20 years ago, Germany decided to stop FM broadcasting in 2015. Digital radio (DAB+) was heavily advertised. Despite a fear campaign ("your radio will stop working soon!"), almost nobody cared or replaced their working cheap kitchen or car radio. The plan to stop FM broadcasting was finally abandoned in 2011, because radio stations would've lost 80% of their listeners. My parents bought a DAB+ kitchen radio in 2009, but never liked it and it stopped working after a few years. They replaced it with a new FM radio.
However, since December 2020 the EU mandates that all new cars equipped with a radio must be able to receive DAB+. In H2 2019 only 22% of cars sold in Germany were equipped with a DAB+-capable radio, in H2 202 this already rose to 80%.[0]
So yeah, in 2015 they'd indeed lose around 80% of listeners. But it's a completely different story in 2024, as anyone with a car bought in the last 5 years would support it. Give it another 5, and the switchover might be possible without anyone really noticing.
As for Switzerland? 99% of cars sold in 2019 were already equipped with DAB+, so they probably mandated it even earlier.
Yeah to me, it seems like FM radio + internet audio over cellular is a great mix of choices, and "digital radio" is pointless. If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
> If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
Rather a streaming service with an open protocol, and then users use whatever they want to listen. Fine if there's also an app for those who want, but I don't want to install an app to listen to a specific audio stream. I have VLC and it's enough.
The other problem is people without cellular data and/or cellular phone, and those with limited data plans. But if most radio stations stay also on FM, that's basically a non-issue.
Correct. I don't see a huge amount of use for ~20MHz (probably less) of very long range spectrum. Potentially for smart meters and other IOT stuff, but current cellular networks deal with that pretty well (and there are other alternatives available). Plus I don't know much equipment that could use it at least out of the box so it is going to be fairly custom and very expensive.
But on the other hand it's been used for audio for so long that the world is saturated with transmission equipment. I think I'll become a pirate radio band as soon as public stations stop transmitting. Of course you can police that but the 80s showed that it wasn't very effective. It's just too easy to build one with a few components.
Also there's often going to be a lot of interference from abroad, 100Mhz signals while VHF can carry far under the right conditions.
In my country DAB has station dedicated to playing classical music, jazz, youth-oriented pop music, current affairs, religion, rock music - not to mention dozens of local radio stations!
FM allows for only a very limited number of stations, which means it ends up in a bidding war between the large commercial stations - who in turn have to play fairly generic music to attract a large number of listeners. With DAB there's plenty of space left over for niche stations, as they can transmit essentially for free.
Once you get beyond the cities, there is still plenty of open FM spectrum. Getting a frequency isn't the real hurdle. Human effort and licensing are the much greater challenges.
Especially licensing. Even on commercial radio you can regularly catch them playing "10 second" clips of different songs, to stay within fair use, that they wish to play but cannot legally do so. The college stations are more brazen about it and will flat out tell you that they can't play different jobs for legal reasons.
Indeed, commercial radio does have to appeal to an audience, but that audience would unquestionably enjoy other music – at least within the same genre. But playing it for them opens up a huge legal minefield. It is a lot easier to pick a small catalog that you can properly audit and disallow anything beyond that.
Swiss here: Pretty certain this is part of a pressure campaign by the SRF ("Swiss Radio and Television"). They are facing budget cuts nationally through an initiative that will be voted on probably later this year (https://srg-initiative.ch/). By preemptively cutting services on their own (that they are not forced to under the text of the initiative) they probably hope to sway voter's opinion.
Attacking public broadcasters is a pretty standard playbook of the far-right and even Conservatives - the latter in Germany for example killed off fibre buildout under Kohl in favor of cable TV/radio because they wanted private broadcasters as competition against a "too left" public TV [1]. The consequences of that decision haunt us to this day, with many households still getting internet access via decades-old twisted pair phone lines.
Cutting service costs on their own while burdening the cost to their listeners is so backwards. My car radio can't do DAB and it would cost me quite a bit of money to install a replacement radio if I want a proper setup (i.e. as before in terms of usability/integration).
Some politicians in my country have worked out that when someone tries to force them to spend less, they can cut funding to something popular like libraries, immediately get a bunch of complaints and protests, then declare "Well we tried, it seems voters don't want us to spend less after all"
>...The Washington Monument syndrome,[1] also known as the Mount Rushmore syndrome[2] or the firemen first principle,[3][4] is a term used to describe the phenomenon of government agencies in the United States cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government when faced with budget cuts. It has been used in reference to cuts in popular services such as national parks and libraries[2] or to valued public employees such as teachers and firefighters,[3] with the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore being two of the most visible landmarks maintained by the National Park Service.[1]
>...The term was first used after George Hartzog, the seventh director of the National Park Service, closed popular national parks such as the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon National Park for two days a week in 1969.
Technically, if you don't have a device capable of receiving their broadcasts, you can get an exemption from the fee. Unfortunately a single computer or TV is enough to incur the obligation.
Serafe will only let you waive the fee if everyone in your household is both deaf and blind, or you are on certain social benefits (can't afford it), or you are a diplomat.
Everyone else has to pay CHF335/year, and good luck getting a partial refund if you leave the country (we didn't).
That's not quite right. You don't need a TV License if you're in possession of a TV.
You do, however, require one if you watch TV as it is being broadcast, utilise BBC iPlayer (their online catch-up service), or consume TV via satellite / terrestrial receiver equipment[0].
Consuming catch-up TV (e.g. My5, Channel 4, etc.) does not require the purchase of a TV License, nor does Netflix or YouTube.
The "Enforcement Officers" (who pay you a visit if you cancel, and try to intimidate you) tend to play into misconceptions regarding how the law works, so it's best to be equipped with knowledge before cancelling to avoid being tricked.
>Everyone else has to pay CHF335/year, and good luck getting a partial refund if you leave the country (we didn't).
Not Swiss here(it's the same kind of tax in Austria), and I hate useless taxes that incompetent governments shove down our throats, but I support the idea of citizens having an independent, impartial and transparent publicly funded media, and unfortunately that costs money to fund and maintain either through direct or indirect taxes, but either way you'll still be paying for it one way or another from the state budget.
We can't have a functioning democracy expecting citizens to make informed decisions on important things like Brexit, when their only sources of information are controlled by big-ad-tech like Meta or Google and Warren Buffet.
The only question remaining is the traditional "who watches the watchmen", as in what assurance do we have that the publicly funded media is truly unbiased and independent and not paddling its own biases and political agendas.
On paper it's not controlled by the state, but awarded independence by law. On paper. In practice, it's still subject to the laws and influence of the state it's funded by, so take that as you will.
At least here in Austria I can't put too much faith in the state media since they don't cover any major corruption scandals of the parties in power, but mostly report on neutral stuff like whatever new laws passed and that the sloth family at the local zoo had a baby.
It's not controlled by the state, but funded by it. There's a kind of a people's council everyone can join and vote about stuff which in part control the direction of it, it's called SRG.
If it's like in Austria, then the state media doesn't receive cheques from the state government, but directly from the taxpayers via a separate tax collected by an independent agency granted power by the state, and not from the state itself.
On paper this makes it so that the state media is reporting directly to the paying citizens similar to a national Patreon, in practice IMO, it's still state control but with extra steps and middlemen designed to give the illusion of independence.
