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Analogue radio in the UK given 10-year stay of execution
- timsneath 6y agoIt seems hard to imagine that DAB-based radio services won't themselves be completely obsolete in another decade, given the ever-growing pervasiveness of Internet access through cell and satellite. I wouldn't be surprised if DAB was the first to shut down, with a reduced analog service remaining as a backstop for the few that need a broadcast solution and for national emergency scenarios.
- stormdennis 6y agoI don't have a DAB radio and I don't know anyone who has one. These days, even in the car my phone is my radio.
- chrisseaton 6y agoI’ve got four DAB radios around my house. What do you use instead? Always your phone? I find the one-touch interface to turn the radio on or off as I go past valuable. I guess I wouldn’t mind if they were really using the internet though.
- stormdennis 6y agoJust my phone, very occasionally the radio in the kitchen cupboard is called into use.
- brnt 6y agoI just don't have noise on all the time.
- chrisseaton 6y agoIf you don't listen to the radio much why are you in a thread about radio?
- brnt 6y agoWhy would I only visit threads on things I use much?
- chrisseaton 6y agoThis is like joining a thread about which fishing rod to use and saying 'none of this matters - I don't fish'. Or joining a thread about books and saying 'I just don't read'. It doesn't contribute anything useful to anyone. It's just noise. See?
- brnt 6y agoI wrote I don't need noise all the time. I didn't say I never listen to the radio. If you prefer to have no discussion, why visit a discussion board?
- arethuza 6y agoI recently went back to using a DAB radio in our kitchen rather than using my phone, largely because at 6:30am when I get up I want to just hit a single button for Radio 4 to come on!
- stormdennis 6y agoThat is one click fewer than I have with https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm added to my homescreen but I have the benefit of being able to go back to the start of the program. I don't know if that available on your DAB radio?
- arethuza 6y agoI've been listening to Radio 4 first thing in the morning for about 30 years - about 4 years ago I accidentally broke the power supply to our DAB radio so I started using my iPhone in a fancy dock/speaker. Which was fine. About a month ago I found the radio in a cupboard and thought that I should either throw it away or get a replacement power supply. Having done the latter I now find that I rather like having a dedicated Radio 4 early morning device - I don't have to remember where my phone is, I don't have to fit it into some dock or fiddle with an app and is still usable even if I have misplaced by glasses. The rest of the time I listen to whatever I want in our kitchen via my phone through a UE Boom bluetooth speaker which I inherited from our son. First thing in the morning, and before I have had any coffee, give me the good old fashioned (DAB) radio! Edit: I should also point out that as we are in a rural area our Internet connection isn't brilliant but we do have fantastic DAB reception as there is a transmitter about 1km away on top of a nearby hill.
- stormdennis 6y agoYeah it's nice to not have to think before you have your coffee of a morning.
- arethuza 6y ago
- est31 6y agoThe advantage of broadcast solutions is that there are no personalized ads and no tracking, unless of course your end device has those things, you use DRM, etc.
- Animats 6y agoKeeping AM broadcast radio around is useful for emergencies. The range is long and the receivers are simple and widely available. One transmitter can reach all of the UK. Besides, the 1MHz "medium wave" band is not very useful for anything else.
- dungdang 6y agoyou just gave the reason. the long reach. one transmitter can reach all of uk. wouldn't it be great if you could transmit a digital signal on that frequency? not all communication is bandwidth intensive cat videos. and as far as am radios being simple, who has one vs people with a phone? you want am voice? transmit a hundred of them on the reclaimed bandwidth, with the same reach, and higher quality.
- rini17 6y agoThere just isn't so much bandwidth in AM bands to practically transmit hundred digital stations in same band as one analog. If you want to keep the same reach as analog, you need so much error correction overhead that you may as well stay with analog. Or you can add more digital transmitters but they still need more power than higher frequencies and there are multipath problems with long-range transmissions mentioned in the article. IMO practical thing would be to add text service to analog AM broadcasts(like teletext) but with ubiquitous internet coverage, that ship has sailed.
- dungdang 6y agoyou need very little bandwidth for an am-quality mono signal. i'm talking like 1kb/s. and when i say am frequency, i mean the am spectrum, not the spectrum of one station. you are literally arguing you can't transmit more on the same spectrum if you go digital. this is simply false. the move would make the current am spectrum, which almost no one uses, useful again. very useful.
