Norway is starting their FM radio network switch off, replacing it with DAB Digital Radio

Norway is starting their FM radio network switch off, replacing it with DAB Digital Radio.

What does Sup Forums think?

Other urls found in this thread:

files.catbox.moe/a8be64.7z
wohnort.org/DAB/index.html
homesteadnotes.com/use-ham-radio-for-internet-access/2/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Frees up bandwidth for wireless internet

Are they doing SFNs for their national networks?

Not really.
Broadcast is almost always better use of spectrum than individual comms, and the VHF-FM band is only a few megahertz in a wavelength unsuitable for wireless internet.

>fm spectrum
>internet

Predictable stupidity from a country whose greatest claim to fame over the past 2000 years is a shitty cheese slicer.

DAB is fine providing you give it enough bandwidth. DAB+ is far better though (and I think may actually be what Norway are using, though I may be wrong)

DAB here in the UK is a shitshow, and a downgrade on FM on every level. The BBC broadcast at either 128kbps stereo (for music) or 96kbps mono (for speech), both of which are far below FM quality. Most of the other music stations are being broadcast at 80kbps mono too. Bear in mind this is using the MP2 codec from the 80's.

I love 6Music, and it's far easier to have a DAB radio in the office than it is to stream it online, but if it were available on FM, I wouldn't touch DAB with a ten-foot barge pole.

If done correctly, a DAB system is completely superior to an FM one.
Better spectral efficiency, lower transmission costs, greater reception through SFNs, better audio quality, data transmissions, etc.

The only thing that worries me is .
In Australia which uses DAB+, most broadcasters give 64kbps to each station. But when you factor in the data and error correction that is lowered to ~48kbps. That's lowered ever further still by the use of 960-frame AAC+, which is less efficient than standard 1024-frame AAC.]
I can provide samples if people like. It's a fucking farce.
Broadcasters are rolling out with "good enough" parameters, not "better than FM" parameters.

Although, that being said, from my own personal experiences and blind testing, at bitrates above 160kb/s, MP2 is better than AAC. It's a shame that broadcasters stick to minimums

Good. Fuck legacy poorfags living in the past and halting technology progress

>DAB
I want millenials to leave.

GAS THE NORSK

I digital broadcasting just a meme to push aside old analog equipment?

The money must flow.

From a study that the BBC performed when they were first researching DAB, they said that 192kbps was enough to match FM quality. Why they don't stick to that anymore I don't know. There were a lot of complaints when they dropped the bitrate of Radio 3 (their classical station) and so that got a boost back up to 160-192kbps but everything else is still worse than it is on FM.

What?

It must suck hard for all those that have an FM-only radios in their cars, since replacing them is costly as fuck. Also, all the older AM-FM radios become useless, which is a fucking waste, since those things are usually immortal.

But it helps the econmeme

*economeme

they really should have put in a period where new radios had to have dab by law from about 2010 if they were planning to turn it off in 2017
it's what they did when they switched over to digital television
most cars, etc would be dab compatible in that case, which they aren't at them moment

...

You need more immigrant workers, or your economeme will crash with no survivors.

Trust me, go-... guy

Just be glad you aren't American.

The DAB system is completely open (as in patent free now), and the DAB+ system is standardised (won't be patent free until like 2025). Both have implementations in Free Software.

The yanks on the other hand use "HD Radio" which is protected forever by some silly US laws, and every station and manufacturer has to pay iBiquity royalties to use it.
It's illegal to transmit digital radio using any other technology.

They god jew'd fucking hard.

Just listen to chiru.no

>it's what they did when they switched over to digital television
TV switch was kinda a pain in the ass, but it didn't turn out to be expensive after all; SCART decoders were pretty cheap and it was a painless conversion, if you didn't bother having yet another remote. Radios can't be converted so easily, especially car's ones.

I've gone to too much effort.
I recorded a DAB+ sample.
Where can I upload a file bigger than 100mb?

catbox.moe

Here it is.

files.catbox.moe/a8be64.7z
Inside the archive is at least a minute from every station on the ABC/SBS mux (our equivalent to the BBC, ARD, etc) in my city with bitrates listed in a file.
I'd do the commercial radio mux, but it took me almost half an hour to get this.

If anyone would like an ETI sample as well, I can do that upon request.

>Why they don't stick to that anymore I don't know.
Because they want to transmit more content inside their single mux.
The way DAB works is you get one signal. By default it's 1184kbit/s.
You can send whatever you like inside that signal.
You can decide to have four stations at 256k or fourteen at 80k.
Whereas analogue was fixed in what it needed, digital gives you the flexibility to choose how much you allocate to each station.

wohnort.org/DAB/index.html
If you look at Wohnort (a brilliant resource for digital radio listings), you can see that the BBC national mux is practically bursting at the seams.
To make Radio 2 192k for example, they would have to get rid of something like the World Service (which uses 64k).
They've really got themselves into a rut, because people are going to complain either way.
If they dropped a network, people would complain. If they set up another mux, people would complain about the cost. If they keep the status quo, people complain.

