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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

#281

Post by scholia »

gozur88 wrote: post #254
scholia wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FM is amazingly cheap, and green. You can reach millions of listeners with high quality sound. In many cases, you can reach tens of millions for exactly the same cost. Until you need another mast, the extra cost per user is $0. Smartphone chips already include FM so there's no extra cost to reaching mobile users, with no extra bandwidth consumption. (Not FM's fault if some smartphone makers don't use the FM capabilit…

Broadcast is fine and will always have a place, but there's no reason to use analog any more. It's too inefficient from a spectrum perspective.

Well, there is a very good reason to use analogue: it's already in place and working, and there are hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of analogue radios.

The problem is that attempts to introduce digital systems have generally not been successful.

If radio didn't exist, you'd obviously start digital services. But it does exist, and it's deeply entrenched.

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

#282

Post by nicky0 »

Angostura wrote: post #152
nicky0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for, DAB is pretty horrible too.

In what respect? I have DAB at home and in the car in the UK and find it reliable and decent quality.

Bulky, expensive DAB receivers. Try finding a portable DAB receiver that isn't huge and drains batteries like it's a hairdryer.

Meanwhile I have a 20 year old Phillips AM/FM receiver that's about the size of an iPod nano, slips into my pocket and lasts days on a single AA.

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

#283

Post by scholia »

scholia wrote: post #202
tormeh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live next to the radio tower, perhaps. I prefer to have more sound in my noise than FM can offer.

What sort of aerial are you using?

I ask because FM waves are 2.8 to 3.4 metres long, so a quarter-wave FM aerial should be 70-86cm (28-33 inches) long....

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

#284

Post by jessaustin »

ptaipale wrote: post #271
jessaustin wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just another example of satnav being a terrible option to build into cars. Who wants to use a "custom" nav system kludged together by the lowest bidder ten years ago when we have much better on our phones?

Well, someone who doesn't want to reveal his/her driving habits to Google, NSA et al?

Good point, but one probably does that as soon as one purchases a smartphone...

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

#285

Post by tormeh »

scholia wrote: post #283
scholia wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of aerial are you using?

I ask because FM waves are 2.8 to 3.4 metres long, so a quarter-wave FM aerial should be 70-86cm (28-33 inches) long....

No idea. Car radios etc. They work amazingly well in Oslo, but they're useless out in the bushes. Radio isn't fun when you only hear half the conversation. Give me error correction and lossy codecs any time.

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

#286

Post by scholia »

tormeh wrote: post #285
scholia wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask because FM waves are 2.8 to 3.4 metres long, so a quarter-wave FM aerial should be 70-86cm (28-33 inches) long....

No idea. Car radios etc. They work amazingly well in Oslo, but they're useless out in the bushes. Radio isn't fun when you only hear half the conversation. Give me error correction and lossy codecs any time.

Well, if there's no signal you won't get a result whether it's analogue or digital, In fact, digital works less well at low signal strengths: instead of a noisy, hissy FM radio you usually get nothing ;-)

AM goes further, of course, if AM is available...

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

#287

Post by hzhzjsj »

lb1lf wrote: post #93
audunw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

>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. -True, but surely one could simply allocate bandwidth in the 4G network to multicast at least the most popular channels? (This may be a very stupid question; I know a thing or two about broadcast networks, but hardly a thing about computer networks. It all…

Agreed, but when they had to throw out almost everything and replace it with dab+ they really should have reconsidered. All that money would be better spent building fiber optics across the country and tower sites (DVB-T money too). Space in these towers would be rented to operators at cost. Then we would probably have several 4G networks today with near full coverage (and other last mile tech) instead of only two partial ones.. And fibre in every village

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

#288

Post by hzhzjsj »

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 FM band is useless for anything else. The antennas are too big, the noise floor too high and the band too narrow. Nobody are going to make a chipset only for countries where they AND all their neighbors have turned off the FM band. Radio waves dont stop at the border

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

#289

Post by kagamine »

digi_owl wrote: post #170
kagamine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They seem to have gotten around the problem of switching landlines to mobile by simply increasing the cost of a landline so that consumers willingly give it up. I remember our package cost of mobile, net and landline made keeping the landline viable, until it was no longer included in the package and then it increased in cost until we retired it. Iirc the cost of the landline doubled over ~5 years.
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