frequency space to be put up for auction aimed towards mobile phone networks.

Damn it, Telenor was making noise about replacing the landlines with mobile phones for a while. This because their switches in and around the major cities were getting old. They seem to have dropped the idea though, likely because they noticed they would have to put up a whole lot of new mobile cells to cover all those villages tucked away in narrow valleys.

Frankly big business in Norway has gotten very brazen about their milking of the population for all sorts of rents.

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