Getting rid of these older analog radio technologies is short-sighted unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available.
FM (and AM) radio are great technologies. Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better.
In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear). All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion. FM is not without it's warts, but the "errors" are less distracting IMO. They also all suffer from binary operation. They either work or they don't. FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.
Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.
In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or "changed the format" of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.
I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!
According to WP, the station's staff didn't even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.
AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.
The local alt/prog rock music market has never recovered.
I've tried to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely packed with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that's not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.
Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I'm not even sure if new cars I'd by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.
The noncommercial band of the FM dial is a godsend-- college and community radio stations exist in nearly every city, and serve a very special niche in allowing human-curated broadcasts to exist. (No commercials, no repetition)
I'm perhaps a bit biased-- I work as a program director for one of the bay area noncommercial stations (KZSU, 90.1 FM), and help with the Soundtap project.[1]
I think HD support is now just a given, they don't bother mentioning it.
I also feel FM is a superior format to HD in most cases. The compression required by digital to fit into the spectrum is just too excessive for my taste. The only reason the stations are into it is so that they can sell the same commercial time multiple times for each of their digital sub-stations.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, HD radio can transmit up to 300kbps, which is more than enough for extremely high quality sound. If quality is worse it's because stations are choosing to trade off quality for more channels, not because the technology forces it.
They do, they usually jam on several subchannels so the quality is nothing special. Plus, if the signal drops a bit you get stuttering/drop outs/desyncs, not graceful degredation.
I suspect what's actually happening is that they are playing lowest-common-denominator music, which few people are thrilled by, but which more people are interested enough in to stay listening to.
Put differently, there are lots of people that might listen to Latin American music, and very few of us who listen to prog rock. Prog is actively repellent to ~90% of people.
This is a common argument but the numbers don't back it. Radio station listenership had tanked and market penetration of pop music with respect to total sales volume is going down. The most popular song rarely constitutes over 0.5% of sales for a given week. The only growth segments I read about are for NPR and non commercial stations.
The real idea is that they want the most cheap to produce, easiest to sell commercial on format. I don't believe that they care much about who listens to it.
Yeah, I agree, large media companies have tried to commoditize music and chase profits by squeezing blood out of the stone they've created. But like the sibling commont by kristopolous points out, ratings have absolutely tanked, and I personally believe it's because even lowest common listeners want to hear something other than commercials or the same 3 songs all day.
Even people who like Taco Bell don't eat it every meal.
I think a more challenging problem is that with radio rapidly dying, the music publishers still act like they're the prime advertising medium, and that online streamers should be brought in line with the traditional radio model. The industry is a mess and I can't help keep thinking that it's because they brought it on themselves.
I've driven in quite a few remote locations in Norway, and it's very rare not to have a 3g or at least an edge connection.
I can stream music no problem while driving over the mountain between east and west (over Haukeli).
Trying to listen to FM in these areas is a test of patience at best.
Moving to use DAB is a mistake though, they should just remove them all and rely on regular internet transport.
I'm paying 300 NOK(€36) for a 5000 MB/unlimited call/sms/mms within the nordic countries. The 1000 MB package is 200 NOK(€24).
Which is again paid for by my job, but many more have this option than a FM receiver without switching equipment or plan.
I have yet to exceed the 5000 MB limit, but the provider I use also have a 8000 MB option for another 100 NOK.
In comparison, if you order a beer in Oslo you will probably pay 90 NOK for half a liter.
Depends on whether you need a separate carrier plan just for that. Most people already have a decent, unlimited data plan on their mobiles, which at least in Finland start from 5€/month. Although, that only buys you 0.5Mbits connection, so upgrading to 10€ plan for 2Mbits might be required. On the other hand, a separate SIM with no calling or SMS functionality will get you 10Mbits for 10€/month.
Plus the hassle of obtaining a new radio to an old car, so that you can plug your 3G phone to it. (At least around here, most car radios do not even have an input where you could plug your phone's earphone output, and even in 10-year-old cars the radio is an integrated model which is not at all easy to replace.)
"Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better."
Nobody has claimed this, so why are you arguing against it? You've pretended someone has claimed something, and then you argue against that rather than the actual arguments made. This is called a 'straw-man'.
You're like a lunatic, arguing against an imaginary person.
I have read the article. Nowhere does it claim that the reason for this is that FM is simply "old". They believe that DAB is better for particular reasons - choice, they want to reclaim the bandwidth etc. You disagree with that, but it has nothing to do with simply the age of FM.
Nobody has argued that the reason they want to replace FM is that it is old. So why challenge that argument?
DAB typically serves minimal quality (is bandwidth inefficient), often picks up interference from LEDs/modern lightbulbs/low voltage circuits, and receivers are costly, people don't have them, and they use significantly more power than FM.
Interesting. One of the claimed advantages of DAB(+) is that the transmitters use less power. But if that happens by offloading the energy use onto the receivers, that may not be a wise choice.
The worst thing about DAB is how stupid the DAB manufacturers have been prioritizing. 95% of all DAB radios you can buy are $50 plastic piece-of-shit-speakers stuff that you have in your kitchen or bathroom. Even if DAB(+) were to offer better sound quality than FM, you wouldn't be able to discern it. Adding insult to injury, a radio in a fixed location with good wifi coverage doesn't need any of the technical innovations in DAB wrt. elimination of multipath interference etc.
XM is pretty awful, mostly as an artifact of the number of channels they chose to cram into the system.
I was once privy to a document that showed how the 1.5Mbit stream was divided up into the channels. Some of the "better" channels got less than 32kbit/sec.
The whole stream (all channels combined) is only 1.5Mbps? Yikes. I knew it was bad - but not that bad.
I reluctantly pay for XM. I enjoy some of the talk radio stations, but the music quality is sub-par. That said, if I had a $1 for every person that said they loved XM and thought it sounded great, I could buy... well not much but many people I've talked to think the SQ is great.
I think it's worse than: CDs, MP3s over 128kbps, cassette tapes, vinyl records, 8 tracks, and FM. They only think that it's maybe better than in terms of SQ is AM radio, but it still suffers from loads of high frequency distortion that is maddening - especially if you have a high end car stereo. AM doesn't try to be something it's not - there is a roll off starting around 4 kHz, but it's fine for talk radio and music just sounds dull, which is fine. XM sounds "bright" in that it has HF content, but it's distorted and "warbley" for lack of a better word. It sounds like the the HF is passed through a filter of moving water or a fan or something.
I don't recall if it was 1.5mbit for both ensembles or if it was 1.5mbit each (there are actually two data streams that are broadcast by the two satellites to give redundancy and time/space diversity). There's also forward error correction built into the data.
The "warbly" stuff is the artifacing in the AAC decoder. That's how compressed the stuff is. I can hear it and it drives me nuts. Many can't.
Protip: two of the best quality channels are the Preview channel (of course) and the classical music one.
Is there something the US did right which Europe did not? Not sure what that might be. The VSB TV standard here is junk compared to DVB. We're stuck with VSB, because the incumbent broadcasters couldn't see past the few years of the transition period. And it didn't solve the co-channel interference, anyway.
Of course all established engineering fields are incredibly narrow compared to the scope of what software might conceivably do. There are simply no definitions of software fields that have the rigor for such objective evaluations and licensure. And there probably never will be given that the substrate of physical engineering is physical matter with unchanging properties whereas with software it's a ponderous stack of man-made abstractions.
It doesn't mean that programming is in any less need of rigor or that it is any easier than any other form of engineering at scale.
You realize that in most US states, software engineers can now sit for a PE license in software engineering, right? This has been possible in a few states since 2012, when the NCEES started offering the PE license exam in software engineering.
This is the same license that electrical, mechanical, structural engineers get, with the same initial Fundamentals of Engineering exam followed by the subject matter (P&P) exam (usually after verification of a certain amount of experience).
