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Analogue doesn’t degrade gracefully. Every time you drive under a power line it becomes completely unintelligible. Meanwhile digital radio can use error correct
by Gigachad 2y ago
Analogue doesn’t degrade gracefully. Every time you drive under a power line it becomes completely unintelligible. Meanwhile digital radio can use error correction to maintain perfect quality under heavy interference.
- winkelmann 2y agoThis sounds like a signal strength (or maybe frequency?) issue more than an advantage of digital. I sometimes hear people report the opposite of your experience, but many factors play into that. Your point about error correction and perfect quality is noteworthy. Yes, if there is some data loss, error correction can maintain perfect quality, but once that fails, it fails badly. And it's not even all-or-nothing: The radio may, due to an arbitrary firmware configuration, refuse to tune into a stream that is still partially intelligible if it deems the signal integrity or strength to be insufficient. Even very damaged digital streams can be somewhat useful, if you can deal with lovely artifacts like piercing chirping noises when the decoder doesn't know what do to with garbled data.
- mcmoor 2y agoYeah when my national tv is transitioning from analog to digital, in some conditions where the analog channels quality degrade, the digital channel fail completely.
- Gigachad 2y agoDigital tv can degrade gracefully. It just looks different. Instead of fuzz it looks like missed iframes which create blocky artifacting on movement or when switching cameras.
- stroupwaffle 2y agoI’ve always wanted to drive in circles under power lines listening to the Jethro Tull Christmas special!
- okanat 2y agoTo be able to decode under heavy interference you need heavy error correction in the digital hardware and in the standard. Nobody designs space-grade consumer radios. You are basically limited with the bits you have and the recovery you have, no more. A really bad digital signal is unintelligible by definition. It is a sharp cutoff when you reach the limit. However an analog signal is ehmm .... an analog of the original. It is continuous. So the error is also analog and you're only limited by the average case. The signal degradation is also analog, there is no sharp cutoff. So as long as human brain can extract the information from the noise, analog continues to work.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoif you design the protocol well you could easily make a digital signal degrade cleanly. rather than sending a plain signal, break it up into a low, medium and high fidelity version where the higher fidelity versions store extra frequency info but the low quality ones have more error correction
- quailfarmer 2y agoSpace Grade? Only in the sense that it’s technology we mastered in the 1950s. Error correction is a feature of radio transceivers that cost pennies.