The NICAM Codec replacement project
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
/I was half expecting the article to outline how a box full of 80s technology had been replaced with a Raspberry Pi!
The Parallella computer, which looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi, has a Xilinx Zynq chip similar to the one in the BBC's new codec. So it's almost true.
http://store.digilentinc.com/zedboard-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc...
Edit: found an old breakdown here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Expenditure
Seems like their whole technology department has a budget of £175m
Page 32:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwewor...
I'll be honest, I had no idea all of this goes into radio. I thought there were just, err, towers?, that broadcast... radio waves, and that was kind of it? I mean, I knew on some level it had to be a tad bit more complex than that, but you never see or hear about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radio_4 (C-f nuclear)
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchest...
"Secret orders to the captains [of the nuclear subs] say that these deadly instructions are to be opened and acted upon only if the submarine cannot tune in to Radio 4’s Today programme for a given number of consecutive days. That is a reliable sign that Britain has been hit by a nuclear attack."
This may have been true in the past (although really no official confirmation has ever been given), but it most probably is not true anymore, as the valves of the 198 kHz transmitter at Droitwich are of a design that is not available anymore and there is a limited supply left; when that is depleted, the transmitter will shut down.
Although there are claims otherwise, see the note at the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch#Transmitter_O...
Of course, Clear Channel also has lots of robot stations in many markets in the country, which seems like it might approach similar complexity. However, of the few I've experienced, Clear Channel don't handle the complexity well and there's nowhere near the BBC's level of professionalism: they'll overlap commercials and songs for the entire duration, drop off the air (no signal) or broadcast dead air for 15min at a time ...
There's been a fair bit of change over the past decade, resulting in a lot more network programming and automation amongst stations established prior to 2000 or so. Core programming hours can be 7am-6pm, with local presenters, news, sport, traffic and weather, but that's it. Post-2000 stations seem to be a lot more local, they only appear to serve larger cities - smaller towns are stuck with carbon copy stations. Specialist and talk radio stations are virtually non-existent.
It sounds like Clear Channel's problem is with automation and production. It's really not that hard to automate a station such that it sounds like it's being produced live. I would take a guess that they're using some early 90s - maybe even 80s - tech to drive their automation.
One thing you've got going for you in the US is local TV. It's something that's only just started to be done in the UK and it's pretty amateurish stuff. I can't see it succeeding - wrong era and stations exist on their own channels, rather than as network affiliates.
As part of making the unit, we had to ensure it complied with all the relevant European directives so that it could be CE marked. We had the Codec tested for both safety and EMC.
Interesting, I thought this wasn't required for internal use; probably the BBC corporate structure means it no longer counts as "internal".
On "Radio Teleswitch":
[Droitwich] transmitter uses a pair of obsolete metre-long valves which are no longer manufactured anywhere in the world.[1]
In October 2011, the BBC admitted that the Droitwich transmitter, including Radio 4's longwave service and Radio Teleswitch, will cease to operate when one of the last two valves breaks, and no effort would be made to manufacture more nor to install a replacement longwave transmitter.
This is like the Domesday Book (1980s interactive multimedia system on Laserdisc): high-tech and sui generis at the time it was built, but eventually uniquely obsolete.
The BBC itself is very much a valve-and-laserdisc organisation in a Google world. We huddle round the warm glow, concerned that eventually some vital element will give out due to lack of money and the whole enterprise will give up.
Periodically someone comes up with the idea of shutting down analog FM radio. This is politically inconceivable as half the country has ancient radios that were tuned to Radio 4 in 1967 and have never played any other station (an exaggeration, but only a small one).
With respect to EMC and safety it is absolutely in their best interest to conform, not merely out of a bureaucratic obligation but out of a need to minimize any interference from or to other equipment housed nearby.
Radio Teleswitch stuff is cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
Fascinating stuff.
to allow electricity suppliers to switch large numbers of electricity meters between different tariffs by broadcasting an embedded signal in broadcast radio signals
I believe that operating a rogue transmitter in a licensed band would get you located rather quickly - even though the tech itself may not necessarily be secure, there are other enforcement mechanisms.
Seems a complicated way to do something - doesn't Economy7 operate between fixed times overnight?
I wonder if they can cut power using the transmissions - seems like something that could be used for emergency control of demand in times when the National Grid has problems.
(As for power cutting, that seems unlikely - the system is in place to provide larger power consumption when base production exceeds the load. Around here, the basic low/high rate info is provided by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_management#Ripple_control , which needs a not-really-smart power meter, but runs on top of the power line, obviating the need for a side channel)
Disclaimer: I've worked for a smart metering manufacturer.
The obvious benefit for a malicious person would be to set their meter to the cheaper tariff by replaying the signal.
