Norway Will Switch Off FM Radio In 2017 293
New submitter titten writes The Norwegian Ministry of Culture has announced that the transition to DAB will be completed in 2017. This means that Norway, as the first country in the world to do so, has decided to switch off the FM network. Norway began the transition to DAB in 1995. In recent years two national and several local DAB-networks has been established. 56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day. 55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio, according to Digitalradio survey by TNS Gallup, continuously measuring the Norwegian`s digital radio habits.
About half (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words they're going to cause problems for nearly half the households?
Re:About half (Score:5, Insightful)
Even bigger problem is cars where you cannot replace the head unit without disrupting the CAN bus or losing some functionality (like turn indicator reminders, warning tones, etc.)
Re:About half (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather the opposite - nice cars (or anything newer than 10-15 years) has integrated headunits, which is basically what kimvette says. On old/simple cars, the radio was just a radio, sitting in a DIN socket.
However, there are aftermarket solutions, some nicer than other. And of course, the nice solutions are krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkr...
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DAB/DAB+ is obsolete already (Score:3)
In addition to this DAB/DAB+ is obsoleted by internet streaming services.
Of course - it sucks to stream in a car, and the result may be that people won't be able to listen to radio in their cars at all and instead play their MP3s or whatever and miss out on traffic information and other important information.
I just wait for FM to be turned off and then a major event to happen where information is sent on the DAB+ net where nobody listens and then we have a lot of people driving into a closed off area.
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AM is rare in Europe. There are a few, but mostly in central Europe.
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In addition to this DAB/DAB+ is obsoleted by internet streaming services.
DAB(+) = Free
Data usage (+ roaming charges) = costly to expensive to "no signal".
Do you work for a wireless carrier?
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Good luck with most modern European cars. There aren't any unless you buy a second hand 10 years old one.
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SAAB 9-3.
Brands which this affects:
* BMW
* SAAB
* Volvo
* Cadillac
* Porsche
Hardly cheap pieces of shit. It's actually a more common design in higher end brands.
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Chrysler (including Jeep) - okay, cheap pieces of shit there, I'll grant you that
Mercedes
Newer Toyota models (including Lexus), especially the higher end models
You can get a CAN interface to bypass the radio but at risk of losing audio for turn indicators, headlamp warning, key left in ignition warning, and so forth. You may or may not also lose your steering wheel controls for the radio; some aftermarket head units and CAN interfaces can translate various makes' control codes, but some cannot, and most hea
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it's been always like that, since the Walkman era.
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Another thing I'd forgotten about; an increasingly common trend with top-end vehicles (not cheap pieces of shit as you claim) is integrating even MORE features from the CAN bus into the head unit, particularly climate control. This is becoming increasingly (and annoyingly) commonplace, and is starting to filter down into midrange vehicles as well.
It's only the cheap pieces of shit and high-end vehicles from a handful of makes which only hand-build cars (Koeningsegg, Spyker, etc.) where volume is too low to
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Probably more. What percentage of listeners have at least one FM radio that doesn't receive DAB? For example, installed in a car?
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Ooh, found my answer, "20 % of private cars are equipped with DAB radio." So 80% aren't. I think 80% of people are going to not like this once it happens.
Re:About half (Score:5, Informative)
Ooh, found my answer, "20 % of private cars are equipped with DAB radio." So 80% aren't. I think 80% of people are going to not like this once it happens.
That doesn't even begin to cover it, many people have an FM radio that they occasionally use for example at cabins or whatever, more than 80% will probably have to replace some radio. And note that they asked for "digital listeners" not "DAB listeners" meaning if you use your smartphone or tablet or PC to listen to radio, you get counted in favor of DAB even though you don't use DAB.
Actually this (Norwegian) [ssb.no] is the truth, in 2014 about 64% of the population listened to radio daily and only 19% on DAB. There's no numbers for it but even less exclusively used DAB. I don't have a DAB radio. It sucks for any kind of battery-driven device, meaning just the kind of remote places and mobile appliances where you'd want radio. We'd do better just upgrading so we'd get 3G/4G coverage everywhere rather than DAB.