I have a genuine question, what's to gain from this? I could half-understand it if they were going to re-allocate the 88-108 MHz block, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I could also understand why such an action would be taken if that meant that they could pack more stations in the same spectrum, but considering that Switzerland is a relatively small country, so is there really a market? Even if considering multiple languages per niche.
I guess a case could be made for power savings by virtue of (assuming local topography allows) lower power transmitters or by multiplexing various stations on the same transmitter.
On a personal level, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about all forms of analog broadcasting being slowly phased out. The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner, but if this trend continues and analog FM really goes the way of the dodo, then I surmise that DAB (or whichever local flavor is chosen) will become easily and cheaply available, which makes my gut feeling a moot point anyway.
I don't know, I just don't like the idea of needing a processor to receive broadcast audio, and I can't quite put my finger on why.
It probably lets them scrap large amounts of FM transmitters, relays, broadcasting hardware and maintenance. I assume in a mountainous country such as Switzerland this adds up to quite a lot
But DAB is already deployed, removing the FM part will probably allow them to spare money. I think the transmitters are managed by someone else than SRF (maybe Swisscom broadcast), as any service it can be pretty expensive. This said, I'm not happy about the removal of FM. Now I want to find out what's the cheapest way to broadcast the whole FM band at once using an SDR (inside my house).
"The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner..."
I agree. I'm concerned the more advanced broadcast technology is the easier it is to control and or shut down.
A broadcast service can be shut down for various reasons, political, economic,etc. or because of some unforeseen disaster, natural or human-made. Whatever the reason the population is then cut off from news and information. The simpler the technology the easier it is to restart or resurrect.
Whilst Europe has largely dispensed with AM radio, we're seeing this debate playing out in the US over AM radio in cars. And now we're seeing this with FM, and Switzerland isn't the first.
Let's look at this holistically for a moment. AM radio is easy to establish and it works well—witness both local and shortwave services in the 20th Century. An AM receiver can be as simple as a tuned circuit and diode (a crystal set). FM is a little more complex but mono FM is nevertheless very easy to get going. Similarly, an FM receiver can be as simple as a single valve or transistor circuit configured as a superregenerative† detector (I've used one to listen to FM over a 100 miles from the transmitter, they can be extraordinarily sensitive given their simplicity).
This simplicity and ease of establishment just isn't possible with DAB. DAB requires advanced electronics, ICs etc. that cannot be improvised without high tech production.
It seems to me these debates over the closure of AM and FM services are being conducted without the public's interest and national security in mind.
DAB has worse behavior with marginal signal quality. When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
I really hate that engineers, regulators, and businesspeople managed to work together to make something simple and reliable less reliable but more "modern".
Probably because DAB has been designed to be spectrally efficient, allowing one to cram as many radio channel as possible into a slice of spectrum. It's a property of error control codes, as used in DAB: that the closer one gets to optimal performance, the sharper the cutoff between working and not working. As range increases: works, works, works, BAM, gone...
If it's optimal, the quality of a digital link will be pretty well perfect up until that cutoff (but no link is truly optimal). DAB's design placed emphasis on more channels rather than longer range, so the point at which DAB cuts out will likely be before the point that FM has degraded to unintelligibly. In theory there can be a region where FM has degraded but DAB is still holding up, but in the name of more channels this region is probably small.
> When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
You'd think that this would be a good scenario for 'hierarchical modulation':
> Hierarchical modulation is particularly used to mitigate the cliff effect in digital television broadcast, particularly mobile TV, by providing a (lower quality) fallback signal in case of weak signals, allowing graceful degradation instead of complete signal loss. It has been widely proven and included in various standards, such as DVB-T, MediaFLO, UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband, a new 3.5th generation mobile network standard developed by 3GPP2), and is under study for DVB-H.
In the US, our "HD" radio (we don't have DAB) sounds so bad, I end up turning it off and listening to the analog version.
It sounds like they reduced bitrate by pitch-shifting down prior to transmission, and then pitch-shifting back up at playback. Everything just has this metallic ring to it: When I tried the classical station, at first I thought there was bells in the piece they were playing until I realized it was a compression artifact. When I listen to talk, I keep hearing a bell/ringing over everyone's voice.
I know a lot of the newer codecs also sound great (for the car) at low bitrates, so I don't want to go and blame "quantity over quality."
The whole "HD" thing of HD Radio was a deception to begin with. It blatantly played on the understanding of HD as "high definition", when all it actually meant was Hybrid Digital, i.e. you get a digital audio stream that falls back to a simulcast FM with insufficient signal strength or exceeding error correction thresholds.
When I read about it years ago, It was made out to have a very high bitrate (and quality) if the analog FM signal was replaced completely by a digital signal.
AM only has lower fidelity because of the low broadcast power and shitty receivers. 80 years it was much higher quality with the huge transmitters and high quality tube radio.
That "sound" is partially due to the design of the current AM system. It was built to pack more transmitters into the allocated frequency range.
There are no technical impediments to high fidelity audio because of amplitude modulation. In the past the big limitation was the bandwidth of intermediate frequency (IF) amplifiers in the receivers which were typically tuned for maximum gain and not flat audio band response. The transmitters have flat response out to the legal limits. Radio stations have a monitor receiver that has proper IF audio response and the sound of those are very good.
That's he-aac so 56kpbs is not that bad, it gets dicey below 32kbps when you need tricks like parametric stereo. But he-aac's spectral band replication does add metallic taste to everything, i would agree
Long wave is a frequency band just like medium wave. Amplitude modulation is used on both; it's the same technology, LW needs much larger antennas though. FM is often used to refer to a frequency band, but that is actually called ultra-short wave, and frequency modulation is used on it.
Most European countries have switched off all their major transmitters, or are preparing to switch off the last few that are left. E.g., in the Netherlands, there are now only low-power hobbyist stations, which will remain I think, but have a near-zero audience.
"Most European countries are now running a reduced AM radio service with fewer transmitters, fewer services and
lower power. Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Norway (except Svalbard),
Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland have completely closed their AM radio services. Denmark retains a part-time
long wave service for mariners. Lithuania has closed domestic AM radio, but retains a medium wave transmitter
for international broadcasting. Only Cyprus, Hungary, Iceland and Romania (together with England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland and Spain) are continuing with a comprehensive AM radio service."
This is outdated. Denmark closed its long wave transmitter last year. The biggest hold out is bbc radio 4 and they stopped special long wave programming and the service is only still on the air because it doubles as a digital signal for some power meters.
Digital audio is also relatively expensive for some people. There are people who in my community who ride around on their bikes listening to fm radio. A monthly data fee could be hard for some.
Not having a radio receiver in a phone has always been one of those WTF things for me. There have been articles on why iOS doesn't have a radio tuner even those the receiver is there claiming because it would divert users from apple music or whatever. It's always felt like a missed opportunity to me though
The main reason to not have it is that unless you’re out of cellular range or has no data quota left, it’s just worse than just streaming the same stations over the internet, which also offer more content as running FM stations is expensive.
Even though older iPhone baseband chips had FM receivers, you’d still need break it out and deal with the antenna setup, with the approach taken by others requiring wired headset and shenanigans in the headphone port. That’s more BOM, and user resistance to wireless headphones or newer models whose baseband chips cut the feature.
