Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio | Hacker News Reader

Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

cbc.ca

294 pointsbreitling277 comments

Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then.

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.

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.

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 often leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying.

They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country.

For the battery powered ones they're at least an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.

Blah, DAB is MP2 vs AAC for DAB+. I guess that's one advantage of Australia lagging so far behind the rest of the world in radio+TV - I'm pretty sure we went straight to DAB+.

Except that for some reason Australia picked MPEG-2 for our digital TV, and so HD was almost unwatchable. Though it seems we've moved to MPEG-4 now.

It wouldn't surprise me if we went to MPEG2 because the original subsidised set top boxes were cheaper than the ones that supported H.264.

There's some documents available under FOI (posted online) that have some further info on H.264 in digital broadcasts in Australia.

Frustratingly, my TV isn't compatible, but a much older set top box (purchased to avoid silly DRM) works fine.

Consider getting an RTL-SDR for your 13th FM radio.

> They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer

Yes, despite all the propaganda that DAB was 'interference-free' it quickly degraded into a bubbling, clicking ear-splitting cacophony when something affected the signal. Often something as simple as a person standing in front of the antenna or the bus that I was on passing some trees.

We had two DAB radios for a few years but when they eventually failed we just stopped listening to radio intead of replacing them.

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away.

In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging.

For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it?

The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.

I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets.

I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.

New cars were still going to be built though so it's better that they are electrical, especially when you have 100% clean energy to source it (dam hydro).

The 24 month upgrade cycle is hardly unique to Norway; Australia being another where everyone and his dog gets a new phone biannually.

1. Tax breaks and other incentives boost new sales, so the number of new cars is higher than if the market had continued as before. There is an argument for that having an impact.

2. Not 24 months, 12. And it encourages people who would not have upgraded for years to upgrade every year, year on year.Do you really need a new phone every 12 months?

1. As it's only the electric cars that receive your incentives, it's a very worthwhile push to clean energy. Also the first generation of these cars will make it to the 2nd hand market about now, further increasing the penetration. Number of new cars might have been lower without, but the percentage of electric cars would have been a mere fraction. (Edit: And filthy diesel cars would likely be the ersatz).

2. Oh, right, 12 months - me bad. Yep that is pretty awful. I'm coming up on 24 months on my own but could really stretch it longer with my S6 Edge being a great phone.

(As a PS my Rotel / Infinity hi-fi system is 21 years old now, and going strong.)

> For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly.

This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :)

"Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle."

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...

15pct is not anywhere enough to offset the lifetime footprint of a fossils-driven vehicle, especially in case of Norway where effectively all electricity is hydro.

Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and car culture is. If the govt were serious, really serious about the environment then public transport would be much better than it is currently.

Edit: I just remembered another reason why I think EV is about money and not only about the environment: diesel engines could easily(ish) be adapted to run on renewable plant based fuel[1], but no govt is interested in promoting this. In fact they do the opposite, they tax the end user quite highly for pouring vegetable oil into cars even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free. The conversions wouldn't be very much more than when leaded fuel was phased out and we all put new heads on our petrol engines (in the Land Rover community at least we did this). New diesel motors could be manufactured to specs able to cope with plant based fuel (especially with a bit of engineering enterprise). If some one can give a good answer as to why this has never been a viable option except for hobbyists I would be interested to read it.

edit 2: without govt. or trade backing this company doing said conversions folded 3 years ago. But what a future we might have seen. http://www.dieselveg.com/

1. http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php

I actually agree that it's all about money. An average citizen cares for environment in abstract, but not enough to pay premium for it. What we have in Norway with EVs is government incentives for adoption at work.

With biodiesel I remember there used to be some debate how much it can harm the food crops supply if the prices are competitive. So at least that is a concern. And specifically in Norway diesel is penalized for a while now, ironically after being promoted by the government for years before that.

The whole EV thing is a mess.

There was some old regulations on the books that allowed EVs to drive toll free and use buss lanes during rush hour.

Hardly anyone cared when it was introduced, because the major EV available were Think compacts.

But when Tesla introduced their sports car, suddenly everyone monied individual in the cities took interest. Because it was still a EV according to regulations, so now they could drive something that looked and performed just like the gas guzzler the neighbor had, get around tolls and rush hour traffic, and pretend to care about the environment.

