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Norway killed its FM transmission, a perfectly functioning technology. Pure one to many distribution perfected over time, deprecated. DAB+ radio has much lower

Norway killed its FM transmission, a perfectly functioning technology. Pure one to many distribution perfected over time, deprecated. DAB+ radio has much lower range and the signal is unstable. To make matters maybe even worse, HAM radio operators at work inform me the DAB+ standard isn't going anywhere and that the development has mostly stopped. Maybe somehow 5G can do some marvels for the technology, time will tell.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
I'm normally pro-digital over anything analogue, but broadcast radio is one medium, possibly the only medium, where analogue is better. Digital compression simply doesn't cope with packet loss well enough to be practical. Even with a very weak FM signal, in emergencies you can still hear through the noise.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  In rural places in the US, it's terrible for television. Several years ago, it was mandated that TV stations switch from analogue to digital. Now instead of getting a little static and being able to understand 100% of what is said and shown over the air; it's now 10% recognizable video 90% visual blocks, and 0% audio.
  - jdofaz 7y ago
    If the digital transition hadn't happened I think over the air television might have died by now. Analog broadcast used significantly more electricity and fewer and fewer people would be interested in the low quality signal. Stations might have decided the remaining viewers weren't worth the power cost. That said I think streaming might kill it anyway.
    - generatorguy 7y ago
      Can you quantify the difference in electricity costs? Start with difference in Watts, guess 0.15$/kWh and then find $/year saved? I bet the increase in quality and maybe the reliability or support costs for the old analog equipment were bigger factors.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      ...so how much would it have improved the reception if they kept using the same amount of power for digital?
    - toast0 7y ago
      What's the difference in power for analog vs digital TV broadcast?? Is that mostly because ATSC broadcasts moved towards UHF, and NTSC broadcasters preferred VHF when available? Or is there some other property of ATSC broadcasts that require lower energy?
      - LeoPanthera 7y ago
        Analogue video has to have a very high SNR at the receiver, because any noise is directly visible in the picture. But with a digital signal, as long as you can distinguish individual bits, the picture is always perfect, so you can get away with a much lower signal strength.
  - ken 7y ago
    Not just rural. In downtown Seattle, there's nearby stations I can't get at all. KIRO 7 (CBS affiliate) reception is unwatchably bad maybe half the time. Maybe it's the hills? I don't remember analog being this bad. I can pick up analog radio stations all the way from Vancouver.
  - LeoPanthera 7y ago
    At least television is designed for a static receiver. You can solve the problem with a better antenna and a suitable amplifier. But radio is often received by moving receivers, for which there is no good solution, and analogue will always be better.
- jdofaz 7y ago
  Maybe the HD radio system was the way to go, digital with analog fall back. At least on FM, on AM it doesn't work well for me.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    HD Radio has some of the same disadvantages as digital TV — if you don't have a strong enough signal, it drops out. The worse part, to me, is that it takes quite a long time for the HD signal to lock in. I had a brand new rental car last month with a brand new HD radio in it. It took upwards of ten seconds for some of the HD signals to lock in. Radio stations (AM and FM) can improve this by going all-digital, instead of the hybrid technology almost all are running right now. But doing so not only excludes hundreds of millions of older radios, it reduces the coverage area. It's simply not worth the revenue hit, since in radio coverage area is everything. On the plus side, I had a great Sony HD tabletop radio that I loved dearly. It had an iPod dock on top and if a song came on the radio that you liked, you'd press a button and the track information would be stored in a special playlist the iPod. Then the next time you plugged the iPod into iTunes, it would match the information from the playlist and you could buy the song you heard on the radio from iTunes. It worked really well. I wish something like that existed for satellite radio.
