Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then.<p>I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too.<p>In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones.<p>They all work and put out sound in sync (nb except the new denon micro system that for some reason must be using digital stage in processing fm meaning the sound comes .5s later). I <i>often</i> leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying.<p>They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country.<p>For the battery powered ones they're <i>at least</i> an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.
OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios. For what? I think this will be the death blow to radio. People will not go DAB if not absolutely needed, they will essentially try to go "internet" directly and thereby eliminating classic "radio". Maybe you'll use the DAB in your car sometimes, but I can't imagine it will happen that you replace every FM radio in your house (alarm clock, kitchen radio, TV, legacy hifi-systems, etc...) with DAB now. In those cases, you'll switch so a full online solution like one of the gazillions internet radio stations. FM is dead with DAB. My prediction: "Radio" will something you'll probably find in cars - but almost nowhere else. The user base will be crippled totally, rendering "classic" radio into something unprofitable, as revenue from ads will go down. But as I am a digital child, I also look forward: being a podcaster now in the right countries could be unexpectedly monetarily interesting.
FM radio in Norway sucked so much because of mountains. Every fjord had its own tiny repeater, but only if there was at least one inhabitant, otherwise you heard nothing. The cell-phone digital network is much more advanced, the antennas are on mountain tops and there is always coverage within few hundred meters.
On one hand, spectrum is a precious resource and no one would ever forfeit it without a mandate. OTOH don't you just love the simplicity of the FM radio? I can say that I've never found one that doesn't work.<p>Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot, I just want to listen to the radio on my way to work. ;)<p>> 'We are simply not ready for this yet'<p>Well, Norway, maybe if you were a big exporter or even importer of automobiles, your legislation would light a fire under some major manufacturers. But you're just not big enough of a consumer.
The article didn't talk about why? It's not as if the FM bandwidth is particularly valuable, being quite a low frequency. Unlike digital tv, there doesn't seem to be a particularly pressing reason to do this; if broadcasters are happy to keep broadcasting on FM, why stop them?
Consensus from a lunch table in Norway: It was stupid to spend money on DAB now, it happens right as people move from radio to streaming. Many will move to streaming on 4G instead of DAB (which seems to have as good coverage or better, at least for me...then consider if the money spent on DAB had been spent on cellular instead).<p>The populist party that kicked it off in the first place is now the only party to oppose it, now that they know it is too late to do something about it...
What do we do with more channels that we can't listen? If you really need a little bit of bandwidth around 100 MHz for other use, you could cut the spectrum from FM radio and still keep it running.<p>The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers. They all have FM receivers. And these days most cars have radio units that are integrated to the car electronics, steering wheel controls etc - so it's not that easy to just get a new radio that fits the hole.<p>If I get rid of FM radio, I will not replace it with DAB. I'll listen to some streaming service over IP.
Sweden narrowly avoided this, there was a very strong drive, but in the end the responsibie minister halted it. One of the few pieces of happy news in later years.
It is a real shame that the US went with the proprietary HD Radio scheme. The devices are so expensive and there hardly are any available. Just now I couldn't even find anything less than $100. What a scam. I feel sorry for all the radio stations that wasted money on this. Would DAB be able to gain ground in the US?
There's a huge marketing / awareness campaign going on right now in Norway to get people to upgrade their FM radios.<p>I wonder if the radio stations will realize too late that they're throwing away their one advantage (ubiquity) and maybe the option some people will choose when the car radio stops working is to not listen to radio at all.
I visited my hometown over the holidays, and the first thing I did after getting into the rental car was tune into the local Alt Rock FM station. The playlists (and most of the DJs) haven't change in the 10 years since high school. I kinda loved it.
I hope AM doesn't end up going the same way too. It would be sad if it wasn't possible to throw a radio together using a few discrete components.
It is a complete and utter travesty perpetrated by politicians who were convinced by snake oil/electronics salesmen of the (highly dubious) superiority of DAB, and now have too much skin in the game to turn back.<p>Personally, I've been working lately on building an ESP8266/VS1053 based webradio into my nice old wooden 1960s radio. I'm using the variable plate capacitor for the AM tuner as input for channel selection, so for all the world it will look like a still-working FM tuner. Total BOM cost will be <$30.
If you're going to take FM radio and slice into a bunch of digital channels, it'd be interesting to make one or two citizens' bands. I know CB is kind of a mess but I like the idea that the music radio in your car could receive and perhaps even transmit on the local band.
Well congrats to the hams in this country. They're going to get a huge bandwidth that others would be envious enough.<p>They could also explain to people that just switching modes isn't going to make reception better. If you're having propagation issues then you'd be much better off working on getting repeaters setup on high mountains.