One could - from a narrow perspective[1] - argue that diesel engines on plant oil would be carbon-neutral but not that they are emission free. In fact: (older) diesel engines are being banned from cities (e.g. Antwerp, Belgium) not because of CO2-emissions but due to emissions of particulates (and NOx). CO2 is a global problem, but particulates and NOx are local problems (and hence more likely to trigger local political action).

[1] it is often argued that biomass/biofuel is not entirely carbon-neutral due to several reasons: the inherent lifecycle means some CO2 is in the atmosphere at any point; production is often based on CO2-emitting processes ... Secondly some other issues pop up as well: (indirect) land use change, competition with food ...

Anti-environmental conspiracy theories (the evil electric car lobby are ruining the business of the nice oil providers for no good reason) aren't really any more useful than environmental conspiracy theories and biases ("chemicals" are bad, "natural" means good etc).

EVs are better for the environment, both local and global, than ICE cars. That's true on average and even truer for Norway with its cleaner grid.

Biodiesals etc. should really be saved for the things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft. But, at this very moment I believe various places including the US mandate that the diesel is mixed with these fuels to a certain percentage, so there's no big conspiracy here against this type of fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biofuel_policies...

If someone buys a brand new EV then a) presumably they would have bought a brand new ICE instead, b) they do not set their older car on fire and push it over a cliff, but rather sell it to someone, who in turn sells their car to somoene else. In the end, particularly with punitive tax incentives in place, the oldest, least-safe, least-efficient, most polluting cars in the system are scrapped.

> things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft

Funfact about airplanes: they can pretty easily be converted to run on liquid hydrogen. There was a big Airbus-led research project on this some years back. IIRC they found overall efficiency (when accounting for larger fuel volume etc. etc.) was ~4% lower than normal aircraft.

Not to mention that Tupolev actually built and flew a full-scale proof of concept liquid H2 airliner in the late 80's, the TU-155; sadly yet another cool project that died with the Soviet Union.

That is cool, though currently there's no low carbon source of Hydrogen. Possibly over time excess wind an solar power can be used to generate liquid fuels.

There's steam methane reforming from natural gas; it converts methane to CO2 and H2, and you separate those. This is already a large scale commercial process (e.g. used for hardening fat in food or upgrading petroleum to fuel), giving tens of millions of tonnes per year, and recent plants even include CO2 capture and storage, making it a low carbon source.

What about the fuel tanks that would be required for a hypothetical hydrogen aircraft? Unlike kerosene, hydrogen is very light, but the high-pressure tank to contain the hydrogen is quite heavy. Plus, given hydrogen's very low volumetric density, I imagine you'd have to sacrifice a lot of the cargo volume of the aircraft to fit the H2 fuel tank.

Liquid hydrogen is the key. It's frickin' cold, as in liquid nitrogen is positively tropical in comparison, but the density is high enough that you just need slightly larger wing volume for tanks. Vacuum based insulation, which is what they use, is pretty light.

As I said, Airbus did a large R&D project on this and they concluded it's technically and economically feasible for passenger jets. I'm taking their word for it, seeing as they build airplanes for a living.

> However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport.

I don't know about Norway specifically, but in Western Europe in general (Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland etc.) old cars are sold to less well-off EU countries, where they're still in operation for (typically) many more years. So, the Western consumer changing cars every 5 years isn't actually affecting the environment, and is actually helping out folks in poorer economies.

That's something I would really have to see hard facts on before I could believe it.

It should be enough to compare the number of yearly cars bought vs salvaged in say Germany (the difference should be the export, presumably to poorer economies). Unfortunately, I don't speak German (or French, Dutch etc.), but here are the Polish buy-side stats:

This article says that the number of USED cars imported to Poland in 2015 was around 1 million:

http://www.samar.pl/__/3/3.a/91648/3.sc/11/Ponad-milion-aut-...

While this article says the number of NEW cars sold in Poland in 2015 was around 400k:

http://motofocus.pl/informacje/wiadomosci-rynkowe/14747/sprz...

Which means that roughly 70% cars in Poland are used ones coming from (mostly) Western Europe.

You could also come at it from another angle. Consider that a 5-10 year old car can still easily be worth 20-50% of its initial value. Who in their right mind would scrap it, when you can sell on the second-hand market? You don't see these cars on streets of Zurich or Paris, but come to most Polish cities and you'll be surrounded by them (a lot of them still have various stickers in German on them, as people don't bother to peel them off).