It used to be a somewhat common feature in phones (including smartphones from other brands), but it usually had quite “eh” reception. And with transitions to DAB, the feature becomes unusable without DAB decoders which I’m sure someone is claiming royalties for.
> Listening to DAB on a cellphone requires a monthly data plan.
Cellphones used to include AM/FM radios.
Personally I think it might be useful to have them for public service uses: perhaps cell network are more robust than a few years ago, but there are still instances when they could be (are) overwhelmed, and a broadcast-only system could be useful in major emergency events.
Cell systems still have the ability to push out a message regardless of how "overwhelmed" the towers are. They'll just drop service to some customers while the higher priority emergency message is broadcasted out.
A cell network doing a one-way broadcast text message to all clients is a solved problem. And honestly, I greatly prefer this way to push out an emergency message than assume I'm tuned to a radio station or broadcast TV, two things I'm rarely doing. I'm way more likely to be listening or watching local or streaming media instead of watching broadcast TV. Or even just not be doing any of that at all. Lots of people I know wouldn't even be able to tune into a broadcast TV or FM radio station outside of their cars.
I've heard this assertion many times. But after having ridden hundreds (thousands?) of hours wearing headphones, I must conclude that it's a perfectly fine idea. People believe headphones will obstruct your hearing. Some do. Some don't. Wear the ones that don't. It's also possible to set the volume to the same level that it would be from a set of handle-bar mounted speakers.
Switzerland has a national siren network, tested annually, and regularly reminds its citizens "if the sirens sound, turn on the radio to DRS/SRF 1". They've added the swissalert mobile app more recently, but I guess everyone is going to have to buy new radio sets who doesn't have a DAB+ one already.
The reverse scenario happened here in Singapore. It was the first in Asia to introduce DAB in 1999. The national broadcaster MediaCorp then decided to cease DAB transmission in 2011, forcing those who've invested in new DAB equipment to throw them out the window (while many are dual-FM/DAB sets, some more affordable ones are exclusively DAB-only). Interesting that the decision was made to go backwards in technology, likely motivated by economics.
DAB is optimized for "rights holders".
Not for radio stations, not for end users, not for the state.
It's designed against everyone but the rights holder / copyrights industry interests.
That's not the real rightsholder thing, as hardly anyone bothers with scrambled broadcasts; no, the real rightsholder handicap was limiting the bitrate of original DAB so it sounds worse than CDs.
Is this actually used anywhere? To me it feels like DAB and any putative DRM mechanisms have already been basically obsoleted by streaming systems like Spotify.
Analog radio and and video signals like VGA, fail way more gracefully and linearly, which is why they're still used in many applications today where rough environments are involved and high availability is desired as a degraded signal is better than no signal at all due to some CRC or handshake failure.
Digital connections have a terrible failure model, it either works perfectly or not at all, with little in between.
In modern datacenters or in radio broadcasting equipment, you can still find VGA connectors or LCD displays using that signal.
The UK is a bad example, as it adopted DAB (without the "+") far too early. DAB uses the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II "MP2" codec which is a very old codec, and while MP2 actually sounds pretty great at appropriate bitrates (256kb/s or higher), it was decided that quantity was better than quality and so the UK has a large number of poor quality, low bitrate, stations. Sometimes in MONO!
DAB+ uses HE-AACv2 which is much better suited to the bitrates that the UK has chosen to use, and in addition has much better error correction, reducing the "bubbling mud" effect that UK DAB listeners are all to familiar with.
The sad truth is that FM actually works very well, and can have extremely good audio quality, but capitalism must ruin all good things. The death of the BBC, as now seems inevitable, will be the final shame.
In theory, yes, it really can, but as you stated, in practice, no. This is basically the equivalent thing on digital TV between the US and Canada: most US broadcasters tried to pack as much channels as possible (that sometimes digital broadcasts are objectively worse than analog ones because of bitrate starvation) while Canada usually only have a 1:1 correspondence between virtual and physical channels (sometimes 2:1 but there isn't really much more than that).
This is not Switzerland, but the BBC apparently uses 192 kbps only at Radio 3 (their classical music station), while other BBC stations are either 128 kbps or 64 kbps only.
I saw a video a while back (it was since taken down) from a guy with a low power TV station who experimented with broadcasting much more modern video codecs. He experienced some good results with modern "smart TVs" largely because they have good hardware support for various modern video codecs and seemed to handle the streams just fine. He managed to get multiple 4K video streams over standard ATSC 2.0 signaling working on a range of different TV models. It seemed like a neat experiment.
That's done on purpose so that they can roll out conditional access / DRM.
In order to make people pay for that, they need to be invested in hardware first ( DAB radios ) and suffer from poor quality channels....
DAB is optimized to make money, not to serve the general public.
You can read the industry's claims as to why DRM is needed in broadcast (to ensure authenticity mainly), but you'll have to read between the lines that it's to make broadcast TV impossible to record, ads impossible to skip, and (probably eventually) sweet talk regulators into allowing pay-per-view or paid access "premium" channels, probably leeching off the bandwidth (and quality) of the "free-to-air" channels they are legally a required to broadcast to maintain their licenses.
An FM receiver is pretty basic, cheap, and easily understood/home-built technology. Does DAB+ require an encryption key, license, or otherwise limited-access component that would prevent people from rolling their own receiver?
They weren't free. They were subsidized and consequently what used to be a $20 converter jumped to $35 overnight because that was how much retailers knew they could milk out of the rebate.
I understand why the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRF) wants to pull the plug on FM radio. But I think there are still some good reasons to keep it around. FM radio is simple and strong, and it can be heard by a lot of people even in areas with bad internet access. FM radio also comes in handy in emergencies, like when natural disasters knock out other ways to communicate.
Oddly, in Ireland we did the opposite; the last DAB transmitter was switched off a year or so ago (digital radio, oddly, is still available bugs DVB-T2, bundled with the terrestrial digital tv signals, though I’m not sure anyone really listens to it that way).
DAB made little sense in Ireland. The FM figures used to argue for DAB adoption were skewed by a huge captive drivetime audience who were already pivoting to podcasts and live-streams instead of to DAB/Digital stations.
Combine this with cheap and ubiquitous 4G Internet, the introduction of mass audio and podcast streaming services, and the prevalence of smart-home devices at loss-leader prices like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and the writing was on the wall from the get-go.
In short, the National Broadcaster (RTE) were latecomers to DAB to the point where it was no longer deemed necessary by the time it was implemented. Case in point was when RTÉ shut down the DAB infrastructure, but didnt shutter the digital services populating it: RTÉ Gold/2XM/Pulse continue as online streaming services.
The majority of people - even my parents - are now far more tuned in to the likes of Audible and Spotify. When they want e.g. Death Notices or GAA they use a streaming app or the native webcast from the FM station Website.
Synchronous single-infrastructure dependent Audio Streaming is now a use-case in search of a problem for the average consumer, outside of certain niches like Naval/Aviation traffic.
Oh yeah the death notices on the radio. I've never heard anything like that except in Ireland. I haven't thought of that in years.
I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way.
As a country we have a bit of a fixation on death. During the pandemic, some studies and news sources started using rip.ie as an input, because, while formal death reporting outside hospitals in Ireland is lax (it's typically done by family if there are no unusual circumstances, can be done up to 12 months after death, and there are no real consequences for not doing it at all), people still get their death notices in the papers, so death notices were far less of a lagging indicator for covid mortality than formal death reports.