    - jdofaz 7y ago
      A while back a local station was having a problem and their analog signal was off but they were still transmitting digital. When I tuned in it was kind of funny because it was all static and then it faded into whatever music they were playing. I've always wondered what full digital stations do, but for the reasons you've said I doubt there are any.
    - interestica 7y ago
      I always wondered why apple never integrated something like this into their iPods and iPhones. AFAIK, the Bluetooth chips in the devices were capable of FM radio reception. It always seems like a perfect chance to get radio users into the iTunes ecosphere. Heck, there may have even been an ad-revenue opportunity? (Radio ads that trigger screen ads on the device?)
- eru 7y ago
  You can make digital transmissions cope with arbitrary amounts of packet loss, if you design your code accordingly. It's not digital compression that the important bit, but the error correcting code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory
- derefr 7y ago
  Digital doesn’t have to mean compressed. CD audio isn’t compressed; in fact the opposite, it’s expanded with fountain codecs. I don’t see why putting a digital signal of that approach on the air, wouldn’t result in better decoded SNR per bandwidth than analogue signalling. Emergency signals could add more error-correction per bit, to the point of even becoming non-real-time (i.e. your receiver would need to buffer the signal for a while before it could play any of it, but this would be fine, because the signal is likely repeating anyway.) I mean, this is already how satellite (especially interplanetary satellite) communication works.
anyfoo 7y ago
Yeah, it's maddening, isn't it? I would never go back to analog cell phone systems, and I could waffle for hours why analog TV is really not as great as some might remember, but for radio transmission FM stereo radio was simple, elegant and with great quality. DAB+ is in many ways a step backwards, I think.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  DAB+ was meant to deliver high-quality AAC above 128 Kbps, preferably 192 Kbps or higher, unfortunately it ended up being broadcasted using the lowest bitrate to squeeze as many stations as possible, usually at 64 Kbps, it's a total disaster...
  - izacus 7y ago
    Here in one of the smaller EU countries the stations sometimes even go as low as 32kbps and use practically no error correction. That makes the station both sound awful and be significantly less reliable for reception.
- omilu 7y ago
  Analog cable was superior for channel surfing. No digital buffering meant you could change channels instantly to surf back and forth like changing between browser tabs.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Earlier small-dish satellite systems sort of worked around this by showing each I-block as it came in (something like , instead of waiting for the full frame to be available. You still had to wait for enough macroblocks to show up, but audio was instant. Later receivers (last time I used one a long time ago) waited for a full frame to be available instead of showing the blocks as they are displayable. I have been trying to look up what this I-frame-less encoding method is called, but it's impossible to find niche topics like this on Google or DDG these days (tried intra sweep, iframeless, progressive intra, without iframes, etc).
mongol 7y ago
Did everyone switch out their car radios?
- lb1lf 7y ago
  -No, most people simply stopped listening to radio in their cars, or bought DAB adapters which rebroadcast the DAB channel you wish to listen to on an FM frequency. A lucky few with cars old enough to have a standard DIN car stereo bracket simply popped out the FM radio and dropped in a DAB replacement. But, essentially, radio listening in both car and home dropped off a cliff. Edit: The Great FM Kill-Off was a double whammy as they simultaneously stopped broadcasting DAB using the MPEG2/L1 codex and switched to DAB+' HE-AAC. This made sense, technologically - sound quality of low bitrate MPEG2 is not impressive - but the result was that most early adopters of DAB had to purchase new receivers yet again as early DAB sets did not support DAB+. Further, leading up to the FM shutdown all the focus was on FM=>DAB, not DAB=>DAB+ - so during the switch, three of my four DAB radios went the way of the dodo bird without me even having realized it was going to happen. I wasn't very motivated to buy new receivers yet again...