>files.catbox.moe/a8be64.7z
jesus
that sounds terrible

FM radio vs DAB is bit dum.

At perfect signal with no quality degradation, FM might top out on DAB, but the reality of the nature is, FM radio rarely do for most people. Quality/signal loss is indicated in the classic radio white noise/static noise thats prevalent in any radio wave. Digital audio method would overall be a better experience even though theoretically it might be worse.

Owners of old cars with FM radios will be pleased to hear this. :^)

the only thing that frustrates me with digital radio is how poorly it's being managed
you have crappy rollouts, expensive equipment, low bitrates, licences fees and patents galore

something with a flexible bandwidth, but with opus as the codec and stupid amounts of error correction would be literally perfect

you'd have an odfm modulated baseband signal, but make it so broadcasters/regulators can pick bandwidth
10khz to slot into sw allocations (giving 10-20kbit/s)
20khz to slot into am allocations (giving 20-40kbits)
100khz to slot into fm allocations (giving 100-200kbits)
1000khz to have dab style or satellite multiplexes (of 1000-2000kbit/s)

that way you can have big broadcasters like the bbc or the nrk, etc running big national single frequency networks of ten or so programs
but the same system could also accommodate commercial broadcasters with only a couple of programs, or international broadcasters with a single service that could be received from thousands of kilometres away

the current systems (dab, iboc, drm, etc) all seem to have focused all their efforts on signal strength, without coming up with any usage cases or considering the payload signal. signal strength and reception is important, but useless if you are sending potato quality sound
it just seems too rushed

Once you had a radio, you could listen to FM as much as you wanted.
Internet requires a subscription pretty much everywhere.
That's the difference that counts. And why it was lobbied for.

Digital radio is still free over the airwaves, it just requires a new radio.
Or if you are comfortable with computers, you can compile a SDR receiver from source. It's still early days, but it's getting pretty good.

norway think they slick....

THEY dabbin

based

stupid idea. am/fm radios are cheap, extremely low power, last forever and you can even build one yourself very easily. these qualities make the tech accessible to anyone and can be helpful in emergencies. we had a severe ice storm here in 1998 which knocked out power for weeks and the radio was very helpful for weather reports and updates on repairs to the electrical grid.

>he can't access the internet over the radio
pathetic.

homesteadnotes.com/use-ham-radio-for-internet-access/2/

does that mean you can only listen to the radio in the AM time (23:59-11:59) ? :3

As long as essential services such as emergency warnings and weather forecasts are moved over to AM, it's all good.

Who fucking cares.

Norway invented western civilization and are the purest whites.

Obviously Sup Forumsermins like you

Oh great I would just love to need to have a fucking dedicated IC to decode (not demodulate because that's totes old) fucking FM that I could have done before using a homebrew one using discrete components on a breadboard

how long until you need a pay card like they did with digital tv. also expecting lower sound quality because it will be digital so even more compression maybe mp3.

You aren't fucking fooling anyone I saw the 13th warrior.

Your king lived in a fucking log cabin and there was nothing but shit and mud everywhere.

>he literally has down syndrome

Good luck in the special olympics, retard.

Someone please explain what exactly is bad about this?

Is it proprietary or non-free apart from the cost of the hardware?

My understanding of DAB is that it's an even higher bitrate than FM HD. Should make for much higher quality transmissions.

It's gonna be shit. DAB here in the UK is awful quality, bad signal strength. I was chatting to some radio producers on a train once and they said it's known in the business as the betamax of radio.

It's all about shutting down the common person's ability to send and receive information

Except that people still bitched and complained about this shit, and so the govt. told us that we could do it however we wanted then, just quit bitching.

But people didn't quit bitching.

13th warrior was based
They should ban all those animal shows and air deadliest warrior, and 13th warrior

it will be shit because the jews will use it with lowest bitrate and that makes it a downgrade from analog radio.

>replacing it with DAB Digital Radio.

It's been known for years now. They've had time to find a solution.

As if the 4G network would go down to a mere storm these days. If that's what you're worried about, get a cell phone and use the internet.

Actually DAB is usually better than FM here.
It's like we're actually capable of doing something right, and not go full UK everytime.

>thread full of dab shills
i really hope that they will not downgrade to that cancer here

>As if the 4G network would go down to a mere storm these days. If that's what you're worried about, get a cell phone and use the internet.
did you miss the first part of the post? a radio costs basically nothing and doesn't have to be charged. you don't even need batteries if you have one of those crank generator ones.

but they cant sell you subscriptions on old fm radios.