(Another way in which this system showed its cracks during the pandemic: presumably because of the flimsiness of the formal system, the CSO bases its population estimates on modelling. This lead to, at one point, the government reporting that 107% of the oldest age cohort had been vaccinated, because the CSO models significantly underestimated how many very old people were still alive.)
It made me sad when I got into amateur radio to learn that SRI had shut down their famous HF (shortwave) transmissions just a few years prior.
But I still listen to podcasts and streaming from RTS/SRF. They do great world news coverage from a kind of detached perspective. Gotta know French or German, for next 6mo until it becomes commonplace to have live transvocalized podcasts.
Interesting. I live near Switzerland and the only time I listen to radio is using FM in my car. I hope this same idea doesn't make it to the country where I live.
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation is pulling the plug on FM radio. How quaint.
I'm not a fan of DAB+. The range is less than FM, and the compression artifacts are a real treat. Why not just go back to good ol' analog AM, then? Oh wait, it's been deemed too "rustic" and "unmodern".
FM was a great way to listen to the radio, don't you think? You could actually hear the music without it sounding like a tin can on a string. And don't even get me started on the so-called "HD Radio" nonsense in the States. It's just a way to cram more commercials down our throats and make our radios more expensive.
What's with this obsession with "spectrum efficiency" and "bandwidth management"? Can't we just have a simple, reliable way to listen to the radio without it sounding like it's coming from a broken tape deck?
I still remember when LW was around. That was real broadcasting. None of this fancy-schmancy digital stuff. Just pure, raw signal strength. You could pick it up with a pair of cans and a piece of twine, no problem.
So, yeah, Switzerland, go ahead and pull the plug on FM. See if I care. I'll just use my trusty AM radio and enjoy the beautiful, analog sound of static.
Maybe, when most regions follow suit. Hate the idea of FM broadcasting turning off. Still, would love some ham radio wideband spectrum. Then people driving to work can listen to the likes of me droning on about <insert favourite ham radio topic here>.
Personally I think they should expand community radio wholesale if national broadcasters cannot be arsed.
In the US more than likely. In the UK I'm not so sure (can't speak to Switzerland) as there is a healthy community radio scene who may have some democratic influence. There are mutterings of trying to close UK FM broadcasting as well in order to force DAB. I'd like to think there would still be some spectrum allocated for that. If not, the pirates would take over - and good luck to them.
This wholesale move away from simple, analogue radio infrastructure (AM/FM/SW radio) is a disaster waiting to happen in the event of a major regional/global catastrophe.
Most amateur organisations would not even think about trying to experiment with WBFM anyway - too obsessed with ultra-narrow digital modes.
20 years ago, Germany decided to stop FM broadcasting in 2015. Digital radio (DAB+) was heavily advertised. Despite a fear campaign ("your radio will stop working soon!"), almost nobody cared or replaced their working cheap kitchen or car radio. The plan to stop FM broadcasting was finally abandoned in 2011, because radio stations would've lost 80% of their listeners. My parents bought a DAB+ kitchen radio in 2009, but never liked it and it stopped working after a few years. They replaced it with a new FM radio.
2015 was WAY too early for that switch.
However, since December 2020 the EU mandates that all new cars equipped with a radio must be able to receive DAB+. In H2 2019 only 22% of cars sold in Germany were equipped with a DAB+-capable radio, in H2 202 this already rose to 80%.[0]
So yeah, in 2015 they'd indeed lose around 80% of listeners. But it's a completely different story in 2024, as anyone with a car bought in the last 5 years would support it. Give it another 5, and the switchover might be possible without anyone really noticing.
As for Switzerland? 99% of cars sold in 2019 were already equipped with DAB+, so they probably mandated it even earlier.
[0]: https://www.worlddab.org/system/news/documents/000/012/060/o...
Those figures are for new cars sold. People drive cars for decades.
My car was made in 2004. It isn't particularly old. I'll probably drive it another 5+ years. By that math I won't have DAB until 2045.
The average (mean) age of vehicles on the road in the USA is, I believe, 12 years. I don’t know about Switzerland, but I presume it isn’t under five.
Yeah to me, it seems like FM radio + internet audio over cellular is a great mix of choices, and "digital radio" is pointless. If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
> If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
Rather a streaming service with an open protocol, and then users use whatever they want to listen. Fine if there's also an app for those who want, but I don't want to install an app to listen to a specific audio stream. I have VLC and it's enough.
The other problem is people without cellular data and/or cellular phone, and those with limited data plans. But if most radio stations stay also on FM, that's basically a non-issue.
> Fine if there's also an app for those who want, but I don't want to install an app to listen to a specific audio stream. I have VLC and it's enough.
"But muh branding!!!" - Every marketer and UX designer everywhere
Digital radio allows for far more efficient use of spectrum than FM
Using the spectrum more efficiently doesn’t make a system automatically better.
I don’t think Switzerland is crowded enough to have 10x more radio stations sustainably.
It's not to have more radio stations, it's to have more bandwidth to allocate to things that AREN'T commercial radio.
Genuinely interested - what is using the FM frequency instead?
Well, nothing right now because it's still allocated for FM.
I believe he was saying what else could that portion of the spectrum be used for, if not for FM radio?
Correct. I don't see a huge amount of use for ~20MHz (probably less) of very long range spectrum. Potentially for smart meters and other IOT stuff, but current cellular networks deal with that pretty well (and there are other alternatives available). Plus I don't know much equipment that could use it at least out of the box so it is going to be fairly custom and very expensive.
It’s valuable precisely because it’s relatively low frequency, which means it works for things that need to punch through buildings.
But on the other hand it's been used for audio for so long that the world is saturated with transmission equipment. I think I'll become a pirate radio band as soon as public stations stop transmitting. Of course you can police that but the 80s showed that it wasn't very effective. It's just too easy to build one with a few components.
Also there's often going to be a lot of interference from abroad, 100Mhz signals while VHF can carry far under the right conditions.
Same with digital TV, but digital TV also brought a significantly worse viewing experience, at least in my area.
Imagine: Instead of three radio stations all playing the same song, you could have 100 stations all playing the same song!
Or perhaps they could play different songs!
In my country DAB has station dedicated to playing classical music, jazz, youth-oriented pop music, current affairs, religion, rock music - not to mention dozens of local radio stations!
FM allows for only a very limited number of stations, which means it ends up in a bidding war between the large commercial stations - who in turn have to play fairly generic music to attract a large number of listeners. With DAB there's plenty of space left over for niche stations, as they can transmit essentially for free.
Once you get beyond the cities, there is still plenty of open FM spectrum. Getting a frequency isn't the real hurdle. Human effort and licensing are the much greater challenges.
Especially licensing. Even on commercial radio you can regularly catch them playing "10 second" clips of different songs, to stay within fair use, that they wish to play but cannot legally do so. The college stations are more brazen about it and will flat out tell you that they can't play different jobs for legal reasons.
Indeed, commercial radio does have to appeal to an audience, but that audience would unquestionably enjoy other music – at least within the same genre. But playing it for them opens up a huge legal minefield. It is a lot easier to pick a small catalog that you can properly audit and disallow anything beyond that.
apparently, digital radio has less range than FM
You get a lot of that back because you can have all the repeaters for a given station on The same frequency.