  - 1bc29b36f623ba8 7y ago
    Didn't that have an impact on the amount of listeners? Sounds like commercial stations must have taken a big hit.
    - lb1lf 7y ago
      It did, and they did.
      - obruchez 7y ago
        It probably wasn't helped by the success of podcasts as well.
- tyfon 7y ago
  I got an option to switch to DAB+ from my (previous) dealership but I just don't see the point. It's much better just to use mobile broadband and stream whatever you want using your phone + bluetooth. My new car has DAB+ but it also has tunein and spotify built-in so that's a much better option. FM isn't dead yet here in Norway though you can still listen to local stations via FM and it looks like the license for them will be extended to 2031.
paypalcust83 7y ago
Regress instead of progress. AM had the nice property that it worked somewhat in mountainous areas, but it didn't sound very good. It had the nice property of range. FM sounded better than AM but had to be more-or-less line-of-sight. It also had the nice property of range. DAB+ is like an abandoned FOSS project that everyone jumped on like it was Zoom before naked dudes were jumping into online church services and online elementary school classes with zoombombing. 5G is boondoggle unrelated to radio for cellular connectivity that requires much more infrastructure since sub-mmw can't go through many materials at its higher frequencies. I swear it's a conspiracy (theory) to sell 50x more tower gear than 4G LTE. We already have gigabit 4G LTE, sub-mmw 5G just seems uneconomically undeployable at-scale. Technologies shouldn't be adopted simply because they're new or being pushed by vendors. Heck, Apple doesn't even have any 5G phones because 5G may not survive once the major carriers wise-up.
- jayflux 7y ago
  > Technologies shouldn't be adopted simply because they're new or being pushed by vendors. Heck, Apple doesn't even have any 5G phones because 5G may not survive once the major carriers wise-up. I’m pretty sure the next generation of Apple phones (iPhone 12?) will be 5G compatible, when the current generation came out 5G was barely deployed (still isn’t in a lot of places). So that’s more a matter of timing than Apple not believing in the technology.
  - gumby 7y ago
    > I’m pretty sure the next generation of Apple phones (iPhone 12?) will be 5G compatible... that’s more a matter of timing ... agree with your reasoning, not your conclusion. I don't think there will be material 5G buildout by the end of 2020 (even before the Covid-19 crisis I didn't believe that). So unless there's an important market with significant 5G buildout (not sure anybody really has "significant" and certainly none of the important markets do) they'll continue to wait. This is especially true as current 5G devices have larger physical size and abysmal battery life. Apple can't fix that problem on their own; part of the problem is build out and part of it will need to be solved through the experiences of the radio chip vendors and their current customers. Compare this, say, to WiFi 6 which Apple already deploys in their 2019 iphone 11 and 2020 ipads. hat is a little ahead of the curve (chip sets are OK but there's little deployment yet). Wifi base station deployment will trickle out and until then there's no negative cost for Apple's users (i.e. no effect on battery nor size).
billpg 7y ago
Can all the DAB stations fit inside FM if they were all to adopt it?
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  With room to spare. The whole point is to free space.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    Yes, DAB uses less bandwidth than FM, this is more or less its only advantage. It also uses a bit less power at the transmitter, but the receivers are more complex and need more power than FM receivers (afaik), which is a bad tradeoff.
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      If it works, the sound quality is amazing compared to FM and you do get a modern system with almost instant setup, a proper list of channels etcetera.
gpvos 7y ago
It's actually sad that DAB+ is now set in stone using AAC, while in the meantime Opus has been developed which is more or less optimal regarding aural information per bandwidth (see the spectrum diagrams).
- giantrobot 7y ago
  DAB+ uses HE-AAC which is more efficient encoding than AAC-LC. It compares well to Opus at the same bitrate.