And, if they're Americans, they'll be taking the exam, as opposed to sitting for it, or writing it. (After all, professors or other entities write exams. The whole point is that the students didn't write it, or else they'd know all the answers, now wouldn't they?)
- The initial requirement was for at least of 50% of radio listening to be DAB before January 1st, 2015. This requirement was changed in 2011 to "digital listening", including streaming radio over Internet and DVB-T in the statistic. The actual percentage for listening over DAB is not published individually.
- 25% of new cars sold do not support DAB. Cars in Norway have an average lifespan of 10.5 years.
- The majority of road tunnels do not support DAB, and will not support DAB before the FM network is switched off.
This last point means using radio to contact drivers in case of emergency won't be possible at all, because:
1. The 20% of cars using DAB will not be able to receive anything while inside the tunnel.
2. The 80% of cars not using DAB won't have their radio switched on, as there is no reception.
My problem with this argument is that the FM frequenzy changes inside tunnels in Norway. There is probably a reason for it, but it means that you will have to change to a different frequenzy to continue listening to the same station. In most cases, you will have to read the sign infront of the tunnel to know the frequenzy for that tunnel. In practice, it means you live without radio for the few minutes you are in the tunnel.
I think all these issues will be shadowed by the development of mobile networks. You will plug in your phone, listen to spotify and the navigation will tell you about traffic and accidents.
There was a similar raise of concern in Germany, when the insurances bought the emergency system of the autobahn, which resulted as a non-issue, because shortly after everyone had a cellphone.
But what if there is a natural disaster like a Tsunami (not in Norway of course..) or a storm, or what if Norway is attacked by Sweden. Would a mobile network work in those situations, or would radio be better?
Radio is worthless in an emergency unless there's:
- Someone in the booth. 24/7. No downtime. No autopilot. No sign-offs. No bathroom breaks without someone to cover. No excuses. If the weather gets bad, have at least two shifts in the station. Bring cots.
- A way to get information to the radio station when every other method of communication is down. Satellite is not an option, because Earth stations can be disabled by severe wind or heavy snowfall. Point-to-point microwave is killed by heavy precipitation (rain fade, boys and girls) or widespread blackouts. Blackouts also kill Internet links. That isn't even considering man-made disasters.
- Repeated, serious testing of this stuff, before it's too late, with real consequences for people who fail. And, yes, in this context, having a good reason is failure. Having a good excuse is failure. "Lessons learned" is always, always, always don't fail.
- And, finally, a guarantee that people will hear the message when it goes out, not when their brother's friend's wife's accountant's CPA tells them, and most certainly not over social media. If SMS is more effective than FM in this role, FM has failed at the task.
That's the bare minimum to be taken seriously as an emergency alarm and disaster broadcast medium.
While I take your points, see my other reply, it sounds like the Minot train derailment is being used for anti-radio consolidation propaganda as opposed to a real and useful object lesson about the role of AM and FM consumer radio. The critical details per the Wikipedia article are that the Emergency Alert System was not activated by any of the authorities who could do it, which didn't include the radio stations themselves, and who's listening to the radio at 2:30 am for putative local announcers to do their thing?
I think you're overly focused on immediate emergency announcements, where you should not depend on normal consumer AM and FM radio, vs. in the US systems like sirens and NOAA radios with their alarm system. Local consumer radio is much more useful for follow on information, once people are alerted and desire to find out more information.
> I think you're overly focused on immediate emergency announcements, where you should not depend on normal consumer AM and FM radio
Except this is precisely the claim I was responding to: The idea that consumer AM/FM radio should be preserved for precisely that kind of prompt emergency announcement functionality, and to maintain communications after other communications methods have been knocked out in a severe emergency.
The Minot Train Derailment was a disaster for multiple reasons, as disasters often are, but my point stands: The FM station was unmanned, because it was part of a national network and broadcasting a satellite feed, and the local authorities falsely assumed there was someone there who could break into the programming to deliver an emergency message. The fact the sirens also didn't go off is somewhat beside the point I'm making.