You can do the same on FM with transmitter synchronisation. It's used a lot for analog amateur repeaters too. It's pretty easy to do with modern tech.
Swiss here: Pretty certain this is part of a pressure campaign by the SRF ("Swiss Radio and Television"). They are facing budget cuts nationally through an initiative that will be voted on probably later this year (https://srg-initiative.ch/). By preemptively cutting services on their own (that they are not forced to under the text of the initiative) they probably hope to sway voter's opinion.
I wonder how often such attempts backfire ("well, they're going to cut what is useful for me anyways, so why should I vote to give them any money?").
Can there be an initiative to force them to keep FM?
Funny how it's always the SVP trying to cut the SRG funds, after their first initiative to completely abolish the tax failed.
Attacking public broadcasters is a pretty standard playbook of the far-right and even Conservatives - the latter in Germany for example killed off fibre buildout under Kohl in favor of cable TV/radio because they wanted private broadcasters as competition against a "too left" public TV [1]. The consequences of that decision haunt us to this day, with many households still getting internet access via decades-old twisted pair phone lines.
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
Cutting service costs on their own while burdening the cost to their listeners is so backwards. My car radio can't do DAB and it would cost me quite a bit of money to install a replacement radio if I want a proper setup (i.e. as before in terms of usability/integration).
Some politicians in my country have worked out that when someone tries to force them to spend less, they can cut funding to something popular like libraries, immediately get a bunch of complaints and protests, then declare "Well we tried, it seems voters don't want us to spend less after all"
You fire them by pointing out what they kept vs. what they dropped.
In the US it is called Washington Monument syndrome.
Being a non-USAn, can you provide the background story for that? Sounds interesting.
>...The Washington Monument syndrome,[1] also known as the Mount Rushmore syndrome[2] or the firemen first principle,[3][4] is a term used to describe the phenomenon of government agencies in the United States cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government when faced with budget cuts. It has been used in reference to cuts in popular services such as national parks and libraries[2] or to valued public employees such as teachers and firefighters,[3] with the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore being two of the most visible landmarks maintained by the National Park Service.[1]
>...The term was first used after George Hartzog, the seventh director of the National Park Service, closed popular national parks such as the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon National Park for two days a week in 1969.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome#:....
In Canada, it's the "Musical Ride" process.
Technically, if you don't have a device capable of receiving their broadcasts, you can get an exemption from the fee. Unfortunately a single computer or TV is enough to incur the obligation.
I think you're thinking of the BBC.
Serafe will only let you waive the fee if everyone in your household is both deaf and blind, or you are on certain social benefits (can't afford it), or you are a diplomat.
Everyone else has to pay CHF335/year, and good luck getting a partial refund if you leave the country (we didn't).
https://www.serafe.ch/en/exemption-from-the-fee/basic-princi...
> I think you're thinking of the BBC.
That's not quite right. You don't need a TV License if you're in possession of a TV.
You do, however, require one if you watch TV as it is being broadcast, utilise BBC iPlayer (their online catch-up service), or consume TV via satellite / terrestrial receiver equipment[0].
Consuming catch-up TV (e.g. My5, Channel 4, etc.) does not require the purchase of a TV License, nor does Netflix or YouTube.
The "Enforcement Officers" (who pay you a visit if you cancel, and try to intimidate you) tend to play into misconceptions regarding how the law works, so it's best to be equipped with knowledge before cancelling to avoid being tricked.
[0]: https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one
>Everyone else has to pay CHF335/year, and good luck getting a partial refund if you leave the country (we didn't).
Not Swiss here(it's the same kind of tax in Austria), and I hate useless taxes that incompetent governments shove down our throats, but I support the idea of citizens having an independent, impartial and transparent publicly funded media, and unfortunately that costs money to fund and maintain either through direct or indirect taxes, but either way you'll still be paying for it one way or another from the state budget.
We can't have a functioning democracy expecting citizens to make informed decisions on important things like Brexit, when their only sources of information are controlled by big-ad-tech like Meta or Google and Warren Buffet.
The only question remaining is the traditional "who watches the watchmen", as in what assurance do we have that the publicly funded media is truly unbiased and independent and not paddling its own biases and political agendas.
> the idea of citizens having an independent, impartial and transparent publicly funded media,
if its controlled by the state by definition it cant be neutral.
On paper it's not controlled by the state, but awarded independence by law. On paper. In practice, it's still subject to the laws and influence of the state it's funded by, so take that as you will.
At least here in Austria I can't put too much faith in the state media since they don't cover any major corruption scandals of the parties in power, but mostly report on neutral stuff like whatever new laws passed and that the sloth family at the local zoo had a baby.
It's not controlled by the state, but funded by it. There's a kind of a people's council everyone can join and vote about stuff which in part control the direction of it, it's called SRG.
People in Switzerland still trust their state and institutions: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/democracy/why-people-in-switzer...
It's not funded by thew state but by it's citizens, enforced through serafe and the whole construct blessed by the state.
you typically dont behave the same way when you receive a check from someone. just like people dont openly criticize their boss at work.
Maybe Switzerland has a better system but in most countries state funded media ends up being the voice of the state
If it's like in Austria, then the state media doesn't receive cheques from the state government, but directly from the taxpayers via a separate tax collected by an independent agency granted power by the state, and not from the state itself.
On paper this makes it so that the state media is reporting directly to the paying citizens similar to a national Patreon, in practice IMO, it's still state control but with extra steps and middlemen designed to give the illusion of independence.
Maybe not, but it's far more neutral than any other source of control.
> independent, impartial and transparent publicly funded media,
Choose one. /s
I have a genuine question, what's to gain from this? I could half-understand it if they were going to re-allocate the 88-108 MHz block, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I could also understand why such an action would be taken if that meant that they could pack more stations in the same spectrum, but considering that Switzerland is a relatively small country, so is there really a market? Even if considering multiple languages per niche.
I guess a case could be made for power savings by virtue of (assuming local topography allows) lower power transmitters or by multiplexing various stations on the same transmitter.
On a personal level, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about all forms of analog broadcasting being slowly phased out. The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner, but if this trend continues and analog FM really goes the way of the dodo, then I surmise that DAB (or whichever local flavor is chosen) will become easily and cheaply available, which makes my gut feeling a moot point anyway.
I don't know, I just don't like the idea of needing a processor to receive broadcast audio, and I can't quite put my finger on why.
Norway phased out FM in 2017, and went from 5 national channels to over 30.
There's an article from back then here: https://radio.no/2017/01/norway-makes-radio-history/
Interesting.
Switzerland an Norway both have a very moutaineous terrain.
Does that make it more difficult to fit many channels?
It probably lets them scrap large amounts of FM transmitters, relays, broadcasting hardware and maintenance. I assume in a mountainous country such as Switzerland this adds up to quite a lot
Considering DAB has less range, the amount of antennas would need to go up.
But DAB is already deployed, removing the FM part will probably allow them to spare money. I think the transmitters are managed by someone else than SRF (maybe Swisscom broadcast), as any service it can be pretty expensive. This said, I'm not happy about the removal of FM. Now I want to find out what's the cheapest way to broadcast the whole FM band at once using an SDR (inside my house).