There is no accommodation for conditional access in the DAB standard.
Digital television supported it from the outset.

It's a shame that nobody uses the Satellite DAB standard.
You could send national stations once and cover an entire continent.

There was a test in 1995/96 by an Australian research group of the S-DAB standard.
They managed to travel from Adelaide to Eucla (1300km) with only one recorded disruption to a the signal when they went into a tunnel (which is known for signal outages already).

Australia would be a great place to do it, too.
You could replace hundreds of transmitters with just a handful.
It'd also cover 100% of the Australian landmass (as well as parts of New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific), which has never been done before for portable radio.
And because the ABC and the SBS are funded by taxpayers, it would be a net saving for the general population.

I genuinely can't think of a flaw.

the flaw is that the sound quality will be so bad that it hurts to listen

just like it is already with internet radios. horribly overcompressed low bitrate ear rape noises

i remember sitting in class and my old school teacher stopping at exactly 11:11(when the first antenna started going down) and said "a minute of silence for the FM radio"
my teacher is great

Do you want me to let you in on a secret?
Many FM radio stations use 192k MP2 compression from studio to transmitter anyway.
Not to mention that a large number of commercial stations use 384k compression for music storage.

I can remember people saying the same thing about digital television here. "The analogue service looks better with less compression, zomg". What they didn't realise was that the analogue service was fed by the digital service. It was the digital, compression and all but with some noise on top.

Ignoring that though.
Using satellite would allow for greater bitrates for stations, as there would be greater bandwidth available with higher frequencies (T-DAB is typically in the 200MHz range, while S-DAB would be in the gigahertz range).
You could conceivably see stations using 192k AAC on satellite, which is considered by most to be transparent.

I don't care much about radio, really, I just listen to it when I'm driving and don't want to bother other people with my music, but these changes for the sake of change seem stupid and counter productive to me.

they changed to digital tv here only so they can sell you subscription cards that have a yearly fee and a channel fee. the content is still 480p in 2017

and that makes it really funny to look at ads that wants me to buy a fucking 4K tv when it will just make the image quality worse because it gets stretched to an even higher resolution

Where is this?
I can't think of anywhere in the world that uses NTSC derived specs and also has subscription terrestrial television.

The countries that are considering DAB typically don't allow such a thing by law. In Australia, encrypting anything on broadcast spectrum is a crime.

That and DAB doesn't have any way of supporting subscriptions or even encryption.

This.
The CIA wants you to be nigger cattle

It's not even. You know how I know? I've done it.
You can already transmit DAB radio using no non-free software, and like 300$ in open source hardware.
Even stallman can't complain.

That's America. They have a proprietary standard which you can't use without a licence.
This is Europe and the Asia Pacific we are talking about.

In Australia, there is even an overlapping frequency where anyone can transmit low power digital radio without broadcast permits.

Didn't even know this
Thats fucking stupid tho

I've done networks over hf. Absolute dog shit but can be done.

finland. theres 2 channels that are "testing" 1080i but all the commercial (ad supported) channels are still low res.

Oh.
It's not 480p, it's 576i. That's the same as what it was for analogue.
And if I recall correctly in Finland you get more on digital without a card or subscription than you did on analogue anyway, so it's a net plus.

Terrestrial broadcasts are usually not full of HD transmissions in our part of the world (Europe/Australia).
Australia has five channels in HD and like twenty in SD.

That's slowly changing as HD gets rolled out. We had only one HD channel a few years ago.

I th_nk _ha_ _w_ile advancemen_ in th_ ar_a of ra___ i_ _ good thing, we should not be get____ r_d of technolo_y bet__r su_te_ to the puropse.

*p_rp__

Digital is definitely superior WHEN you have a good signal.

Har har.

Norway is switching early because they get better reception through DAB than they do through FM.
Where most countries continued to maintain FM services, Norway has put all that funding and effort into improving digital services. Since the early 2000s, at least.

The only reason that digital radio is inferior in places like the United Kingdom is because it's still treated like a second class citizen policy wise.

Think of things like SFNs.

Currently in my city, there are two different FM frequencies for most stations.
One for people in the north, south and west and one for people in the east.
This is an unfortunate geological quirk.
Travelling between the two you need to change the frequency. If you live on the border of both, it can be hit and miss.

What digital can do for that, is an SFN, or using the same frequency from both transmitters.
In that case the signal will be continuous through both areas, like it was only one transmitter. It also improves reception in the border of the two signals, as you can use a bit of signal from both transmitters to enhance your reception.

(23:59-12:00) use exclusive range notation right asshole.

>not wanting your radio to have shit quality
>not listening to AM morning call shows on your way to work

The magic will be gone. It's so comfy...