> even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free

Nonsense.

Well thanks for the well-reasoned and neatly laid out rebuffal, it's what I come to HN for. Perhaps "free from harmful emissions" would be better, I'm not in that field of expertise so I can't say, but if you take issue with plant based fuel over fossil fuels then I would like to hear that rational: preferably in a one word answer sans context. /bitchy

The better response would be (theoretically) "carbon neutral": as long as that diesel is run strictly on biomass-based fuels, the carbon cycle would be completed (it would would be "net zero" in pollution).

That doesn't mean it would be "pollution free", of course; no vehicle can be. For a diesel, you have various gases and particulates, but with proper capture and scrubbing, much of these can be disposed of in more environmentally friendly ways. Plus, most if not all of this tech is already developed and used on current diesel vehicles.

> ...even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free.

This just isn't true. Local emissions of bio-diesel are comparable to petro-diesel.

When you factor in that C02 is absorbed during manufacture, biodiesel is estimated to have 45%-65% lower net emissions than petro-diesel, but that ignores the fact that you just repurposed viable farmland (or in some cases rainforest) and changed its C02 profile, potentially reducing or erasing any net benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_biodie...

Another challenge is what to do with all the waste glycerol (100kg per ton of biodiesel), since prices crashed a few years back

>Another challenge is what to do with all the waste glycerol (100kg per ton of biodiesel), since prices crashed a few years back

Vape it obviously.

I used to be one of the weirdos collecting waste oil to burn in my VW. That was pretty cool but obviously not everyone can do that.

Money is how we align priorities although our individual wants and needs vary dramatically.

I don't think there are any major initiatives around that are compelling people to junk cars in favor of EVs. We do have subsidies that are "priming the pump" to ramp up production volumes and build enough economies of scale to make EVs a thing. That's a good thing IMO as many driving use cases are well met by EVs.

IMO, plant based fuels are problematic due to the affects they'll have on the agriculture market. I would prefer to see subsidy to make natural gas replace diesel fleets. Alot of needless human suffering is attributable to diesel particulate emissions.

It's not 15% when you already have a gasoline vehicle that you propose to discard. It's 115%, because the alternative is to keep what you have. You can't unproduce what you have.

Keep old car: 0% the emissions of producing it

Buy new gasoline car: 100% the emissions to produce it

Buy new electric car: 115% the emissions to produce a gasoline car

When you hand in an old cellphone they just resell it the same for used cars, so lease programs don't result wast the way you are thinking.

Then why have I read news reports over the last few years about the used-mobile mountain piling up and how hard they are to recycle?

For a 1 year old phones it's Reused not recycled. When you hand in a six year old phone that's when they need to be recycled and that costs a little money. So, old phones do end up in piles as actually recycling is more expensive than saying they will some day be recycled.

> I also believe this is primarily driven by money

Quite likely. I am not sure exactly when it came to be, but at some point the national broadcaster, NRK, transferred maintenance and such of the broadcast network to Telenor.

While Telenor is on paper the national telecom company, it has since the late 90s operated as a publically traded company with the government as a major share holder.

So what is likely going on is that Telenor has found the older FM equipment expensive to maintain, and thus want to replace it with DAB. Quite likely because they can then extract rent from all the extra channels being broadcast.

We had a similar transition to digital TV a few years back, and as best i can tell the analog channels were barely turned off before Telenor started lobbying for the frequency space to be put up for auction aimed towards mobile phone networks.

Damn it, Telenor was making noise about replacing the landlines with mobile phones for a while. This because their switches in and around the major cities were getting old. They seem to have dropped the idea though, likely because they noticed they would have to put up a whole lot of new mobile cells to cover all those villages tucked away in narrow valleys.

Frankly big business in Norway has gotten very brazen about their milking of the population for all sorts of rents.

They seem to have gotten around the problem of switching landlines to mobile by simply increasing the cost of a landline so that consumers willingly give it up. I remember our package cost of mobile, net and landline made keeping the landline viable, until it was no longer included in the package and then it increased in cost until we retired it. Iirc the cost of the landline doubled over ~5 years.

I agree the delay is annoying (especially for live events that you are watching - e.g. fireworks) but overall I've found DAB to be far preferable to FM. Admittedly I pretty much only listen to BBC Radio 4 which is mainly voice rather than music.