So following your argument, DAB shouldn't have deployed from the begining? I agree with you!
DAB works worse in that kind of terrain, so good luck with that.
"The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner..."
I agree. I'm concerned the more advanced broadcast technology is the easier it is to control and or shut down.
A broadcast service can be shut down for various reasons, political, economic,etc. or because of some unforeseen disaster, natural or human-made. Whatever the reason the population is then cut off from news and information. The simpler the technology the easier it is to restart or resurrect.
Whilst Europe has largely dispensed with AM radio, we're seeing this debate playing out in the US over AM radio in cars. And now we're seeing this with FM, and Switzerland isn't the first.
Let's look at this holistically for a moment. AM radio is easy to establish and it works well—witness both local and shortwave services in the 20th Century. An AM receiver can be as simple as a tuned circuit and diode (a crystal set). FM is a little more complex but mono FM is nevertheless very easy to get going. Similarly, an FM receiver can be as simple as a single valve or transistor circuit configured as a superregenerative† detector (I've used one to listen to FM over a 100 miles from the transmitter, they can be extraordinarily sensitive given their simplicity).
This simplicity and ease of establishment just isn't possible with DAB. DAB requires advanced electronics, ICs etc. that cannot be improvised without high tech production.
It seems to me these debates over the closure of AM and FM services are being conducted without the public's interest and national security in mind.
__
† https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_circuit
https://www.qsl.net/l/lu7did/docs/QRPp/Receptor%20Regenerati...
> if they were going to re-allocate the 88-108 MHz block, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
they definitely will do that though. spectrum is valuable, they're not just going to let unallocated spectrum sit there unused.
DAB has worse behavior with marginal signal quality. When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
I really hate that engineers, regulators, and businesspeople managed to work together to make something simple and reliable less reliable but more "modern".
Probably because DAB has been designed to be spectrally efficient, allowing one to cram as many radio channel as possible into a slice of spectrum. It's a property of error control codes, as used in DAB: that the closer one gets to optimal performance, the sharper the cutoff between working and not working. As range increases: works, works, works, BAM, gone...
If it's optimal, the quality of a digital link will be pretty well perfect up until that cutoff (but no link is truly optimal). DAB's design placed emphasis on more channels rather than longer range, so the point at which DAB cuts out will likely be before the point that FM has degraded to unintelligibly. In theory there can be a region where FM has degraded but DAB is still holding up, but in the name of more channels this region is probably small.
Agreed. DAB reception is very poor in comparison.
It's worse on purpose. They did not even try to be "modern". Here you can read what it's about: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102300_102399/102367/01...
> When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
You'd think that this would be a good scenario for 'hierarchical modulation':
> Hierarchical modulation is particularly used to mitigate the cliff effect in digital television broadcast, particularly mobile TV, by providing a (lower quality) fallback signal in case of weak signals, allowing graceful degradation instead of complete signal loss. It has been widely proven and included in various standards, such as DVB-T, MediaFLO, UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband, a new 3.5th generation mobile network standard developed by 3GPP2), and is under study for DVB-H.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_modulation
Combine that with scalable audio quality:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_SLS
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitrate_peeling
FM is so simple and robust. It should never be turned off.
In the US, our "HD" radio (we don't have DAB) sounds so bad, I end up turning it off and listening to the analog version.
It sounds like they reduced bitrate by pitch-shifting down prior to transmission, and then pitch-shifting back up at playback. Everything just has this metallic ring to it: When I tried the classical station, at first I thought there was bells in the piece they were playing until I realized it was a compression artifact. When I listen to talk, I keep hearing a bell/ringing over everyone's voice.
I know a lot of the newer codecs also sound great (for the car) at low bitrates, so I don't want to go and blame "quantity over quality."
The whole "HD" thing of HD Radio was a deception to begin with. It blatantly played on the understanding of HD as "high definition", when all it actually meant was Hybrid Digital, i.e. you get a digital audio stream that falls back to a simulcast FM with insufficient signal strength or exceeding error correction thresholds.
When I read about it years ago, It was made out to have a very high bitrate (and quality) if the analog FM signal was replaced completely by a digital signal.
AM is even simpler and even more robust. I think we never should have switched it off.
In the US, AM is still very common and there are efforts to keep it that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234871
I wouldn't say it's more robust. One pass under a bridge proves that AM has problems.
It also has lower fidelity.
AM only has lower fidelity because of the low broadcast power and shitty receivers. 80 years it was much higher quality with the huge transmitters and high quality tube radio.
AM sounds painfully awful
That "sound" is partially due to the design of the current AM system. It was built to pack more transmitters into the allocated frequency range.
There are no technical impediments to high fidelity audio because of amplitude modulation. In the past the big limitation was the bandwidth of intermediate frequency (IF) amplifiers in the receivers which were typically tuned for maximum gain and not flat audio band response. The transmitters have flat response out to the legal limits. Radio stations have a monitor receiver that has proper IF audio response and the sound of those are very good.
For a while there was an AM Stereo which sounded much better
And there are some stations in the US still broadcasting in AM Stereo AKA C-QUAM, if you have an AM stereo capable receiver that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-QUAM
So does DAB. It’s way the hell compressed.
Not that I care too much, as I basically only do on demand media these days.
Agree for music. Hard disagree for voice.
Especially in the car! I can’t make out voices on FM at all. But AM, easy.
You should listen to some DAB+ for comparison. I heard that 56kbps can make wonders. /s
That's he-aac so 56kpbs is not that bad, it gets dicey below 32kbps when you need tricks like parametric stereo. But he-aac's spectral band replication does add metallic taste to everything, i would agree
LW is simpler still and incredibly robust. It's a pity it has been turned off.
Long wave is a frequency band just like medium wave. Amplitude modulation is used on both; it's the same technology, LW needs much larger antennas though. FM is often used to refer to a frequency band, but that is actually called ultra-short wave, and frequency modulation is used on it.
LW isn’t a modulation
But AM isn't switched off.
Most European countries have switched off all their major transmitters, or are preparing to switch off the last few that are left. E.g., in the Netherlands, there are now only low-power hobbyist stations, which will remain I think, but have a near-zero audience.
Depends where. In Switzerland it is.
I looked for a source for this but can't find any mention of it.
"Most European countries are now running a reduced AM radio service with fewer transmitters, fewer services and lower power. Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Norway (except Svalbard), Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland have completely closed their AM radio services. Denmark retains a part-time long wave service for mariners. Lithuania has closed domestic AM radio, but retains a medium wave transmitter for international broadcasting. Only Cyprus, Hungary, Iceland and Romania (together with England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Spain) are continuing with a comprehensive AM radio service."
http://frequencyfinder.org.uk/AM_Other_Countries.pdf
This is outdated. Denmark closed its long wave transmitter last year. The biggest hold out is bbc radio 4 and they stopped special long wave programming and the service is only still on the air because it doubles as a digital signal for some power meters.
My new car doesn’t even have an AM tuner
Because it raises the costs (antenna + cable) so the profit is lower.
It sucks though, sounds horrible.
AM was switched off?
Digital audio is also relatively expensive for some people. There are people who in my community who ride around on their bikes listening to fm radio. A monthly data fee could be hard for some.
I have never heard of DAB or DAB+ requiring monthly subscription fees? At least I don't pay any, and I have a DAB+ receiver in my car
Listening to DAB on a cellphone requires a monthly data plan.