Nobody else is phasing out FM or even planning to phase out FM. This is just Norway going off on its own crusade urged on by commercial interests of 10+ new channels, fuck whether it makes sense to throw out millions of radios. On the bright side, I expect this to lead to a massive interest in building out 3G/4G coverage as ex-FMers give DAB the middle finger. Streaming with Spotify + offline playlists is likely to be the new "radio".
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Nobody else is phasing out FM or even planning to phase out FM.>
A (much discussed) study for Swedish parliament recommended that FM radio be closed down 2022.
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Yes, they did shu..//../ but digital is worse when it comes to 99000...///// ddddd..... when I want to wa@/.....,'''[[[[ bad weathe.../[][]][;;;
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"Then again, somebody has to go first."
No, why? What's so bad about FM that it needs replacing? And even if you replace it, why would you do it with a dead standard that has failed to become popular when it might have mattered, and is now outdated already? If you want digital, use 3G/4G; if you just want radio, analoge FM is the best there is.
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"55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio"
Do the rest care about radio or have the people who listen already moved on?
My parents listen to radio here in Norway, but they use their TV for it these days since all the channels are available through the "Radio" option on their fiber cable/internet/everything system.
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"56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day."
I wonder... Would there be more radio listeners overall if stations hadn't closed down on FM already as part of the transition to DAB?
How many stations worth listening to are still on FM? How many radio listeners are there now in total compared to a decade ago?
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56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day
What about those who only listen every 2 days?
55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio
How many people don't have a radio at home at all?
Then there's also the premise that going out and spending 25Euro on a radio sometime in the next two years is a problem. This will be a big non-issue.
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I foresaw this from the digital TV switch. When we'd have a tornado warning in the analog days, I could turn on our television as loud as I could(to allow others in the area to be alerted if they weren't already) and we could go to the basement and listen to see where it was and if it was safe to come out. Today even though I live less than 3 miles from the very same transmitter, thanks to RF ghosting, bad weather means absolutely ZERO reception. The same will happen with radio to many others. In the event
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I'm sure there'll be teething problems, there always are. But the great thing when you have a progressive mindset is when you encounter issues, you can fix them and move on.
Re:About half (Score:4, Insightful)
Cassettes and analog cameras weren't banned. They simply fell out of favor because CDs and digital cameras were way superior as far as the end user was concerned. By contrast, digital tv and digital radio don't benefit the end user, they'll simply let parts of the spectrum be auctioned off; so they require legislation to force the end users to pay the costs for the transition so someone else can profit.
Not Applicable to North America (Score:5, Informative)
The DAB radio system was not adopted in the U.S.A. or Canada. The Canadian authorities permitted testing of DAB for quite awhile but eventually allowed it to die off due to lack of interest.
Instead, the iBiquity HDRadio IBOC standard was adopted in North America, which is a hybrid digital/analogue system that retains the traditional FM Radio band. While DAB and FM Radio occupy different parts of the spectrum, in North America you can think of digital radio as being a "superset" of the traditional analogue stations in the same band (IBOC means "In Band, On Channel).
So, a tuner with HDRadio capability and an old analogue FM tuner will both tune in the exact same station, but the former will process the digital portion of the station's signal in all its superior quality.
For broadcasters, the iBiquity HDRadio IBOC system can also be switched to 100% digital someday, but it is not likely to happen for a very long time if ever due to all the legacy analogue FM radios out there even in brand new consumer electronic gear. The automakers have come onboard with HDRadio-equipped tuners for the North American market.
Perfect time (Score:5, Interesting)
For pirate FM stations to fly their flags.
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For pirate FM stations to fly their flags.
"Perfect time"...?!
3 decades ago, as a child growing up in a small Greek city, i had a pirate FM station - i had my room full of wires and stuff, i was electro-shocked several times (stupid home-made circuit), i had the police constantly investigate about me (and few other fellow FM pirates) for disrupting important radio communication/transmitions, and all that for what: for just an old Greek (warning: it would be all Greek to you!) comedy movie about FM pirates... [youtube.com]
Nowdays anyone can communicate/transmit hi
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Cool! Several friends and I ran pirate FM intermittently for a bunch of years.
Anyone know where to get English subtitles for that film? Might be fun to compare to the handful of other pirate radio movies.