I wonder how smooth the switch will be (the article says cars are a big problem due to the price). I'd imagine quite a few people won't upgrade their car radio and you'd think...so what radio is way to retro let's just stream stuff and listen to mp3s/ogg.<p>I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what?<p>The biggest issue (for me) is that radio plays an essential part in crisis management. Imagine a long term power outage or some other crisis. With radios it's mostly a matter of keeping stations running and making sure the population knows that a battery powered (or crank powered) radio such as a car radio will work during a power outage. That's one of the few reliable ways of mass-communicating important information during power outages.
The NPR One radio app costs me an extra $20 dollars a month due to high data usage. And NPR gets none of that cash. If my phone had user facing FM tuning I could probably contribute directly to content creators.<p>I wonder if shutting down FM and replacing it with much more expensive mobile data is a conspiracy by cellular carriers?
Sure, why keep something that's cheap and easily accessible operational when you can have something that's easier to monetise, track, and whatnot...
This is all about lobbying politicians. Very hard to understand why they want to set aside separate bandwidth for different sorts of media, when Internet access would provide all we needed.<p>We have digital radio, digital television broadcast, separate emergency frequencies and so goes the list.<p>What about gathering around standard that work and are already in place? What about making cell phone and Internet connectivity more robust?<p>But no. Let's throw billions in taxes down the drain. For instance: The emergency network fails when there's a storm. Then we're back to RHF!<p>From the inhabitant perspective, this is all a power party. A few people with high positions get to make big decisions and pat each other's back. I'm sure the CEOs of the businesses getting the contracts are good at patting backs too.<p>Good thing we already pay so much taxes we don't even notice the difference.<p>Except for the bumpy roads and understaffed elderly homes.
I like that the UK will switch over once usage reaches 50% -- abandoning a huge number of listeners! They should abandon it when it becomes vestigial -- say more than L5K/listener/year or something like that.<p>Clearly money or techno-determinism is at play.
I know I am properly a outlier but how many people on HN actually listens to radio over FM/DAB/Other non IP systems?<p>I dont remember when I last listened to radio. Even in the car the entertainment is one or more of the following from the connected phone:<p>- Streaming or locally stored music
- Podcasts (which may include shows produced by radio stations).
- Audiobooks.<p>At home its the same, either played directly on the playback device (sonos) or from the phone.<p>I really dont see the allure of flow radio, I hate listening to something I have no control over and if there are commercials its even worse.<p>For my sake they could shutdown all radio broadcasts and use the bandwidth for mobile broadband. (Ok, maybe keep a single station running for emergency broadcasts).
I have never liked FM radio. Far too much time wasted fiddling with telescopic aerials.
I've always listened to AM broadcasts in preference.
I don't listen to much radio at all any more except via podcasts.
DAB radio in my car stopped working and it costs £650 to fix. The service guys said they have to replace the whole centre console. As I won't pay that much, it's FM radio or Bluetooth for me.
What they should do is turn off the spectrum a bit each year ranging from the top frequency down. That way people can adjust, stations can move on the dial, and there is no cold turkey. In the US this might mean I could hear my favorite Top-40(tm)songs only 24*60mins/4mins/40songs times a day, (and who knows if I would be willing to buy [obnoxious furniture store ad] furniture any more at that rate) but it would be a resonable way to do it.
It's interesting to note how valuable spectrum is for mobile internet use. Think about the bandwidth taken up by FM radio broadcasting next time your in a city with your phone struggling with sluggish connection.
Some simple math-
1,500 crowns * 2M unequipped cars = 3B crown<p>That's 3B in capital costs (plus the cost of radios in unequipped homes) to save 250M/year. Seems expensive, but not totally out of the realm of reason?
What are there plans for the AM frequency? I rely heavily on my AM radio stations here in Canada to get my daily dose of local/national/international news!!
For more channels? I would've thought a country like Norway would use that bandwidth to make some sort of high-power long-range public-access network.
Don't most smartphones have emergency broadcasts built-in these days? Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car?
As a US citizen, I cannot imagine a world without FM radio. It's almost the only option for in-vehicle audio. I've heard of such a thing as AM radio, but outside of billboards stating that accident information on interstate highways is available via that frequency, I have no connection to it. I've heard pray-tell that NPR broadcasts on such frequencies as well, but I can neither confirm nor deny that.<p>I suspect that Clearchannel and the other one that have effectively bought up monopoly rights to the FM spectrum would fight this tooth and nail.