You listen to DAB using a DAB radio like you listen to FM broadcasts with an FM radio.
If you’re listening to something on your phone through a data plan, it’s not DAB, but an unrelated streaming service.
Not having a radio receiver in a phone has always been one of those WTF things for me. There have been articles on why iOS doesn't have a radio tuner even those the receiver is there claiming because it would divert users from apple music or whatever. It's always felt like a missed opportunity to me though
The main reason to not have it is that unless you’re out of cellular range or has no data quota left, it’s just worse than just streaming the same stations over the internet, which also offer more content as running FM stations is expensive.
Even though older iPhone baseband chips had FM receivers, you’d still need break it out and deal with the antenna setup, with the approach taken by others requiring wired headset and shenanigans in the headphone port. That’s more BOM, and user resistance to wireless headphones or newer models whose baseband chips cut the feature.
It used to be a somewhat common feature in phones (including smartphones from other brands), but it usually had quite “eh” reception. And with transitions to DAB, the feature becomes unusable without DAB decoders which I’m sure someone is claiming royalties for.
Phones used to have fm receivers! It was common in the early 2010s. They used the headphone cord as an antenna.
Unihertz phones still do (even the tiny Jelly Star)
> Listening to DAB on a cellphone requires a monthly data plan.
Cellphones used to include AM/FM radios.
Personally I think it might be useful to have them for public service uses: perhaps cell network are more robust than a few years ago, but there are still instances when they could be (are) overwhelmed, and a broadcast-only system could be useful in major emergency events.
Cell systems still have the ability to push out a message regardless of how "overwhelmed" the towers are. They'll just drop service to some customers while the higher priority emergency message is broadcasted out.
A cell network doing a one-way broadcast text message to all clients is a solved problem. And honestly, I greatly prefer this way to push out an emergency message than assume I'm tuned to a radio station or broadcast TV, two things I'm rarely doing. I'm way more likely to be listening or watching local or streaming media instead of watching broadcast TV. Or even just not be doing any of that at all. Lots of people I know wouldn't even be able to tune into a broadcast TV or FM radio station outside of their cars.
Hard to have an antenna with wireless headphones.
hard to have an efficient VHF antenna using traditional designs
Smartphones a lot* of antennas, but most target 1/10th the wavelength of FM radio.
I wouldn’t mind if those people blasting FM radio used headphones. I don’t believe it’s because they can’t afford them.
Not a good idea on a bike
I've heard this assertion many times. But after having ridden hundreds (thousands?) of hours wearing headphones, I must conclude that it's a perfectly fine idea. People believe headphones will obstruct your hearing. Some do. Some don't. Wear the ones that don't. It's also possible to set the volume to the same level that it would be from a set of handle-bar mounted speakers.
Switzerland has a national siren network, tested annually, and regularly reminds its citizens "if the sirens sound, turn on the radio to DRS/SRF 1". They've added the swissalert mobile app more recently, but I guess everyone is going to have to buy new radio sets who doesn't have a DAB+ one already.
The reverse scenario happened here in Singapore. It was the first in Asia to introduce DAB in 1999. The national broadcaster MediaCorp then decided to cease DAB transmission in 2011, forcing those who've invested in new DAB equipment to throw them out the window (while many are dual-FM/DAB sets, some more affordable ones are exclusively DAB-only). Interesting that the decision was made to go backwards in technology, likely motivated by economics.
DAB has also effectively been abandoned in Ireland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_in_the_Republic_...)
> the decision was made to go backwards in technology
What is so forward about DAB ?
In theory it sounds excelent. In practice it sounds like crap due to using the lowest bitrate possible.
DAB is optimized for "rights holders". Not for radio stations, not for end users, not for the state. It's designed against everyone but the rights holder / copyrights industry interests.
How so? It's not encrypted or anything similar.
https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102300_102399/102367/01...
That's not the real rightsholder thing, as hardly anyone bothers with scrambled broadcasts; no, the real rightsholder handicap was limiting the bitrate of original DAB so it sounds worse than CDs.
Is this actually used anywhere? To me it feels like DAB and any putative DRM mechanisms have already been basically obsoleted by streaming systems like Spotify.
While DAB is very rough (mp2 at usually under 128kbits) DAB+ is HE-ACC and will sound better than FM even at quite low data rates.
My fav ... part of di radio ... is tha you only he ... ha of the broadc ... whe sign i poor...
It's useless in the car, in my experience on-and-off the last 10 years or so. Too many blackspots (in the UK)
Analog radio and and video signals like VGA, fail way more gracefully and linearly, which is why they're still used in many applications today where rough environments are involved and high availability is desired as a degraded signal is better than no signal at all due to some CRC or handshake failure.
Digital connections have a terrible failure model, it either works perfectly or not at all, with little in between.
In modern datacenters or in radio broadcasting equipment, you can still find VGA connectors or LCD displays using that signal.
The UK is a bad example, as it adopted DAB (without the "+") far too early. DAB uses the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II "MP2" codec which is a very old codec, and while MP2 actually sounds pretty great at appropriate bitrates (256kb/s or higher), it was decided that quantity was better than quality and so the UK has a large number of poor quality, low bitrate, stations. Sometimes in MONO!
DAB+ uses HE-AACv2 which is much better suited to the bitrates that the UK has chosen to use, and in addition has much better error correction, reducing the "bubbling mud" effect that UK DAB listeners are all to familiar with.
The sad truth is that FM actually works very well, and can have extremely good audio quality, but capitalism must ruin all good things. The death of the BBC, as now seems inevitable, will be the final shame.
Are you implying DAB+ existed when the UK launched DAB in 1995...? Or we should have not launched DAB at all and waited?
DAB+ came out in other countries in the mid 00s and was adopted in the UK in 2016 and now we have over 180 DAB+ stations. But notably missing the BBC.
I'm saying that the UK should have done one of the following:
* Recognized that DAB was not capable enough given the number of stations required, and waited.
or:
* Cut back on the number of stations so that the remaining ones could be broadcast at an acceptable quality.
Does DAB really offer better quality? From what I know, stations opt for puny 64kbps streams which sound nowhere near as good as FM can.
In theory, yes, it really can, but as you stated, in practice, no. This is basically the equivalent thing on digital TV between the US and Canada: most US broadcasters tried to pack as much channels as possible (that sometimes digital broadcasts are objectively worse than analog ones because of bitrate starvation) while Canada usually only have a 1:1 correspondence between virtual and physical channels (sometimes 2:1 but there isn't really much more than that).
This is not Switzerland, but the BBC apparently uses 192 kbps only at Radio 3 (their classical music station), while other BBC stations are either 128 kbps or 64 kbps only.
Switzerland uses mostly 64kbit DAB+, by the look of the latest observations on https://www.wohnort.org/dab/switzerland.html?PageSpeed=off
I saw a video a while back (it was since taken down) from a guy with a low power TV station who experimented with broadcasting much more modern video codecs. He experienced some good results with modern "smart TVs" largely because they have good hardware support for various modern video codecs and seemed to handle the streams just fine. He managed to get multiple 4K video streams over standard ATSC 2.0 signaling working on a range of different TV models. It seemed like a neat experiment.
Switzerland uses mostly 64-96kbps as per this outdated(?) list https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_DAB-Sender_in_der_Sc...