Mobile phones can receive special emergency broadcast messages (for the US see http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-emergency-alerts-wea ). Probably a more effective way of attracting people's attention as well, since we all have a compulsive desire to check our phones the second they vibrate.
To my last point: The FM transmitters inside road tunnels have the ability to interrupt the transmission for emergency announcements. This capability will effectively be lost.
You cannot be guaranteed mobile phone reception inside the tunnel. Coverage is typically done using a leaky feeder, relying on base stations on either end of the tunnel.
Although this perhaps makes sense from a technical, maintenance and cost perspective it's, contrary to the NRK owned radio.no's opinion, an absolute horrible deal for a large part of the users.
«55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio, according to Digitalradio survey by TNS Gallup», which leaves 45% not currently having access to a DAB radio. Many of the having _one_ radio has this in their home and perhaps not in their most important place: the car.
In order to elegantly implement a DAB radio in your car you need to attach a dongle to your window and run cables into a (sometimes) new radio altogether. Whilst this may be a simple procedure for _some_ it's for the vast majority a huge burden - both in terms of time and money (often costing around 3000NOK - 380USD).
It's well and fine that they started the implementation of DAB in Norway in the mid-90s, but it's just in recent times that we've seen cars come with DAB reception by default. They should at least wait until 80-90% of all cars have access to DAB before switching over - which could take I'm guessing up to 10 years.
This is like only supporting Chrome on important governmental sites - which would rightly cause an uproar on HN. Radio should be about accessibility and content, not the medium - which should change naturally and over time.
The UK is in a roughly similar position, but our govt is unlikely to switch off FM until 2020-ish at the earliest (was 2015, then 2018... now "whenevs").
It's sad to consider how governments foisted DAB on listeners exclusively for the benefit of state broadcasters - the list of fails is extensive here: DAB gives you demonstrably worse reception, poorer sound quality, more expensive hardware, added costs to replace old hardware, added costs to run (4x power consumption), etc.
The magic carrot of 'more channels/ more choice' thing never happened either: thus, a bum deal all round.
I would guess the upside for broadcasters (cheaper infrastructure, more listeners) may have been significantly overstated too.
I remember a few years back being dismayed when I plugged my brand new DAB radio into my Kill-A-Watt and rather than register nothing like the FM radio that it was substituting, it was showing ~ 4 W, going up to ~ 6 W when playing.
Not enough is being said about this, there are still no really energy efficient receivers and on a per-station basis DAB is also a lot more expensive to transmit. DAB only becomes energy efficient at the transmitter end because it's always transmitting a multiplex of many stations.
A few years ago I bought a battery-powered DAB radio so I can listen to Radio 4 in the bath. It will zip through a set of high capacity AA NiMH cells in around 2-3 weeks, the old FM radio used such a small amount of power that Alkaline cells made more sense and would consume around two sets per year.
Thankfully the "more channels/ more choice" actually happened in Norway. However - apart from that, DAB is a bad deal.
Right now it's become a typical "we can't stop right in the middle, so let's continue forward full speed"-situation. So much has been invested in DAB in Norway that stopping the transition would be just as expensive, if not more so.
Norway is using DAB+, which is based on the modern HE-AAC codec. We were going to use the old MP2-based DAB, but switched to DAB+ pretty quickly.
Right now most channels are being transmitted in either DAB or DAB+ (DAB+ devices can receive both), but DAB+ is the future and DAB is going away. It's going to suck for the early DAB adopters though, who's soon going to be left with incompatible radios.
Most phones in Europe* (not just smartphones) can get FM radio, because including it adds nothing to the cost. DAB, by contrast, costs too much and uses too much power to be included in phones.
So, Norway is not just giving up on car users, it is also giving up on mobile phone users, ie the next generation of potential radio listeners.
* Most US smartphones also include FM radios, because it's a standard element of radio (FM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) chips. However, FM is often disabled by the manufacturer (eg Apple) or by the carrier.