It wouldn't need to be a powerful signal - if you were broadcasting right next to the meter even a few milliwatts would be enough. Build a faraday cage around the meter to be sure! Just remember to dismantle it before the meter reader comes round.
I'm surprised BBC is not only willing to make custom hardware, but custom RTL design as well.
I'm curious what the failure rate of the FPGA will be, I mean they are more susceptible to soft errors than CPUs or ASICs. Maybe BBC will fund making a custom ASIC :-) Well I see two systems, maybe they are redundant that way.
Why not make the project open source? Put it up on github.
FPGA makes sense for this application. It can always be re-flashed.
I checked, Zynq-7000 has this capability: http://www.xilinx.com/products/intellectual-property/sem.htm...
I wonder if they're using the Zedboard or the actual 7000 soc.
I'm guessing that the initial build was exactly this. Maybe the equipment is highly specialised for the UK, and other countries have their own standards?I imagine these custom standards are hard to just rip out and replace. It is also hard to convince a bunch of engineers who know a set of tools, and proprietary formats and hardware to change to something they don't know, with something that is so critical to a nations infrastructure.
edit: Here's the video I had in mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51F7zNWqlgM I guess it's boring without understanding the audio :)
There's more on his channel
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." - Futurama
I'm surprised, I thought in the UK these kinds of taxpayer-funded projects were required to be open source.
In any case, it's too bad. I was not familiar with the NICAM codec up to now, but I'm sure that software and hardware plans would have been very useful to some developing countries, many of whom apparently also use NICAM in their state-owned broadcast companies.
There is no law, afaik, and even the BBC has commercial interests. iPlayer has never been open-source, for example.
The BBC has obligations in terms of content reach and content quality, but they're not particularly bound to specific ways of achieving those targets (beyond some stuff about not abusing their position in commercial terms). Actual engineers are mostly pro-OSS and try hard to push for it internally, but they have legal obstacles similar to any other company.
unsigned int epoch;If you look at the photo of the back of the unit, you see a lot of very wide D-Sub sockets that these ribbon cables seem to connect to, so the unit is meant to connect to a bunch of other things. Actually, the need for these sockets seem to account for most of the size of the unit, the box appears pretty empty.
Also, I'm willing to bet a place like the BBC has boxes filled with spare PATA cables and 16MB SIMMs and 8 GB internal hard drives, and maybe even a room with a bunch of dusty 17" CRT monitors in it. And sometimes, rather than fill out a purchase order, one of the engineers descends into the hoard, returns with a cobbled-together frankenserver, and installs NetBSD on it.
So they might actually be PATA cables using PATA connectors, but the signal between cards is not ATA.
Random BBC-related anecdote: the Cambridge University computer lab had, up to 1999, an info TV in the lobby driven by a 20 year old BBC micro in Teletext mode. This was apparently because it had an extremely powerful video output (more so than modern hardware) and the display was at the other end of 50m coaxial cable.
It lasted a few years past 1999 - it was still in service for some time after I returned in 2002.
You can easily see from the pictures that the ribbon cables are different widths. It looks like every ribbon connects a PCB to a connector on the backplane, most of them D-subs. The photo of the backplanes as installed show that most of the connectors aren't even being used.
By coincidence, the large-sized cables have 40 conductors. The medium ones have 25 or 26, and the small ones have 15 or 16. Those are all standard sizes for ribbon cable, and you can likely buy new cables of the correct sizes off the shelf for less than $10 each, or make them yourself at 20% the price or less.
In comparison to the overall cost of engineering the box, the ribbon cables are just a drop in the well. Nevertheless, about 12 of the ribbon cables in the box could theoretically be replaced by old PATA cables and 35 million people would still never know. The potential problems would be that some ATA cables block pin 20 as a mechanical key, they would be longer than strictly necessary, and ribbon cables are obnoxiously effective antennas.
The 40-pin ribbon cables as installed could almost certainly be used as very short PATA cable replacements, with a little mechanical modification of the connectors.
If you had to connect 40 low-speed signal pins from one board to another, you'd do it as simply and cheaply as possible. Serializing them doesn't gain you much of anything, other than complexity.
Some of those ribbon cables could be carrying serial signaling on some lines but to get it all on one smaller cable with fewer signaling lines like SATA you'd need to mux/demux the data on each end which would add expensive chips to save money on cheap cables.
It could work if there were a subtitle. "35 million people didn’t notice a thing: BBC Radio's NICAM Codec replacement project". I dunno. But it is (or should be) very important that the title actually informs you as to what the article is about. "35M people didn't notice a thing" doesn't tell you anything at all.
Edit: Upon further consideration I may have been a little harsh. This is really a blog entry more than an "article" per se, and I suppose that's fine for a blog post title. The problem comes when we link to it from somewhere else, e.g. HN; we need the additional context.