LeoPanthera 7y ago

I'm normally pro-digital over anything analogue, but broadcast radio is one medium, possibly the only medium, where analogue is better. Digital compression simply doesn't cope with packet loss well enough to be practical. Even with a very weak FM signal, in emergencies you can still hear through the noise.

RandomBacon 7y ago
In rural places in the US, it's terrible for television. Several years ago, it was mandated that TV stations switch from analogue to digital. Now instead of getting a little static and being able to understand 100% of what is said and shown over the air; it's now 10% recognizable video 90% visual blocks, and 0% audio.
- jdofaz 7y ago
  If the digital transition hadn't happened I think over the air television might have died by now. Analog broadcast used significantly more electricity and fewer and fewer people would be interested in the low quality signal. Stations might have decided the remaining viewers weren't worth the power cost. That said I think streaming might kill it anyway.
  - generatorguy 7y ago
    Can you quantify the difference in electricity costs? Start with difference in Watts, guess 0.15$/kWh and then find $/year saved? I bet the increase in quality and maybe the reliability or support costs for the old analog equipment were bigger factors.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    ...so how much would it have improved the reception if they kept using the same amount of power for digital?
  - toast0 7y ago
    What's the difference in power for analog vs digital TV broadcast?? Is that mostly because ATSC broadcasts moved towards UHF, and NTSC broadcasters preferred VHF when available? Or is there some other property of ATSC broadcasts that require lower energy?
    - LeoPanthera 7y ago
      Analogue video has to have a very high SNR at the receiver, because any noise is directly visible in the picture. But with a digital signal, as long as you can distinguish individual bits, the picture is always perfect, so you can get away with a much lower signal strength.
- ken 7y ago
  Not just rural. In downtown Seattle, there's nearby stations I can't get at all. KIRO 7 (CBS affiliate) reception is unwatchably bad maybe half the time. Maybe it's the hills? I don't remember analog being this bad. I can pick up analog radio stations all the way from Vancouver.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  At least television is designed for a static receiver. You can solve the problem with a better antenna and a suitable amplifier. But radio is often received by moving receivers, for which there is no good solution, and analogue will always be better.
jdofaz 7y ago
Maybe the HD radio system was the way to go, digital with analog fall back. At least on FM, on AM it doesn't work well for me.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  HD Radio has some of the same disadvantages as digital TV — if you don't have a strong enough signal, it drops out. The worse part, to me, is that it takes quite a long time for the HD signal to lock in. I had a brand new rental car last month with a brand new HD radio in it. It took upwards of ten seconds for some of the HD signals to lock in. Radio stations (AM and FM) can improve this by going all-digital, instead of the hybrid technology almost all are running right now. But doing so not only excludes hundreds of millions of older radios, it reduces the coverage area. It's simply not worth the revenue hit, since in radio coverage area is everything. On the plus side, I had a great Sony HD tabletop radio that I loved dearly. It had an iPod dock on top and if a song came on the radio that you liked, you'd press a button and the track information would be stored in a special playlist the iPod. Then the next time you plugged the iPod into iTunes, it would match the information from the playlist and you could buy the song you heard on the radio from iTunes. It worked really well. I wish something like that existed for satellite radio.
  - jdofaz 7y ago
    A while back a local station was having a problem and their analog signal was off but they were still transmitting digital. When I tuned in it was kind of funny because it was all static and then it faded into whatever music they were playing. I've always wondered what full digital stations do, but for the reasons you've said I doubt there are any.
  - interestica 7y ago
    I always wondered why apple never integrated something like this into their iPods and iPhones. AFAIK, the Bluetooth chips in the devices were capable of FM radio reception. It always seems like a perfect chance to get radio users into the iTunes ecosphere. Heck, there may have even been an ad-revenue opportunity? (Radio ads that trigger screen ads on the device?)
eru 7y ago
You can make digital transmissions cope with arbitrary amounts of packet loss, if you design your code accordingly. It's not digital compression that the important bit, but the error correcting code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory
derefr 7y ago
Digital doesn’t have to mean compressed. CD audio isn’t compressed; in fact the opposite, it’s expanded with fountain codecs. I don’t see why putting a digital signal of that approach on the air, wouldn’t result in better decoded SNR per bandwidth than analogue signalling. Emergency signals could add more error-correction per bit, to the point of even becoming non-real-time (i.e. your receiver would need to buffer the signal for a while before it could play any of it, but this would be fine, because the signal is likely repeating anyway.) I mean, this is already how satellite (especially interplanetary satellite) communication works.

anyfoo 7y ago

Yeah, it's maddening, isn't it? I would never go back to analog cell phone systems, and I could waffle for hours why analog TV is really not as great as some might remember, but for radio transmission FM stereo radio was simple, elegant and with great quality. DAB+ is in many ways a step backwards, I think.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
DAB+ was meant to deliver high-quality AAC above 128 Kbps, preferably 192 Kbps or higher, unfortunately it ended up being broadcasted using the lowest bitrate to squeeze as many stations as possible, usually at 64 Kbps, it's a total disaster...
- izacus 7y ago
  Here in one of the smaller EU countries the stations sometimes even go as low as 32kbps and use practically no error correction. That makes the station both sound awful and be significantly less reliable for reception.
omilu 7y ago
Analog cable was superior for channel surfing. No digital buffering meant you could change channels instantly to surf back and forth like changing between browser tabs.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Earlier small-dish satellite systems sort of worked around this by showing each I-block as it came in (something like , instead of waiting for the full frame to be available. You still had to wait for enough macroblocks to show up, but audio was instant. Later receivers (last time I used one a long time ago) waited for a full frame to be available instead of showing the blocks as they are displayable. I have been trying to look up what this I-frame-less encoding method is called, but it's impossible to find niche topics like this on Google or DDG these days (tried intra sweep, iframeless, progressive intra, without iframes, etc).

mongol 7y ago

Did everyone switch out their car radios?

