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Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

economist.com

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Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#121

Post by aeonik »

myotheraccount2 wrote: post #113
aeonik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very small slice that amateur radio gets in this band, in theory it would be nice to have a bigger slice, but honestly, building antennas for this band to transmit anything worthwhile would be pretty hard. My 7 Mhz antenna (HF, 40m band) is 67 feet long, and goes across by whole house. The smallest antenna you could get away with for LF would be hundreds to thousands of feet long. You might be able to go s…

Here you go. https://theradiosource.com/products/antenna-630pd.htm

This is amazing.

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#122

Post by petilon »

> Terrestrial television will surely follow

I hope not. I am saving $80 per month by recording over-the-air TV using Tivo. I only want the major networks, and recording them over the air is free. Tivo DVR is great for OTA and their service is still active but sadly they have stopped selling their DVR.

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#123

Post by amiga386 »

That's the end of the world, then. The British nuclear deterrent will launch when Radio 4 on long wave stops.

https://www.forcesnews.com/services/navy/nuclear-promise-let...

> The process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, among other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting [on long wave]

> Submarines on patrol were reported to have briefly gone on nuclear alert in 2004 when Radio 4 went off the air for 15 minutes due to a power cut.

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#124

Post by arprocter »

jimnotgym wrote: post #33

I'm very sad to see this go. I was listening to DAB in the car, not so far from here last weekend, and it kept cutting out. Whereas you could get LW everywhere! I developed a love of cricket on Test Match Special from a very young age. A tiny inexpensive radio could get it anywhere. I actually never minded the interruptions from the Shipping Forecast, the real reason they kept this service up for so long. I know ther…

Funny you mention the cricket

In the HBO miniseries Generation Kill the marines are tuned into the beeb long wave to get news updates, and there's a cricket score read out in the first episode

https://www.reddit.com/r/generationkill/comments/6o2w2s/epis...

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#125

Post by rgblambda »

cjs_ac wrote: post #14
jmclnx wrote: post #4

That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.

IIRC, their operation relies on enormous vacuum tubes that the BBC can’t get replacements for any more.

It's actually a private company that operates the transmitters. The BBC have been paying for access until now.

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#126

Post by dotwaffle »

cogman10 wrote: post #99
Peanuts99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital radio was always going to be crap, it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse They should have just put all the money into a better 4G network and ran radio through that.

> it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse That has a lot more to do with the dated implementation and less to do with digital radio. There are a number of digital broadcasting techniques which can minimize and compensate for noise, including a slight delay with a signal correction and fault tolerant codecs. DAB was implemented using the old MPEG2 audio codec. DAB+ uses the now 15 year old codec HE-AAC which…

DAB+ uses EEP (and RS) which was deliberately chosen to give better signal quality all the way to the point of losing reception. Old DAB used UEP which degrades faster, but instead of having no signal, it went to a muddier / warbling kind of sound that characterised early DAB receivers.

And technically while some people do call it MPEG2, it's actually MP2, also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2, an audio codec in the same family as MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3).

I imagine that today they'd probably use something like Opus and a fountain code or similar, yes... But you can't expect everyone to replace their radio every 10-15 years ;)

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#127

Post by dotwaffle »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #96
guenthert wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAB+ receivers can (and many do) display signal quality. Not playing distorted, noisy signals is a feature I greatly appreciate.

It’s a digital cliff. Analog fades away but is never a true replication digital remains stable for over but then vanishes. At the same quality dab is still perfectly long after fm becomes gabled. It then vanishes. The problem with dab in early days was the lower strength, the poor quality decoding, and the lower bitratr than should be been used for the codec.

Not entirely true. There's quite a bit of error correction applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting#Err...

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#128

Post by dotwaffle »

aeonik wrote: post #73
microgpt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought hams already had plenty of bands. Is there not one in this range?

There is a very small slice that amateur radio gets in this band, in theory it would be nice to have a bigger slice, but honestly, building antennas for this band to transmit anything worthwhile would be pretty hard. My 7 Mhz antenna (HF, 40m band) is 67 feet long, and goes across by whole house. The smallest antenna you could get away with for LF would be hundreds to thousands of feet long. You might be able to go s…

Before Radio 4 LW was renumbered in 1988, it was 200kHz. And before the early 70s it was referred to as it's wavelength... 1500m :P

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#129

Post by K0balt »

hylaride wrote: post #117
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet it will have to do with the military, almost inevitably.

With the risks to GPS becoming more acute, many jurisdictions are seriously entertaining bringing back a modern version of LORAN. There's also high frequency firms that want to muscle their way into shortwave frequencies as they can have lower latency between trading sites (eg NYC and Chicago) since the physical infra isn't a direct link as the crow flies (as well as the speed of light being slowed in fiber optic lin…

LORAN was actually pretty awesome.

Re: Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

#130

Post by dotwaffle »

MonkZ wrote: post #50
goodthenandnow wrote: post #11

That station is said to be one of the signals used by the UK’s nuclear subs to assess the state of the country in a war scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort#:~:text...

I hope they update their protocols

I hope you mean updated... Otherwise we're about to find out what's in the letter of last resort they have onboard! ;)
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