And for that matter, AM degrades even better than FM -- at least to my ear I prefer AM static to FM fading.

AFAIK that's why aircraft still use AM.

Unless I'm wrong about aircraft still using AM too. :)

Interesting, did not know that. Just looked it up on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband#Modulation

> Besides being simple, power-efficient and compatible with legacy equipment, AM and SSB permit stronger stations to override weaker or interfering stations. Additionally, this method does not suffer from the capture effect found in FM. Even if a pilot is transmitting, a control tower can "talk over" that transmission and other aircraft will hear a somewhat garbled mixture of both transmissions, rather than just one or the othe

The poor audio quality is a major issue for me. For some reason my ears (or rather brain) have become really good at spotting highly compressed audio. I rarely listen to webradio because of that, and only DAB with sufficient bitrate. At least with FM it didn't degrade the audio predictably, and in a way it is a far more plesant degradation.

DAB+ is supposed to have solved many of the issues with DAB.

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.

Wouldn't we be better using this spectrum for even more data to stream anything, including DAB?

FM is amazingly cheap, and green. You can reach millions of listeners with high quality sound. In many cases, you can reach tens of millions for exactly the same cost. Until you need another mast, the extra cost per user is $0.

Smartphone chips already include FM so there's no extra cost to reaching mobile users, with no extra bandwidth consumption. (Not FM's fault if some smartphone makers don't use the FM capabilities and make users consume expensive and limited cellular spectrum instead.)

The drawbacks with FM are (1) the limited number of stations and (2) users can't choose their own music. That's why there's a market for different services.

However, there's still a market for live radio: it's free and has billions of listeners. It's also a very efficient way of handling phone-ins and live commentaries on sports events, among other things.

Broadcast is fine and will always have a place, but there's no reason to use analog any more. It's too inefficient from a spectrum perspective.

Well, there is a very good reason to use analogue: it's already in place and working, and there are hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of analogue radios.

The problem is that attempts to introduce digital systems have generally not been successful.

If radio didn't exist, you'd obviously start digital services. But it does exist, and it's deeply entrenched.

The spectrum is not that big and we can use it for exact the thing we use it.

...and Cars are not there yet. We have strong campaign for DAB once a year here in Germany to remind people that there is something like DAB+. We had one this year again. Thats when I realized that despite using so many rental cars, I haven't seen one with DAB. So I guess it's an extra you have to pay for more then for FM.

I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few years ago when they took away the analogue TV program. In the years that followed more and more TV stations dropped out of the DVBT portfolio which was also mostly only available around big cities. Now they come with DVBT2. New hardware, less TV stations and pay options for what you once got for free.

It's a sad rip off strategy and I'm really sorry for radio. Luckily the data plans over here are ridiculous and I hope the resistance will be stronger.

Digital TV in the US flopped, as far as I can tell. Broadcasters were killed by their own greed. If a Roku is cheaper than an adapter box, and some of the channels on it are also free-with-commercials, as well as cheap paid content, broadcasters push people away with the transition.

as far as I can tell

Genuinely curious, but what are you using to measure this, or better asked: how do you define flopped? A year ago before I finally had everything in line to drop out of the workforce and go to Grad school I spent a lot of time in rural America and I met a LOT of people who didn't have Cable, but relied on rabbit ears plugged into converter boxes to get digital TV.

Heck, for a while I even used it-and preferred it, forced me to do something other than sitting on the couch staring at a big rectangular box. Got me my local stations, which were more than enough to have soap opera / background filler noise on while I worked from home and got my Sunday football fix.

Middle America conveniently forgotten once again?

When the switch was made to digital I was really surprised at the picture quality and the number of channels available with just rabbit ears, for free. This was in LA so it could definitely be different in less populated areas.

I live five miles outside of downtown Minneapolis and have trouble picking up anything inside my stuccoed house. I've tried many many antennas and short of poking a hole in my wall and running an antenna outside nothing has worked. I was able to watch many many analog stations without issue.

Yeah the problem with digital vs analog is digital is "all or nothing." There's no fuzzy picture, there's either a picture or no picture. Which sucks!

>and short of poking a hole in my wall and running an antenna outside nothing has worked.

Isn't that what one's supposed to do in the first place?

At least I live in a country and for the whole lifetime of analogue tv (and now digital) we've had antennas outside.