I was hoping to see more interest in local pirate TV when analog NTSC got shut down. The long reign of cable TV weaned enough people away from local antennas altogether, so viewer base probably limited in most areas.
DAB or DAB+? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find here in the UK the DAB stations often sound worse than their FM equivalents, thanks to an antiquated codec (MP2!). DAB+ was supposed to fix this by using AAC+, but that doesn't seem to have been deployed here. Backwards compatibility issues I guess.
Re:DAB or DAB+? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It *SHOULD NOT* be less that 192kbps, but is it?
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Had a year's worth of Sirius satellite radio with a new vehicle. Couldn't stand to listen to it. the sound quality was awful, just like you describe. Even talk stations were tinny and clipped and grating on the ears. Anything remotely "classical" as far as music was concerned was utter garbage. Analog FM sounds way better. And as you say, it's a codec issue more than a digital issue. A modern MP3 encoder such as LAME can create pretty good audio with a 64 kbs stereo stream.
I guess most people aren't
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Had a year's worth of Sirius satellite radio with a new vehicle. Couldn't stand to listen to it. the sound quality was awful, just like you describe. Even talk stations were tinny and clipped and grating on the ears.
Well you have no-one to blame but yourself for that, if you'd remembered to tape on your Brilliant Pebbles with Teflon Tape, plug in your Tice Clock, and outline the speaker in Green Pen, then you'd have noticed the difference immediately, with strong bass in impact and quantity, clear mids, nice extension and clarity in the trebles, and one of the best soundstages in the market, the physical properties of width and depth producing a sense of great size and space when listening (except that final bit where
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Today it's a mix but towards the transition they'll all convert to DAB+, of course that's ditching a couple hundred thousand early adopters of DAB (no plus) radios but hey.. we're a monopoly.
Less accessible (Score:4, Insightful)
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Two days later the Chinese will flood the same dollar stores with one cell, one button digital receivers, don't worry about that.
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The components used to make a DAB reciever, while they have come down lots in price and power use recently - still use a _LOT_ of power - from the point of view of something running on small batteries.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Robert... [amazon.co.uk] - for example.
4-5 hours on two AA cells.
FM radios (at modest volume on headphones) can last over 200, with the same cells.
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I don't know about the EU and UK, but in the USA, the market for HD Radio [wikipedia.org] has been crippled by IP and licensing issues. The hardware is (or could be) cheap. Particularly if China gets into the manufacturing business.
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There is a pitiful veneer of 'standardization', courtesy of the NRSC [nrscstandards.org]; but 'NRSC-5c' is more or less a very lightly de-branded generic d
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Further, analog radios can consume next to no power (in some cases, actually no power) and continue to work to some degree even when the batteries are practically dead. That can make a big difference in an emergency.
I have two or three extras they were giving away at a trade show.
I think one of my locals already has (Score:3)
There was one station I would listen to, the local rock station (yes, it played real rock, not that poser stuff) and as of late, it sounds like crap.
The only way I can describe what it now sounds like would be tinny and clipped. Songs which used to have a roundness to them sound horrible. It's as if the treble has been tripled and the bass halved. Reminds me of when my work went from analog phones to the "new and improved" digital phones. Immediately voices sounded off and messages and voicemail could and would be jittery.
Fortunately there are still a few stations to flip through, including NPR, but it's the only time I listen to the radio. Normally I just bring my cds to listen to.
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The sound quality of FM radio is not that great, especially due to the very high compression. A record, tape or a CD has much higher quality.
However, I like to listen to radio at work - the quality is good enough for background and I do not have to constantly change records or tapes. Also, the compression helps to keep the volume down. I also do not have to constantly decide what to play now - just tune to a station I like and leave it be. Also, when driving short distances, I listen to radio - I grab some
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Since about 2005, it was plugin your mp3 player (ipod, zune, replaced by iphone starting in 2007 and android in 2009)
Some of us don't have cars that new.
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I do not use an iphone or similar, especially in a car.
To me, a tape or a MD has one big advantage - it can easily be ejected and a new one can be put in. When I am driving, I want to look at the road, not a display on the player. I can easily choose a tape (I can hold it between me and the windshield and read the label without looking away from the road) and put it in the player (without looking).