AM radio is comfy, but have you ever tried to use it in anything remotely city like?
It's a real shame, but there is so much fucking interference these days.

I always use AM when I'm outside of the city though, even if something better is available.
That warm soft bassy sound is like semen straight into my ears.

the technology might be nice but im worried that they will use something like 64kbps mp3s and everything will have that metallic mp3 sound that low bitrate mp3s usually have. if they make it use 320kbps then it might be cool but im sure that it wont happen.

DAB uses MP2 (worse at lower bitrates than MP3, but better at higher bitrates)
DAB+ uses AAC.
The best you usually get on DAB is 192k, and the best you usually get on DAB+ is 128k.
It's usually closer to 128k, and 80k respectively though.

You can actually see bitrates all over the world at this website.
wohnort.org/DAB/index.html
In Germany, for example, most stations are about 96k AAC+.

That may seem low, but the transmission path for FM radio is usually pretty badly compressed anyway.

Fuck that. DAB is awful just like DVB is awful because there are no quality standards. Sure, in a perfect world it means you get same/better quality audio and more stations but in the UK every fucking DAB station is 64-96 kb/s mono or 96-128 kb/s mp2 (no, not mp3). it sounds like shit, plus they put some weird bass bump in to make it artificially sound "better" compared to the FM equivalent.

I almost never listen to radio but if they ever turn FM off without offering equivalent quality audio (say 96 kb/s AAC using DAB+), which they won't, then I will stop listening for good.

yeah, the brits really fucked up their rollout
they dove straight into the deep end but before water was even in the pool

now that the rest of the world has dab+ they can get at least decent quality in the same space that you guys can get shit
wasn't there talk about britain rolling out dab+ too?

>That may seem low, but the transmission path for FM radio is usually pretty badly compressed anyway.
Don't forget all the DRC they apply on top of already DRCed-to-hell music.

DAB+ has been "talked about" for about 7 years. Basically it won't happen for ages because it took them way too long to mandate that players support DAB+. There are a lot of DAB radios out there now.

Also I doubt it'd help. We got DVB-T2 years ago and at first it was used for good quality HD at ~10 Mb/s per channel. Now they cram in 5-6 HD channels plus a bunch of SD and radio channels so they average 5 Mb/s if you're lucky. So even if we did switch to DAB+ I bet they'd just use the opportunity to cram even more shit stations in rather than restore the quality to an acceptable level.

This is why you use ISDB-TSB

I don't listen to commercial radio because of the content, but having worked briefly at one, I don't think I could even if it was any good.

The music was stored in musicam at the lowest acceptable bitrate.
This was played over a computer with a built in DRC into an analog console.
This analog signal was then re-digitized by a standalone DRC, which had only an analog output.
This now compressed analog signal was re-digitized and sent to the transmission site over an IDSN link at 224kb/s using the musicam codec.
From there it was sent to the airwaves.

When I saw that chain for the first time I almost cried.
No wonder it sounds like literal fucking ass.
From what I heard, that was commonplace at commercial broadcasters.

Don't blame DAB/DVB for your broadcast landscape being a shitheap dominated by the private sector.

British broadcasters (particularly private ones) will always go for the minimums to squeeze as much shit as they can in.
It would be no different if they used any other standards.

The best are probably the BBC, but they are at best average compared to overseas.

why would anyone do this

Costcutting and general corporate bastardry.

The analog console was used because they didn't want to buy a new one.
The IDSN link was compressed because they didn't want to hire more than one.
The range compression was to sound louder without breaching federal regulations on sound levels.
The computer that stored the music was set up in the mid nineties, and they didn't want to go to the expense of re-acquiring the music.

Go eat a frog Varg.

who icf-sw23 masterrace here

This is just some shit they're doing because they the Norwegian government though it was hot shit like 10 years ago and doesn't want to take the embarrassment of admitting they fucked up.

This will be a bad thing for Norwegians for a few years, but will end up good for everyone else.
I'll bring down the cost of DAB radios and put more in new cars.

Stay mad.

looks like a bomb

what's that?

ham radio
don't know why anyone would be mad

ham radio users are the most autistic people on this planet.

KWFAG HERE IN TUSCON ARIZONA
ITS A SUNNY DAY
YOU HAVE A SLIGHT HUMMING IN YOUR TRANSMISSION< BUT ITS SOUNDS GOOD
73 BACK TO YOU NET CONTROLLER

Is this real?

>replacing something that's been used and has worked for years and that a child could build a receiver for at home with new shit that will be expensive
>implying I give two shits about bitrate when the limiting factor would be the speakers in my car
>implying I don't care more about my current old alarm clock being built to last than I do about bitrate at the cost of using new shit that's made to break in a couple years.