That's done on purpose so that they can roll out conditional access / DRM. In order to make people pay for that, they need to be invested in hardware first ( DAB radios ) and suffer from poor quality channels.... DAB is optimized to make money, not to serve the general public.
Same thing with ATSC 3.0.
You can read the industry's claims as to why DRM is needed in broadcast (to ensure authenticity mainly), but you'll have to read between the lines that it's to make broadcast TV impossible to record, ads impossible to skip, and (probably eventually) sweet talk regulators into allowing pay-per-view or paid access "premium" channels, probably leeching off the bandwidth (and quality) of the "free-to-air" channels they are legally a required to broadcast to maintain their licenses.
https://cordcuttersnews.com/the-team-behind-nextgen-atsc-3-0...
Source?
https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102300_102399/102367/01...
An FM receiver is pretty basic, cheap, and easily understood/home-built technology. Does DAB+ require an encryption key, license, or otherwise limited-access component that would prevent people from rolling their own receiver?
No encryption. Manufacturers do have to license HE-ACC, I think (at least in theory; wouldn’t really be any issue for amateurs)
Nobody wants this especially since there are still quite a lot of cars that have old radios.
I thought there was an agreement that we would wait a little longer but for what ever reason the SRG thinks they know better.
Something similar happened with TV broadcasts in the US ~15 years ago. The solution was just to provide an adaptor for free for anyone who wanted one.
They weren't free. They were subsidized and consequently what used to be a $20 converter jumped to $35 overnight because that was how much retailers knew they could milk out of the rebate.
Adapters are not much use on a car, are they?
They are available https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/product-group-tests/88304/best...
Just a matter of time before my state makes it illegal to touch one of those while driving, if they haven't already.
This is the analog (pun) in radio technology of abandoning physical cash and switching exclusively to digital money.
Optimisation, efficiency and monoculture versus redundancy, resilience and diversity.
I understand why the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRF) wants to pull the plug on FM radio. But I think there are still some good reasons to keep it around. FM radio is simple and strong, and it can be heard by a lot of people even in areas with bad internet access. FM radio also comes in handy in emergencies, like when natural disasters knock out other ways to communicate.
>even in areas with bad internet access.
They stop the analog signal, not the whole "air transmission":
>>Those who listen to the radio now largely do so via digital audio broadcasting (DAB+) or the internet
It's literately the first sentence.
Oddly, in Ireland we did the opposite; the last DAB transmitter was switched off a year or so ago (digital radio, oddly, is still available bugs DVB-T2, bundled with the terrestrial digital tv signals, though I’m not sure anyone really listens to it that way).
DAB made little sense in Ireland. The FM figures used to argue for DAB adoption were skewed by a huge captive drivetime audience who were already pivoting to podcasts and live-streams instead of to DAB/Digital stations.
Combine this with cheap and ubiquitous 4G Internet, the introduction of mass audio and podcast streaming services, and the prevalence of smart-home devices at loss-leader prices like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and the writing was on the wall from the get-go.
In short, the National Broadcaster (RTE) were latecomers to DAB to the point where it was no longer deemed necessary by the time it was implemented. Case in point was when RTÉ shut down the DAB infrastructure, but didnt shutter the digital services populating it: RTÉ Gold/2XM/Pulse continue as online streaming services.
The majority of people - even my parents - are now far more tuned in to the likes of Audible and Spotify. When they want e.g. Death Notices or GAA they use a streaming app or the native webcast from the FM station Website.
Synchronous single-infrastructure dependent Audio Streaming is now a use-case in search of a problem for the average consumer, outside of certain niches like Naval/Aviation traffic.
Oh yeah the death notices on the radio. I've never heard anything like that except in Ireland. I haven't thought of that in years.
I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way.
It was a very unique way of using radio though.
As a country we have a bit of a fixation on death. During the pandemic, some studies and news sources started using rip.ie as an input, because, while formal death reporting outside hospitals in Ireland is lax (it's typically done by family if there are no unusual circumstances, can be done up to 12 months after death, and there are no real consequences for not doing it at all), people still get their death notices in the papers, so death notices were far less of a lagging indicator for covid mortality than formal death reports.
(Another way in which this system showed its cracks during the pandemic: presumably because of the flimsiness of the formal system, the CSO bases its population estimates on modelling. This lead to, at one point, the government reporting that 107% of the oldest age cohort had been vaccinated, because the CSO models significantly underestimated how many very old people were still alive.)
TV signals have lot more spare bandwidth. So packing a few audio only channels is not really that much extra work or cost.
It made me sad when I got into amateur radio to learn that SRI had shut down their famous HF (shortwave) transmissions just a few years prior.
But I still listen to podcasts and streaming from RTS/SRF. They do great world news coverage from a kind of detached perspective. Gotta know French or German, for next 6mo until it becomes commonplace to have live transvocalized podcasts.
Interesting. I live near Switzerland and the only time I listen to radio is using FM in my car. I hope this same idea doesn't make it to the country where I live.
I guess this will start to happen everywhere in the EU, now. In Germany it has also already started:
https://www.heise.de/news/UKW-Radio-Schleswig-Holstein-schal...
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation is pulling the plug on FM radio. How quaint.
I'm not a fan of DAB+. The range is less than FM, and the compression artifacts are a real treat. Why not just go back to good ol' analog AM, then? Oh wait, it's been deemed too "rustic" and "unmodern".
FM was a great way to listen to the radio, don't you think? You could actually hear the music without it sounding like a tin can on a string. And don't even get me started on the so-called "HD Radio" nonsense in the States. It's just a way to cram more commercials down our throats and make our radios more expensive.
What's with this obsession with "spectrum efficiency" and "bandwidth management"? Can't we just have a simple, reliable way to listen to the radio without it sounding like it's coming from a broken tape deck?
I still remember when LW was around. That was real broadcasting. None of this fancy-schmancy digital stuff. Just pure, raw signal strength. You could pick it up with a pair of cans and a piece of twine, no problem.
So, yeah, Switzerland, go ahead and pull the plug on FM. See if I care. I'll just use my trusty AM radio and enjoy the beautiful, analog sound of static.
Might be an anti-anti-fragile move…
Does it mean the 88Mhz -> 108Mhz frequency band will go to back the auction block ?
Maybe, when most regions follow suit. Hate the idea of FM broadcasting turning off. Still, would love some ham radio wideband spectrum. Then people driving to work can listen to the likes of me droning on about <insert favourite ham radio topic here>.
Personally I think they should expand community radio wholesale if national broadcasters cannot be arsed.
What's the demand like for that part of the spectrum in Switzerland?
In the US it'd just be gobbled up by another corporate interest; no way that'd go to the amateur service.
In the US more than likely. In the UK I'm not so sure (can't speak to Switzerland) as there is a healthy community radio scene who may have some democratic influence. There are mutterings of trying to close UK FM broadcasting as well in order to force DAB. I'd like to think there would still be some spectrum allocated for that. If not, the pirates would take over - and good luck to them.
This wholesale move away from simple, analogue radio infrastructure (AM/FM/SW radio) is a disaster waiting to happen in the event of a major regional/global catastrophe.
Most amateur organisations would not even think about trying to experiment with WBFM anyway - too obsessed with ultra-narrow digital modes.