- rini17 6y agoAll I'm saying is that whole medium wave AM band is only 0.5MHz wide, and has bigger problems with long-distance interference and requires higher transmit power than the 88-108 FM band which is 20MHz wide. You meant 1kbit ot 1kB/s? Neither is "am-quality mono", it's only acceptable with specialized voice codec. Music starts at 32kbit, pls source your claims if you know otherwise.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoShutting down analog tv in favor of digital freed up a huge amount of spectrum but aren't the FM and AM commercial radio bands pretty tiny in comparison? Not sure what's the motivation for trying to shut it down especially given the simplicity of the system which would be much more useful in an emergency situation.
- ggm 6y agoMistaken cost cutting? Mw broadcast energy 24/7 costs money. Also consider repurposed bandwidth with national reach for unidirectional broadcasting of digital data could be useful. Asymmetric networks with differential return path is what direcTV did with sat dishes and modems. The bandwidth is low, but the reach is phenomenal.
- nikanj 6y agoBeing able to pull HD radio ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio ) from the side band to the center stage would allow for a massive explosion in radio channels and/or sound quality. FM is simple enough, but not so simple that people could just jury-rig a receiver/transmitter together in an emergency situation. If you need a store-bought receiver, you might as well have a receiver that's not using tech from 1930s.
- reaperducer 6y agoHD Radio doesn't exist in the U.K.
- dylan604 6y agoIn most emergency situation, a receiver is enough just so you can receive information/updates. Transmitting definitely adds a larger layer of complexity. An analog radio receiver is definitely something a lot of people could jury-rigged, as it is a common science experiment for young school kids.
- ac29 6y agoFM radio in the US certainly has less spectrum than TV did, but it has 20MHz of relatively low frequency spectrum which is quite useful: 88-108 MHz. It has excellent propagation characteristics (less power lost over distance compared to higher frequencies) and very good ability to penetrate through obstacles like trees and the walls of buildings, but still has an antenna size that's fairly manageable. For reference, 20 MHz is enough to carry ~3200 voice channels (6.25kHz spacing), or ~1600 data channels of ~10-60 kbps each (12.5kHz spacing).
- stormdennis 6y agoDepartment of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It follows that the Cabinet minister with responsibility for DCMS is the Minister of Fun I love British humour
- UncleSlacky 6y agoThere's also (from the series "W1A"): "The Department of Culture, Media, and also Sport"
- MintelIE 6y agoDigital radio just can't compete. Not only are the players generally large and battery hungry, everybody will be expected to buy a new receiver. It's a terrible shame and they might as well just switch to the Internet.
- dungdang 6y agoradio is mostly used by people in cars. all cars, at least stateside, have had digital radio for eons. i don't even think there's a used car you can buy that still runs, that doesn't do digital. for a car, a digital radio is not battery hungry -it's power requirement doesn't even count. people don't buy standalone radio receivers, and haven't in decades.
- reaperducer 6y agoall cars, at least stateside, have had digital radio for eons My car is a 2015. My wife's car is 2016. Neither have digital radio, much to my disappointment. people don't buy standalone radio receivers, and haven't in decades Except that they do, which is why they're still available in stores. I bought one at Target just last fall for a relative who was in the hospital for an extended stay.
- dazc 6y ago'Neither have digital radio, much to my disappointment.' Count yourself fortunate.
- kawsper 6y agoYou can buy a cheap bluetooth dongle that transmits on the FM-band that your car can pick up, you can then pair the bluetooth dongle with your phone and have your phone play through your car speakers. That's a nice inexpensive upgrade, and can be an alternative to having a digital radio installed.
- reaperducer 6y agoYou can buy a cheap bluetooth dongle that transmits on the FM-band No need to. The car has Bluetooth. It also has a USB port, an aux port, and an SD Card slot for playing music. It just doesn't have digital radio.
- stormdennis 6y agoI prefer to refer to MW and LW rather than AM because so many AM receivers don't cover Long wave band and that happens to have the only station I care about, BBC R4. It's not a problem any more with internet radio but you can pick up R4 on 1500m from the Droitwich transmitter right across Europe.
- menybuvico 6y agoThis. I've got plenty of devices capable of tuning into the (mostly dead) MW band, but only a single one capable of receiving LW broadcasts.