The tape (or MD) holds enough music to not need replacing very often, but also not too much as to get boring (m
So much for long distance Listening (Score:5, Informative)
Digital ANYTHING over the air for listening just plain sucks.
If your signal is not perfect you simply don't hear anything. If I am WAY away from an analog broadcast, it might be fuzzy, it might in and out of stereo but I can still HEAR and understand it. With digital, one the signal gets fuzzy is just does not decode it.
This is only one of the reasons why cops and fire fighters hate the new digital radios.
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This effect is called "digital cliff". In theory, digitally encoded information (in this case, sound we want to hear) does not suffer the quality degradation no matter that there is actual degradation in signal. Until signal quality becomes so horrible that is not possible to get encoded information from the signal. With analog modulation, you would get more noise in information when you get more noise in signal. Illustrated as: http://www.aerialsandtv.com/_wp_generated/wpea5bfb21_01_1a.jpg In practice this
Re:So much for long distance Listening (Score:5, Insightful)
You get best possible* image with DTV where you would get unwatchable static-covered picture.
The problem with the switch to digital TV was all the channels moved into the UHF band which does not carry as far. Here I used to get ch. 2 and 6 clear and a couple of other ones were sometimes watchable, after the switch to digital we don't get any channels. Being 30 miles outside of one of the biggest cities in Canada means no other options, satellite blocked by hills and trees, no cable, no cell coverage and with the privatized phone system 3 9's means that every 9 days the phone is out for 9 hours (18 hours last time), usually due to cable theft.
FM radio is still good but I'm sure if it switched to digital that would also be gone. This raises the question about Norway and how good the DAB coverage is compared to FM
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We have a big dual VHF/UHF antenna on a 30 ft pole that can be rotated along with a VHF/UHF amplifier. The antenna needed to be rotated for the best signal from the 2 good signals. This is another disadvantage of digital, with analog rotating the pole you could watch the signal improving from zero to clear and back off when rotated too far. Digital needs time to lock in so you have to rotate really slow and hope you catch the signal.
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In practice, it's a bit worse for digital. The decoders seem to lose sync easily and just go black for a bit where the analog would have given a couple frames of static and then a watchable image. If it happens frequently enough, you get a black screen and silence from digital where you would get a staticy but watchable picture on analog.
Multipath on a digital signal is a serious issue where on analog, you will actually stop noticing the ghosts after a few minutes.
On the old analog NTSC, the audio was on a
Re:So much for long distance Listening (Score:5, Insightful)
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The way the digital stations around here work, is they broadcast both - and the receiver in my car seem to be intelligent enough to downgrade if the digital signal is too weak.
Basically, the radio starts off sounding like poo as it starts off in analog, but then as it 'locks in' (for lack of a better term) it switches over to digital and thus sounds much better. If I drive into a tunnel or such, the digital signal will drop and the radio will (without gap, mind you) drop back to analog, and switch back up w
re: broadcasting both analog and digital (Score:3)
As I understand it, that's only one of the possible modes of operation for the "HD" FM stereo used in the USA right now.
Up here in the DC area, that seems to be exactly what stations like DC 101FM are doing. If the digital signal cuts out, the radio falls back to the analog broadcast until it can switch back to digital.
The problem with FM HD though is they often opt to broadcast 1 or 2 additional digital stations, and there are no analog equivalents for those. So they just abruptly cut out when the signal
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Used to be a fussy TV no matter the weather. And a pair of pliers to change the channel because the crappy plastic knob fell off.
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Digital ANYTHING over the air for listening just plain sucks.
If your signal is not perfect you simply don't hear anything. If I am WAY away from an analog broadcast, it might be fuzzy, it might in and out of stereo but I can still HEAR and understand it.
You're assuming the goal of listening radio is simply to understand. For most people it most definitely isn't. There's nothing more fatiguing than trying to understand content through static in the background. Heck when FM drops out of stereo most people typically change the channel, and and many intelligent radios consider the signal lost at this point and look for another station.
This is only one of the reasons why cops and fire fighters hate the new digital radios.
