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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:01PM
Another Wikipedia page explains this a little bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio [wikipedia.org]
I didn't find it very clear. BUT :Apparently there are a multitude of different standards involved around the world.
So we are in for the same clusterfuck we went through with CDMA, TDMA and FDMA cdmaOne CDMA2000 WCDMA, on Cell phones/ Radio manufacturers are going to face a geographically fragmented market.
Also DAB can be carried on top of AM or FM channels, and on the few stations that carry DAB, the DAB portion might only be available over 10% of the range. So that presents another hurdle for manufacturers and another delay for adoption.
As for combining signals from multiple repeater towers, I've read that doesn't work very well, because a broadcaster's various repeaters sites often have too much delay, and not all (or even most) of the repeaters are DAB capable, and too widely spaced.
TFA point out that this is only for Norway's national radio system. (I don't know if anything else exists in Norway). So they are in a unique position to impose this cut-over.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:03PM
Sounds like the GGP is thinking of ATSC in the USA.
Back when the switchover from NTSC happened, in sci.electronics.design we had a guy that lived in the mountains who noted that if a plane flew over he would lose 5 minutes of his movie.
(ATSC has essentially zero tolerance for multipath.)
If clouds rolled in, he would lose the rest of the evening's broadcasts.
Other folks in remote areas that could previously get snowy reception now got nothing.
Ones and zeros are great--as long as your ones are all above the logic threshold.
The protocol the USA adopted seems to have been chosen by the cable TV industry.
Now, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if digital radio in the USA has been done just as badly as TV was.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:09PM
Not just around the world, also along in time, at least in Germany: Not too long ago I was glad that I didn't yet buy a DAB radio. That's because the radio station announced that it would update to the newer and bettter DAB+, which of course is incompatible with the old DAB radios.
I think it's all about planned obsolescence. After all, in the past, they could take a TV standard designed for black/white transmission, and then add colour, then add text information (Teletext), then add 16:9 broadcast, and all that in a way that the decades-old B/W TVs could still receive the broadcast and perfectly display it in 4:3 black and white, with black bars on top and bottom. Similarly, they could add stereo to radio broadcasts without making all the mono radios obsolete.
Now I understand that the change from analog to digital is necessarily disruptive. However updating a digital format? That should be easier than improving an analog format without breaking backwards compatibility. Actually, I've heard in some broadcast the claim that they didn't make it backwards compatible because they would have had to compromise on quality if they had. I don't believe it; even if breaking backwards compatibility should indeed have enabled a slight quality improvement (which 99.9% of all listeners won't hear anyway), I strongly doubt that was the reason.