- est31 6y agoOne issue I have with DAB and the like is their short-livedness. FM and AM radio was figured out almost 100 years ago, while for DAB there are already discussions of replacing it with 5G. So buying a DAB receiver is much more likely to turn out to be an investment for something that you will have to re-buy every 5 years as the technology is progressing.
- lb1lf 6y ago-Indeed. Norway adopted DAB early - test broadcasts started sometime in the late nineties - but a couple of years ago when the majority of the FM broadcast towers were switched off, the DAB encoding scheme also changed from DAB to DAB+, rendering most receivers sold as future-proof radios useless. I'd bought a number of DAB radios, only to be told I had to buy them once again - but this time, they'd got it right, no worries! (That being said, I believe transitioning to DAB+ made sense - sound quality is significantly better - however, from a consumer perspective, it is terrible. First have your FM radios obsoleted, then the first-generation DAB radios - and the only thing in it for you as a consumer is to keep the same service you've had all along... (The main benefit of DAB being that it is significantly cheaper to run the broadcast network, compared to FM.)
- ixfo 6y agoWorth mentioning in the UK things are still DAB and there is no plan to migrate to DAB+.
- martinald 6y agoUK uses both DAB and DAB+. Majority of stations are DAB+ now with a lot progressively moving.
- open-source-ux 6y agoThe UK also adopted DAB early and is now stuck with low-bitrate sound quality. When DAB was first promoted in the UK to encourage sales of DAB radios, one of the claims made was that it would provide "CD quality sound". It soon become obvious that the low-bitrates (in order to cram more stations in the radio spectrum) meant the sound quality was anything but CD quality. The sound quality claims were eventually dropped and became "crystal clear sound" or better reception. This table shows the list of bitrates of radio stations in the UK. BBC Radio 3 (classical music) has the highest bitrate at 192kb for DAB. You get far better bitrates streaming via the web: https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-bitrates/ https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-bitrates/
- hyakosm 6y agoDAB is useless because : FM audio quality is enough (actually the bottleneck is the digital compression used in radio studios) ; the FM spectrum isn't saturated ; FM receivers are simple and cheap, it would be absurd to force people to buy new receivers and trash their fully functional radios. An important part of FM listening is in cars, and a lot of cars have custom proprietary radio trays or proprietery interfaces for hand commands buttons. Signal degradation is progressive in FM, but very irritating in DAB.
- toyg 6y ago> FM audio quality is enough I really disagree there. The difference in quality between FM and DAB (not even DAB+) is very significant, and I’m not even an audiophile. The problem is that 1) you don’t know it until you actually make the switch, and it’s not like you can borrow a car stereo system for a week to try it out, and 2) that’s pretty much the only advantage of DAB, from consumers’ perspective, so the price/value proposition is not good enough to make it a no-brainer purchase.
- corty 6y agoThe difference is only significant if the radio station uses a sufficient bitrate. There are some with atrocious quality in DAB because of their low bitrate.
- ooklala 6y agoI can only speak for the UK, but FM here sounds considerably better than DAB because stations on DAB are usually 32 or 64kbps & mono since they want to fit as many stations into the multiplex... (techmoan has a rant about it— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84)
- iso947 6y agoI had an early dab radio back in 2003ish, it was rubbish. I have dab/FM in the car now, and It’s noticeably better than FM. I use dab almost exclusively, but there are remote areas where only fm reaches.
- gardaani 6y agoNorway plans to switch entirely from FM to DAB by 2022. Here's an article discussing how it has gone so far: https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/norways-fm-shutdown-six-months-later https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/norways-fm-shut...
- xioxox 6y agoThat's a relief considering how bad DAB is. Most stations in the UK are stuck on DAB rather than DAB+, which means poor MP2 codec quality. Then they've gone for more identikit stations rather than higher bitrates. There's very little above 128 kbps and I believe they use mono for some. Then you have the problems with signal dropout, where the sound doesn't degrade gracefully in poor signal areas. Poor battery life is also an issue. If it wasn't the sunk costs of people buying these receivers and the loss of face after all the years of propaganda by the authorities pushing the standard, it would have been dropped.
- mtaksrud 6y agoI’ll just leave this from 2015 here https://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/why-dab-radio-in-the-uk-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it-1217586 https://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/why-dab-radio-in-the...
