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Norway to be First Nation to Switch Off National Analog FM Stations

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the digital-killed-the-fm-star dept.

"gewg_" writes:

The Government of Norway announces

[April 16], the Ministry of Culture announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making [a] historical move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels. With DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and digital radio, listeners will be provided with more radio channels and greater diversity in content.

[...]The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.

[...]Switch-off starts in Nordland county 11th January 2017 and ends with the northernmost counties Troms and Finnmark [13th December] 2017.

Official announcement in Norwegian. Also covered at Ars Technica.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:24PM (#173613)

    I regularly use DAB in the the UK. Yes bit rate is low, but my experience is that you get better quality than FM. Although this is a slight apple to oranges situation as with FM you end up with audible white noise on the track where as with DAB you get digital compression artefacts. There is also alot more space for broadcast channels.

    It probably is worth saying that I am not overly worried about audio quality as I mainly listen to talk radio and mostly from the BBC (R4/R5/R5SX). Most of my music comes from CD or the Internet and I will only occasionally listen to R6.

    As for all or nothing, my experience of this is that its true, if the signal is losing slightly more than the ECC technology can handle then you have a horrible garbled noise (similar to the noise you get when you mpg123 at a directory containing cover art). If the signal is much to low then you really do get nothing. The other issue is that the covered areas are quite small and that rescanning in a new area takes a long period of time (maybe due to old hardware), this to me makes it not really practical for usage in cars. But then if you want to listen to Music why not use your own collection in the car.

    For my purposes I think I would be happy with just AM (LW) and DAB. Yes FM sounds better than AM and is more robust than DAB. But as a medium point it does not really service my needs. Plus in a post apocalyptic situation I could build a LW receiver from things I find lying around, from memory ;-).