lb1lf 7y ago
-No, most people simply stopped listening to radio in their cars, or bought DAB adapters which rebroadcast the DAB channel you wish to listen to on an FM frequency. A lucky few with cars old enough to have a standard DIN car stereo bracket simply popped out the FM radio and dropped in a DAB replacement. But, essentially, radio listening in both car and home dropped off a cliff. Edit: The Great FM Kill-Off was a double whammy as they simultaneously stopped broadcasting DAB using the MPEG2/L1 codex and switched to DAB+' HE-AAC. This made sense, technologically - sound quality of low bitrate MPEG2 is not impressive - but the result was that most early adopters of DAB had to purchase new receivers yet again as early DAB sets did not support DAB+. Further, leading up to the FM shutdown all the focus was on FM=>DAB, not DAB=>DAB+ - so during the switch, three of my four DAB radios went the way of the dodo bird without me even having realized it was going to happen. I wasn't very motivated to buy new receivers yet again...
- 1bc29b36f623ba8 7y ago
  Didn't that have an impact on the amount of listeners? Sounds like commercial stations must have taken a big hit.
  - lb1lf 7y ago
    It did, and they did.
    - obruchez 7y ago
      It probably wasn't helped by the success of podcasts as well.
tyfon 7y ago
I got an option to switch to DAB+ from my (previous) dealership but I just don't see the point. It's much better just to use mobile broadband and stream whatever you want using your phone + bluetooth. My new car has DAB+ but it also has tunein and spotify built-in so that's a much better option. FM isn't dead yet here in Norway though you can still listen to local stations via FM and it looks like the license for them will be extended to 2031.

paypalcust83 7y ago

Regress instead of progress. AM had the nice property that it worked somewhat in mountainous areas, but it didn't sound very good. It had the nice property of range. FM sounded better than AM but had to be more-or-less line-of-sight. It also had the nice property of range. DAB+ is like an abandoned FOSS project that everyone jumped on like it was Zoom before naked dudes were jumping into online church services and online elementary school classes with zoombombing. 5G is boondoggle unrelated to radio for cellular connectivity that requires much more infrastructure since sub-mmw can't go through many materials at its higher frequencies. I swear it's a conspiracy (theory) to sell 50x more tower gear than 4G LTE. We already have gigabit 4G LTE, sub-mmw 5G just seems uneconomically undeployable at-scale. Technologies shouldn't be adopted simply because they're new or being pushed by vendors. Heck, Apple doesn't even have any 5G phones because 5G may not survive once the major carriers wise-up.

jayflux 7y ago
> Technologies shouldn't be adopted simply because they're new or being pushed by vendors. Heck, Apple doesn't even have any 5G phones because 5G may not survive once the major carriers wise-up. I’m pretty sure the next generation of Apple phones (iPhone 12?) will be 5G compatible, when the current generation came out 5G was barely deployed (still isn’t in a lot of places). So that’s more a matter of timing than Apple not believing in the technology.
- gumby 7y ago
  > I’m pretty sure the next generation of Apple phones (iPhone 12?) will be 5G compatible... that’s more a matter of timing ... agree with your reasoning, not your conclusion. I don't think there will be material 5G buildout by the end of 2020 (even before the Covid-19 crisis I didn't believe that). So unless there's an important market with significant 5G buildout (not sure anybody really has "significant" and certainly none of the important markets do) they'll continue to wait. This is especially true as current 5G devices have larger physical size and abysmal battery life. Apple can't fix that problem on their own; part of the problem is build out and part of it will need to be solved through the experiences of the radio chip vendors and their current customers. Compare this, say, to WiFi 6 which Apple already deploys in their 2019 iphone 11 and 2020 ipads. hat is a little ahead of the curve (chip sets are OK but there's little deployment yet). Wifi base station deployment will trickle out and until then there's no negative cost for Apple's users (i.e. no effect on battery nor size).

billpg 7y ago

Can all the DAB stations fit inside FM if they were all to adopt it?

tinus_hn 7y ago
With room to spare. The whole point is to free space.
- gpvos 7y ago
  Yes, DAB uses less bandwidth than FM, this is more or less its only advantage. It also uses a bit less power at the transmitter, but the receivers are more complex and need more power than FM receivers (afaik), which is a bad tradeoff.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    If it works, the sound quality is amazing compared to FM and you do get a modern system with almost instant setup, a proper list of channels etcetera.

gpvos 7y ago

It's actually sad that DAB+ is now set in stone using AAC, while in the meantime Opus has been developed which is more or less optimal regarding aural information per bandwidth (see the spectrum diagrams).

giantrobot 7y ago
DAB+ uses HE-AAC which is more efficient encoding than AAC-LC. It compares well to Opus at the same bitrate.