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoMy question is what is the spectrum that is freed up by this going to be used for? And will it make money? It is an awful lot of spectrum - and laws of supply and demand will start to kick in. Adding in a new range for WiFi is nice but that will take international agreement and frankly no one has charged me for wi-fi spectrum yet and it's it likely to succeed if they try. Scientific applications like back hauling hardly seem profitable. Maybe adding in a new cellphone range will work - but AM and FM take up what 100khz to 1Ghz range? what's going in there ? I am fascinated. Is it really all aiming at 6G?
- corty 6y agoLow frequency spectrum will never go to wifi. Big telcos will see to that, they want it for themselves and also don't want competition by the general populace. So wifi gets progressively shorter-range high frequencies, while the old broadcasting bands are given to telcos
- CamperBob2 6y agoThe spectrum in question would be terrible for WiFi for technical reasons alone. It's too narrow and the required antennas would be too big.
- user5994461 6y agoDon't think there is much usage for it for consumers. They are low frequency bands that can't carry much data, it's enough for a few songs but not for computer usage. For reference, FM radio is roughly 80 to 100 MHz. Wifi is roughly 2400 to 2500 MHz and 5200 to 5800 MHz. One channel requires 25 MHz. Killing ALL radios would barely free enough room for one wifi.
- corty 6y agoIt should be a warning to the world how Germany botched DAB: They introduced DAB among the broadcasters as a cost saving measure. DAB needs smaller transmission power due to the digital transmission and error correction, so they could get away with far smaller transmitter power (factor 10) than for the same area coverage in FM. But they misestimated the power reduction, reduced too much and now area coverage is far worse than FM even in areas that should nominally be covered. Also, they first introduced DAB. Some people bought new equipment. Then, a few years later, they introduced DAB+ in a complete switchover, no more DAB stations. Thus everyone had to throw away their new expensive radios. Therefore no-one trusts the coverage and longevity of digital radio, so no-one buys it anymore. Oh, and even nominal coverage isn't anywhere near where FM is after two decades.
- sorokod 6y agoCan someone comment on the economic forces in play here? The article mentions the "potentially lucrative FM and AM spectrum", but has no further details.
- betamaxthetape 6y agoYouTuber Techmoan covered the issues with the UK's implementation of DAB / DAB+ back in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84
- jbj 6y agoMy experience in Continental Europe with DAB is that when you receive the signal it is fine, but when the signal is flaky it is useless. For FM signals, the quality drop at bad reception is much more linear, and not a binary type of reception where it drops, but rather just gets grainy. Since internet coverage is so wide, I can always receive digital radio online, should I wish to. In the case I am somewhere with bad data reception, I would probably preffer FM.
- rwmj 6y agoI cannot receive DAB in my house because of the thick walls, so when the switch-off happens that'll be the end of listening to radio over the air for me. Also for technical reasons DAB is terrible for music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84
- tzs 6y agoI could see the point of digital radio back when they started switching to it, if they had put some rules in place to assure decent quality instead of allowing stations to opt for cramming in more streams by using ridiculously low bit rates. See the video from rwmj's comment [1]. But now? I don't see the point even if the streams were good quality. When they started development, cell phones were expensive and not widely used. By the time they deployed, cell phones were much more common, but were mostly just voice and text. But now they are widely deployed, and usually include internet. They also usually include WiFi and in cities public WiFi is widely available. It seems more efficient, then, to not have a separate digital radio service and instead just serve digital radio streams over internet. Then there is no need for people on the go to buy dedicated hardware for listening to radio. They've already got what they need with their phone. People listening at home might prefer to listen on their A/V receiver than on their computer, but modern A/V receivers have Ethernet and/or WiFi and know how to stream, so again internet streaming can serve the needs that would have been served by digital radio. (And if they don't, it is almost certain that something else hooked up to your A/V systems, such as a Roku or a Fire Stick or a Blu-ray or a cable set top box or a TV has an internet radio app). Keep analog radio. It doesn't use a lot of bandwidth [2], and you can make really cheap receivers that run for a very long time on batteries or hand cranks and do not require configuration or buying a service. It makes a good backup to have for emergencies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739360 [2] This may vary from country to country, but I think generally the AM band is about 1 MHz wide and FM about 20 MHz wide. In TV terms, that's about 1/6th the bandwidth of a single color TV channel for all of AM, and a tad under 3.5 color TV channels of bandwidth for all of FM.