Which is almost always there, because phones need to sell in -- and to work in -- hundreds of different countries. The US is not typical of the rest of the world.
Actually the vast majority of unbranded/generic Android smartphones - which make up a significant userbase in East Asia - have FM radios. Some of them have FM transmitters too.
As the grandparent comment says, it's because the combo IC includes the functionality; here's an example of one that's quite common:
Many of these handsets are based on the MTK reference platform, and since that includes the FM radio app, the companies that produce them see no reason to remove it - after all, it allows them to have "FM radio" as one of the bullet points in the feature list.
Honestly, the customer doesn't care if the chip supports it. The out-of-the-box experience of´the vast majority of mobile phones (excluding Lumia and some dumb phones – I forgot those) is simply: no FM radio.
Android user here (with a carrier phone). It has FM radio. As does every one I've ever seen. It's so basic that it's a widget for the homescreen rather than an app. This may be why you missed it...
Actually, the vast majority of mobile phones do have built-in FM. That might not be true in the US, but it is certainly true of the the vast majority of mobile phones worldwide.
That is strange. Fairly close to Norway, the market is different: I would say almost all phones in Finland have FM radios, except iPhones. Lumias have them, most Androids have them (except Galaxy S4), and all the Nokia S40 and Symbian phones have them.
Yeah, it's kind of surprising that they didn't mandate inclusion of DAB-capable radios in cars years earlier. Had they done that, it seems like the consumers would be much more prepared for a hard switch. This sounds like it's going to be pretty disruptive.
That seems pretty similar to the situation when analog sattelite TV was shut down. You always have a big amount that will only switch over when the old standard gets shut down. Why else should they if the old standard is good enough for them?
Do you actually think people will buy a new 15.000+EUR car just to get a digital radio in it? Most of reasonably modern cars don't really have user replacable headunits (and even if you do replace it, you usually lose all stalk and display functionality).
> Radio should be about accessibility and content, not the medium - which should change naturally and over time.
That is actually the main argument in favor of DAB. The FM space in Norway only has space for 5 nationally broadcasted channels, DAB has space for 40 (22 already used).
> The FM space in Norway only has space for 5 nationally broadcasted channels
This is not correct. Norway has just as large an FM segment as every other country in the world and could have just as many channels. They simply manage the spectrum questionably. DAB+ will not help that.
This isn't like a full blown counter-argument, but a pattern I like to look for whenever there's debate on some kind of public policy change is if the 'anti' side is predominately an argument for the status quo of car culture.
To me this is the real climate change denial-ism. Not the abstract argument over whether its real or not, but the steady stream of personal and political decisions people make to prioritize car culture over X.
You can get single-chip FM radio ICs for <$1. What's the cheapest DAB radio IC at the moment? Looking at what DAB involves there seems to be at least an order of magnitude more complexity.
FM is not nearly as simple to receive compared to AM (are they switching that off anytime soon...?), but I think the cost of receivers is a big factor in broadcast applications - affordable receivers is what made radio popular in the first place.
They are transmitting public radio from Ingøy in Finnmark on 153 Khz. This is long wave transmitter to cover the Barents sea. And Svalbard/Spitsberge we can find a mediumwave transmitter on 1485 Khz.
Even Svalbard/Spitsbergen is a part of Norway - FM and AM will continue on this islands.
After a natural disaster or extended power outage, all that digital technology isn't going to reach anybody. When I was a kid all I needed was a crystal radio to pick up broadcasts with no power source.
Please elaborate for those of us who are not radio engineers. Why would this frequency band not be useful for 4G data? And what might it be useful for instead?
First of all, the 46/LTE require some bandwidth for upload and download. The lowest bandwidth for LTE is made to match the frequency spacing for DAB (It's actually prepared to replace DAB) with 1,4 MHz channels. FM slots for broadcast is regulated as slots with 100 kHz.
A slot with only 100 kHz bandwidth will give you modem speeds, like 24,4 bits/s. So there's just not revenue to make so small speed for modern broadband networks since everyone need to share the channel.
