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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

#101

Post by gambiting »

vassy wrote: post #60

DAB radio in my car stopped working and it costs £650 to fix. The service guys said they have to replace the whole centre console. As I won't pay that much, it's FM radio or Bluetooth for me.

To be fair, that's usually the only solution official dealerships know. When the CD drive stopped working in my LR Discovery 3, the garage quoted me almost £1000 for replacing the whole unit. I took it to an electronics repair shop, who took it apart, replaced something inside, and ended up charging me £100 for the whole repair.

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

#102

Post by barsonme »

jjoonathan wrote: post #11
userbinator wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet FM still can't beat AM for simplicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

It's even easier to demodulate at high power :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHSuInSkHtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82s5Q3GIO9I

Remind me to never climb an AM radio tower...

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

#103

Post by saiya-jin »

gravypod wrote: post #85
whiskers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a steep-sided inlet. They're award winning you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjord

So "steep-sided inlet" as in "mountian going into a lake".

more likely going straight into the sea

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

#104

Post by arethuza »

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 agree the delay is annoying (especially for live events that you are watching - e.g. fireworks) but overall I've found DAB to be far preferable to FM. Admittedly I pretty much only listen to BBC Radio 4 which is mainly voice rather than music.

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

#105

Post by morsch »

kieranelby wrote: post #71
dagss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I understand correctly, all cell towers in the US are in fact supposed to have at least 8 hours of backup power.

Here's the FCC ruling: http://www.njslom.org/FCC-07-177A1.pdf (page 23)

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

#106

Post by Ntrails »

whiskers wrote: post #70
gravypod wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a fjord?

It's a steep-sided inlet. They're award winning you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjord

I cannot describe how disappointed I was that the awards were not mentioned in the wikipedia article :(

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

#107

Post by dest »

kalleboo wrote: post #99
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-…

Audio is surprisingly low-bandwidth compared to what today's networks are designed for. I'm not sure what the total bandwidth of a site is, but I've gotten 130 Mbps speed test results over 4G - right there you have up to 2000 typical DAB+ streams, and I'm certain a site can handle multiples of that. And if people are listening to something like Spotify, a lot of the data will be cached.

Still, listen a lot to the radio on 4G and you will most likely hit you mobile data cap (1GB ~ 1h of 64kbit audio a day for a month)

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

#108

Post by gambiting »

voltagex_ wrote: post #4

DAB+ sounds terrible to me compared to a (tuned) FM station - AFAICT it's 48kbit AAC.

The worst thing about DAB for me is that any signal interruption causes complete lack of sound, and then my car takes at least 5 seconds to tune back in. It's extremely infuriating - I much prefer FM radio which gets noisy, but at least you can continue listening, even when driving through poor signal area.

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

#109

Post by kalleboo »

dest wrote: post #107
kalleboo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio is surprisingly low-bandwidth compared to what today's networks are designed for. I'm not sure what the total bandwidth of a site is, but I've gotten 130 Mbps speed test results over 4G - right there you have up to 2000 typical DAB+ streams, and I'm certain a site can handle multiples of that. And if people are listening to something like Spotify, a lot of the data will be cached.

Still, listen a lot to the radio on 4G and you will most likely hit you mobile data cap (1GB ~ 1h of 64kbit audio a day for a month)

Yeah we can only hope that data plans get right-sized so you can't burn through your whole cap in 60 seconds of full-speed downloading.

Although for music in particular we are seeing a lot of "music services are unmetered" types of plans. I remember in Sweden back in the early 3G days (384 kbps of pure speed), the public broadcaster audio streams were unmetered and I would usually listen to those instead of FM since I used Bluetooth headphones.

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