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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:49AM
Do they plan on selling subscriptions to these radio stations? Or make it harder to operate a station without a license?
In an emergency, not many will have the technology or expertise to begin broadcasting digital. Lots of people can build their own analog radio station (short range) within a few hours.
Maybe they want this to become a standard so that all radio has to be converted to this nonsense. I never understood why digital radio was necessary, other than the "many stations in the same bandwidth"? Back in the 90's they wanted to broadcast digital Shortwave, which was ridiculous to even think of. That is because people who really need listening to shortwave do not have the means to receive digital.
Or maybe they want "officially approved" chips to be able to decode these channels. So that in the near future, your radio will spy on you. The circuitry will be too complex to check for spyware. With homemade analog radio, you cannot do spying, and cannot tell who is listening to what.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:57AM
Your radio would need a back channel to do any spying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:36AM
Quite easy with a short-range transmitter sending beacon signals (even when powered off ?).
It can listen for certain words in a conversation and keep a record of the last five minutes (30 minutes, 120 minutes...) on a circular buffer. If certain words are heard by the radio, it sends the beacon, so "law enforcement officials" can break down your door and confiscate the evidence (your radio). They are doing the same with mobile phones, so why not radio?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:09PM
They're only converting FM. In that situation you'd almost certainly want to use AM.