The other issue is that the band 88-108 MHz have so big coverage, so there will be problems with the cell spacing.
So 4G via FM is not a business case. However, the DAB channels are already planned for 1,4 MHz LTE. So guess what will happend in the near future?
NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, has actually been one of the biggest pushers of DAB in Norway. Their main public argument is that DAB provides space for many more channels, although their main motivation is probably their own massive cost savings of only producing digital radio.
For those saying "why not replace it with 3G/4G", this makes absolutely no sense
Radio is an unidirectional broadcast. One transmitter, several clients, no upstream communication. Simple receivers. Limited bandwidth
If you want to use Spotify on your phone that's great, but that's a different service than radio.
"It's so much less energy efficient than current FM radios", not necessarily, yes, FM receivers (the receiver part) use very little energy, but consumption will probably go down as well with new receivers.
Still, the issue of shutting it down seems like a strong case of "just because"
This makes sense for me to broadcast via 4G/3G. Because transmission via internet gives you access to awesome big data. And you're able to track your listener in more detail.
Radio broadcast will never be able to compete with Facebook and Google without big data in the future.
Sure, because requiring a complex receiver and using separate bandwidth for each customer makes more sense than a single allocation of approximately 200kHz for all clients (FM bandwidth) because of marketing and big data.
DAB is a good replacement for what radio essentially is, not for "listening music" which, while is a use case of Radio, it's not related to the technology.
It's fairly mainstream in Australia, at least in Metro areas. Rural areas have a mix of DAB, FM, and AM (with AM being the default for those living way outside of metro boundaries)
The BBC has radios 1, 1Xtra, 2, 3, 4, 4Extra, 5Live, 5Live Sports Extra, 6Music, World Service, Asian Network, and the BBC local services all on DAB. Radio 3 (love music and the arts) uses best quality, others use eiter lower quality or mono or both.
It's probably a good idea to leave old technology behind. But I was surprised to see that the new technology is linear digital radio, instead of using 3G/4G/internet to transmit 'episode' like radio.
Linear radio is an artifact of the transmission medium. I'd guess many won't bother with it when most of Norway is already draped in internet access.
We should fix multicast to help make decisions like this easier. Right now each additional IP-streaming listener is an incremental cost on the broadcaster - radiating broadcast has a huge advantage here, which proper multicast would remove.
Outside a few niches (zeroconf, IPv6 SLAAC, financial data distribution) in closed environments, I don't believe we ever reached the point of figuring out how to handle Internet-sized multicast deployment.
Not sure what the state of the art here is, but IIRC multicast introduces significant extra state into every router and switch involved, and with limited ability to control who is able to transmit to a multicast group.
On the radio network side, I don't think IP multicast has any specific support in e.g. LTE, so even if a mobile client could subscribe to a group its bandwidth usage over the air would be equivalent to a unicast stream. Guess this was omitted for the reasons from the previous paragraph.
LTE has something called multicast but AFAIK it's totally unrelated to the IP/Ethernet concept.
edit: whoa, apparently 802.11 networks handle multicast properly - stations don't generate layer 1 ACKs for reception like they handle unicast traffic. There's a ton of cool stuff you could build with this on a LAN!
But if you have the transmitters, "linear radio" (ie radio) is cheap and green. You can add as many users as you like at no extra cost.
Streaming internet delivery, by contrast, consumes finite and expensive mobile phone bandwidth. And if you're listening to "linear radio" as distinct from a service like Pandora, consumes bandwidth to absolutely zero benefit.
FM radio also consumes finite and expensive bandwidth. The difference is that it consumes it at 100% utilization 24/7, rather than using it intelligently. The reason there's no extra cost as you add users is simply because you're paying the full cost for all potential users from day one.
Even consuming "linear radio" over a data connection has a substantial benefit over something like FM broadcast, namely that you can support far more variety in the same area. FM is limited to, what, a few dozen channels in a single urban area? Maybe a couple hundred if you add HD radio? Streaming over a data connection can support hundreds of thousands of different stations, instead of forcing people to choose from twenty examples of the least common denominator.