The cops and firefighters have a rosy view of the past. The reality is that modern digital radios have receivers with far great
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You post repeatedly like you have an interest in DAB.
Bubbling to silence is way more "fatiguing" than a bit of fuzz which never stops the signal from being intelligible. Having to recharge batteries daily instead of every few weeks is also tiresome. And, in the UK at least, FM audio is better than the low bitrate MP2 most channels use - i.e. even at perfect reception, it sounds awful.
And there's nothing like a dork sitting in a lab to tell people actually using their equipment whether it works or not. Maybe
Re:So much for long distance Listening (Score:5, Insightful)
TETRA or P25 on a power for power basis with older analogue equipment works well over 3 times the distance where analogue becomes unintelligible.
Outside. I know particularly the firefighters have complained about poorer coverage inside buildings, which is usually where their life-saving work is done. Details...
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It's not an outside vs inside issue. It's a design issue. The sensitivity of modern digital radios are far superior to those of the analogue radios from 15 years ago people are used to. All else being equal, digital handhelds replacing analogue ones have better coverage.
Now taking that into account I have seen:
- People skimping on diversity because some modelling software said it'll be fine (this is a pretty big issue for coverage around obstacles)
- People skimping on power because some modelling software s
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You're assuming the goal of listening radio is simply to understand. For most people it most definitely isn't. There's nothing more fatiguing than trying to understand content through static in the background.
Yeah, there's nothing worse than when the radio reception is poor while you're digging ditches.
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By the way, "lack of distance" has been considered a feature, not a bug, for decades. The current US FM band (87.5-107.9 mHz) was chosen* to minimize "skip" transmission on the earlier, lower, band. This prevents stations from interfering as easily, and thus increases the number of stations permissible in a particular local listening area. There are still "clear channel" 50,000 watt AM stations that occupy exclusive frequencies for the entire country - they were trying to avoid that.
*partly - the other part
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bullshit. I'm sure it's possible to create a modulation and encoding system that can "partially recover" a stream. if you have good signal, you get "HD quality", but with lower rates you start degrading. Unrelated, but like Wi-Fi does. 300mbit on clear view of the AP, down to 1mbit if you're unlucky.
Another thing about digital is spectral efficiency: how many bits per unit of transmission you can send. For TV with ISDB-T you can send 3 SD channels in the same space as ONE analog channel. This means, in the
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Yep, I miss analog TV. I care not for the clarity, details, etc.
Re:So much for long distance Listening (Score:5, Informative)
AM is only used in a few areas in central Europe like Germany and France, but it's a dead end in Europe.
FM No Static at All (Score:2)
Guess the Norwegians don't seem to care...
Worry the bottle Mamma, it's grapefruit wine
Kick off your high heel sneakers, it's party time
The girls don't seem to care what's on
As long as it plays till dawn
Nothin' but blues and Elvis
And somebody else's favorite song...
FM No Static at All -- Steely Dan
Employment (Score:2)
Does this mean that there will be an influx of unemployed Norwegians with deep voices?
Long Wave for Mariners (Score:2)
About That Now Available 20 MHz... (Score:2, Informative)
All the (Not necessarily compatible...) DAB systems use High-VHF/UHF frequencies.
So what then happens to the 88-108 MHZ "FM" Band when DAB is forced upon us/US? (Lost in the Noise is the fact that Norway's Plan only effects the State Broadcasting System- Commercial and Private Stations can continue with Analog for now...)
Somebody has plans for that very valuable 20MHz Spectrum, and they are being very quiet on what they plan to do with it, once they have it.
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what makes you think the USA would ever go to DAB? HD radio is a flop, there is no sign the AM or FM bands are going anywhere.
not in the usa (Score:3)
Re:not in the usa (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like TV this will bite the big one (Score:3, Interesting)
When analog tv went away, the signals got very weak and undependable.
FM will do the same there
I don't get why the government is involved at all (Score:2)
If digital radio is supposedly better for the consumer, why not just let the market decide? One would think the broadcasters would naturally migrate over as their customers demanded it.
And if consumers don't really care about digital versus FM - why does the government? Have the Norwegians solved every more important issue facing their people?
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The market has already decided, and that's why the FM band is being closed.