That's a small example of what I mean, not the full totality of the threat space.
Building more readership makes them that much more difficult to cut funding to, in a variety of ways (more people to get outraged if the government tries, more evidence to show the government that they are worth the money, etc.). Clickbait headlines create more readership. We may prefer that to be false, but it's obviously not. From there the logic is simple, almost inexorable.
Being government funded does not mean you get to ignore funding issues, it just changes how you play the game. There is no source of unconditional funding in the world.
"Make the most creative and distinctive output;
Innovate online to create a more personal BBC;
Serve all audiences; and
Improve value for money through a simpler, more efficient, and more open BBC. "
The actual Royal Charter, http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/h..., at Section 4 puts quite succinctly what the aims are:
"The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows—
(a) sustaining citizenship and civil society;
(b) promoting education and learning;
(c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence;
(d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;
(e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK;
(f) in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television."
I love many aspects of the BBC but sadly not their news output anymore.
(Sorry I realise this has very little to do with the R&D article.)
When I was young the BBC was always seen as pretty left wing (it certainly wasn't at it's inception though) it seems pretty conservative (and sensationalist) right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
Add things like the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal, and the ongoing threat from the conservative government to turn the BBC into the equivalent of America's PBS (irrelevant on the political landscape, lacking financial heft, and in close to nonexistent viewership) and you have a recipe for a neutered public news broadcaster too afraid to do anything meaningful.
In my eyes, the biggest problem with the BBC isn't bias, but that they're terrified of seeming too biased, and as a result they're wishy-washy in ways that ironically makes them seem biased.
E.g. the left will accuse them of being right wing because they don't write in more critical terms about the governments willingness to deal with the Saudis, while the right will accuse them of a left wing bias for not writing in more critical terms about Chavez, and so on. Similarly they're often accused of bias for not reporting something, or very carefully reporting something, that either side believe to be fact, but where there's not (yet) actual firm evidence. Of course, if done "against" just one side, this too would be actual bias, but the BBC appears to be pretty consistent about it.
So we're left with reporting that is rarely very biased, but often exceedingly unsatisfying for everyone.
I'm not saying there's no bias - I don't believe that would be possible. But I do think that the allegations of bias against the BBC tend to be wildly exaggerated.
If we read about articles on key escrow or actually anything about cryptography and surveillance in general, we will find it hard to see BBC is accurate (neutral is not the same as accurate because to be neutral about anything -- and here comes Godwin's law -- involves saying that there was a legitimate excuse governments to act in a way that is not beneficial to millions of its citizens. Anti-terrorism rhetoric is way overboard and news outlets like BBC are fully on the bandwagon (although thankfully much less so compared to CNN, Fox News, and other low lives). Honestly, I think our fear of terrorists has caused more damage to the world economy than all the "acts of terror" combined. Ordinary people should not be afraid or even mindful of "acts of terror" in their daily life any more than they need to be afraid or mindful of a meteor shower hitting them in the head. Everyone goes over the top with "security precautions" because they don't want to be seen as doing nothing. The point here is BBC does not preserve this neutrality at all. I bet even CNN and Fox could do better if they were organizations that has their funding guaranteed, as opposed to being under the mercy of its advertisers. Sorry but what BBC does is nothing exemplary for someone in its shoes.
I didn't suggest they were exemplary at all. On the contrary, I criticised them for not doing a proper job because they're worried about coming across as biased.
They've chosen to deal with criticism of bias by essentially trying their utmost to never say or do anything controversial, but the nature of the real world is that a lot of the most important journalism necessarily steps hard on someones toes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/0...
It reminds me how satellite radio was supposed to be "mp3 quality" whatever that meant. Everytime I rent a car with SiriusXM, my god, the sound quality is horrible. Its like they're using those early postage-stamp sized quicktime videos from the dial-ups days. Yet people still subscribe in vast numbers.
Why didn't they use that title?
BTW, I agree with your edit. An R&D blog shouldn't be held to the same standard of journalistic excellence as a reputable news source, even if it's the BBC's blog.
>>The NICAM distribution system also carries the RDS data. This will enable the radio in your car to automatically retune when you can get a better signal from a different transmitter. It will also display the station name (for example “Radio 1”) and the current song name (for example “Now Playing: Coming With You by Ne-Yo”). RDS will also indicate when a travel announcement is being made on BBC local radio so that a radio can switch to the travel announcement at the right time.
So anyway, no, you did the only thing you could do. Anything else would have been degraded to the current information value by mods anyway.
We've changed it to what the article says it is about in the second sentence.
I don't know about that. The clickbait title did its job well and we all clicked on the link and read the article.