What else are you going to use the VHF band for? There's no current demand to re-use the FM spectrum, and smartphones etc are in the UHF spectrum. Even if you could do something useful with the spectrum, it would still be a problem because FM is a global standard and isn't going away any time soon....
The UK has no plans for the FM frequencies except to keep using them for FM broadcasting. The difference is that, after the switchover, they'll be local instead of national FM radio stations.
There's also close-to-zero demand for large numbers of radio stations (most people only listen to two or three), and such "variety" is inordinately expensive.
Broadcast is never going to compete with Spotify, Pandora etc for personalized radio.
> You still need linear radio for things like emergencies.
If radio is going to be for emergencies, make sure it's guaranteed to work in emergencies:
- Mandate local control. No more networks piping music in over a network line. Network lines go dead, and then where is your radio station? More to the point, if there's no one in the booth, there's no way to get someone to tell everyone else there's an emergency. This has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
- Mandate that people be in the radio booth 24/7. No more late-night autopilot, and certainly no sign-off. Have cots or similar if the weather starts to get bad, so multiple shifts can stay at the station. (Hospitals already do this.)
- Mandate that radio stations have their own generators. Multiple redundancy. No excuses.
- Create a way to get information to radio stations even if all other information transmission infrastructure is down. Because that is what we're talking about, right? Radio as an emergency last-ditch information transmission medium? Satellite communications can get jammed by bad winds blowing Earth stations around, point-to-point microwave is killed by serious snowfall, and this isn't even considering man-made emergencies.
So, unless you do that, you're just playing at being an emergency service. That represents the bare minimum to be taken seriously.
Ah, I can see I sort of assumed that, given that I was born, raised in and have retired to an area a hair's breath from the US Tornado Alley, as we were recently reminded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado. We're deadly serious about Civil Defense, and at least the main news/talk station has what's needed, is for example always on the air live with useful info when there's a Tornado Warning.
On the other hand, even if all the things you list aren't in place, if you have the basic infrastructure including massive penetration of receivers you can jury rig the rest given a little time and luck.
I used to think so too, but what you really need (or want) are personalized emergency messages. Already they do this with e.g deaf people who can receive the info on SMS.
Imagine that instead of some message on the radio (which you may or may not hear) or a single alarm noise which tells you nothing beyond the existence of an emergency you received a push notification telling you exactly what the issue was, how it would effect you (e.g you don't have a car so here is where the bus stops for the evacuation busses are), and anything special you needed to know. You could make this infinitely personalised.
Nothing like this is possible with linear radio, which can only give you general information, or specific information that is unlikely to be relevant for you.
I think your personalization scheme would never work in the real world of inefficient at best government bureaucracies (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&sour...). Besides the raw fact of an alert, it would have to e.g. note in real time where I am to send an appropriately tailored message.
I think linear radio still has its place, like linear TV. If you want full control over your playlist, just use a podcasting app and hook it into the aux port of your stereo.
As a norwegian station that need to close on the FM band, we're very clear that this will damage the commercial radio sector in Norway.
First of all: Commercial radio will die, however in Norway they will die first. Commercial radio is not able to sell big data on conventional FM, DAB and AM services.
Facebook and other services using the Google PREF are able to give exact personal commercials on a very specific local level. Conventional broadcast radio can't beat this. UNLESS the broadcasters goes pure play. Broadcast radio do send unicast streams, and have still not made it possible to create revenue from it, even you can track what the listener looks like and know his needs are.
With the US for some reason behind the proprietary HD Radio with DRM instead of any kind of DAB open standard, I think we can rest assured that analog FM broadcast isn't going away anytime soon.
FM (and AM) radio are great technologies. Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better.
In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear). All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion. FM is not without it's warts, but the "errors" are less distracting IMO. They also all suffer from binary operation. They either work or they don't. FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.