Of course there will always be s few stragglers, the way some people (myself included) still shoot pictures with film. In this case, the public has an interest in the underutilized radio frequency, so instead of entertaining the stragglers, they open up the frequencies to people who will use them.
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Poor radio... (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Would the abandoned spectrum be useful for data? (Score:2)
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If Norway does the right thing and opens up the FM spectrum for people and personal their short range transmitters, maybe we'll find something more useful to do with the FM bands.
I think you're missing the point of why this is being done in the first place. Hint: you're right that this is being done to "find something more useful to do with the FM bands" but not in the way you imagine.
Like in the US and many other countries in recent years, spectrum is being cleared out so it can be leased to cellular providers. This is in theory because the demand for wireless voice and data continues to rise rapidly; the demand for FM radio not so much; therefore the spectrum is better used by som
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If Norway does the right thing
If there's one thing I've learnt from comparing countries, it's the north western Europe seems to get a LOT more things right than everyone else. Without having any background on this topic, I'm going to have a gamble and assume they'll get this right too.
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There's nothing fundamentally different about the 88-108 MHz band compared to the 2 meter band (144-148) except that it has four times the bandwidth. Any transmission mode that works well at 2 meters will also work well in the FM band, as the propagation characteristics are substantially the same.
Question: How many people actually care? (Score:2)
I hardly listen to the wasteland that is broadcast radio other than to check traffic or propagation conditions. I know we're talking about Norway, but is the broadcast radio there worth listening to? It sure isn't here in the USofA. :(
tl;dr if this happened in USA tomorrow I probably wouldn't notice for a week or more; how about you?
Other side of the coin (Score:2)
Real problem here is that most of the world is still on FM. That means things like emergency broadcasts, information fed to cars, playing radio while you're driving and so on. Tourism/transit in Norway is going to become a whole lot more annoying.
Someone has to start, but it would be nice if they kept at least a small part of the spectrum for visitors from the rest of Europe.
Too busy to rip the radio out of my car (Score:3)
At no point in my buying did I even look for an FM or even AM option to add on. And certainly I never looked for a satellite radio technology (those things just piss me off in rentals).
To me even satellite radio is so 20th century. DAB is also just a bandaid to try to keep the radio station media companies relevant.
But the reality is that this isn't a technology issue. For the last portion of the 20th century a variety of media conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and turned them into MBA masturbatory dreams. All profit with no content. About the last time I listened to radio was just before a DJ that I know told me that his new format was to go into work, record all his blurps between songs in one long scripted 1.5 hour session including interviews, and then go home. The songs and his blurps were all run automatically by the computer.
The few things that come off NPR, BBC, or the CBC that I care about "Art of persuasion, quirks, this american life, etc" I download. But even the CBC is just on a march further and further to the PC left and I can't stomach having one great feature cut short so they can give massive amounts of time to someone with some extreme view on some stupid social issue and listen to them grind their axe endlessly.
So the best of radio on today is worse than silence. But my own playlist is awesome and the technology is sitting in a drawer so that I don't have to use my stupid FM transmitter to get crap off my iPhone.
So like my car not coming with an ashtray, I want my next car to not come with a radio, DAB or not.
WEVL (Score:2)
www.wevl.org
The best FM radio in the world.
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Situation in Finland (Score:3)
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When the power goes down here, I have a hand cranked radio so am still in contact with the outside world. Someone up the page commented that DAB radios are power pigs. I don't have experience with DAB but if true it wouldn't be good in a natural disaster situation.
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Someone up the page commented that DAB radios are power pigs.
What comment are you referring to?
I don't have experience with DAB but if true it wouldn't be good in a natural disaster situation.
On the first glance, I don't see why that should be the case.
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in reality those get two or three of the strongest AM stations around but not much more. yes I've made a few but in emergency I'd use my battery operated receiver thanks very much
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"Percent" is probably the most common flavor currently; but 'per cent', 'per cent.', 'pct', 'pc', and likely others are still within the realm of accepted use. Hell, the '%' sign isn't even entirely settled, unicode has something like four defined variants. And that doesn't count the archaic, but historically used and still recognizable, specimens
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Pin head. The term was originally written as two words.
FTFY.