Digital broadcast TV is usually better quality for the main channels than cable. Plus its free, a great companion to streaming.

What? Digital broadcasts did not flop in the US. I cant' imagine how you come to that conclusion.

You only need an adapter box if you have a non-HD TV. If you have a HD TV all you have to do is plug in an antenna directly into the TV. The government subsided conversion boxes when the transaction happened, which was around 2008 IIRC.

If you have a non-HD TV you aren't going to have an HDMI port to plug your Roku into, so that's a moot point anyways. There literary is no "Roku vs conversion box" it doesn't make sense.

There is also waaayyy more channels with HD broadcasts than analog broadcasts. I'm saying that as someone who went through the transition personally. In 2008 I had a CRT TV and was using rabbit ears to pick up local stations (yeah, I was a "cord-cutter" way before it was cool). I bought a converter box (which the government paid for half of it) and switched to HD when they cut off my analog.

And how were "broadcasters killed by their own greed?" How is broadcasting TV for free "greedy?"

Oh, and the transition was mandated by the FCC and Congress (with the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005) not "greedy TV stations." It was done in order to free up spectrum for other stuff. The amount of spectrum the Earth has is finite. Duel broadcasting digital and analog of the same content at the same time was taking double the spectrum. Verizon bought some of the previous analog spectrum to use for their 4G network.

Oh, and if you were wondering what happened to the rest of the analog spectrum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_sp...

Finally someone talking sense in this thread. Just cause Dvb has the capacity for many more stations doesn't mean the spectrum will be used for that purpose. There are so many better uses (WiMAX, metro wide internet) of the new freed up spectrul can now suit.

Flopped? I dropped cable and went entirely with over-the-air (plus Netflix) in part because OTA digital broadcasts looked better than the overly compressed video that the cable company was pushing - compression artifacts were very visible and annoying.

In my social circle a lot of people have canceled their cable service and gone back to broadcast since since the digital switchover. There are dozens more channels than there used to be, and with better quality. If digital TV has flopped you wouldn't know it here.

It's not just a matter of the cost of switching either.

I own a synthesizer (OP-1) that has a built-in FM receiver for sampling and for fun. Creativity-vise, it's an ingenious feature. Essentially, you can pull new sounds out of thin air whenever you feel like it. No need to connect or set anything up.

Why does it work so well? The receiver is cheap, the radio service is free, the way it works is universal and it's something reliably present in most countries. DAB sounds like it will not have any of these properties initially, and it will never have all of those properties.

My point is that the combination of those features enabled companies to create innumerable innovative appliances that use radio (from cheap radio clock to my Swedish synth). Switching to DAB will not only make existing devices useless, it will also kill the possibility of having new innovative applications in the future.

...

This kind of stuff bothers me, because it's increasingly common these days. People replace reliable, working technologies with something "modern" and claim they are making progress, while completely ignoring higher level architectural considerations.

Consider another thing: the money spent on this kind of stuff can be instead spent on making better Internet infrastructure, which can house digital TV, digital radio, digital phones, but also websites, online games, (soon) connected VR spaces, and things we can't even imagine yet.

>My point is that the combination of those features enabled companies to create innumerable innovative appliances that use radio (from cheap radio clock to my Swedish synth).

I don't think your list is so "innumerable".

The radio clock was merely using FM radio transmissions as intended.

The OP-1 using FM for sampling is the niche-st of niches, and totally irrelevant for 99.99999% of the population.

Between those extremes there are not that many appliances that will miss FM radio transmittions that are not actual FM radios...

Far too dramatic IMO.

Did CD and MP3 players kill radio in car? No.

Radio as being the primary source of audio-only data has been long dead, and the audio-only source has also seen competition of TV, RL (due to easier & cheaper forms of travel), and the Internet. In that sense even TV is dead thanks to the Internet. Both deaths are relative, not absolute.

Radio is however very much alive in the sense that audio-only is alive. Just look at streaming services such as Spotify, and the diversity possible with it. You can make your own playlist, follow someone else's, or collaborate. You can have multiple playlists, too. For a mere 10 EUR a month you even get rid of all the advertising (15 EUR for family pack of 6 people). I'm not advertising for Spotify here; its just one of the many options available and I happen to be familiar with it.

My Nokia N900, an experimental device from 2009, had a FM transmitter on it. One could tune in on car audio, to receive the signal send from the Nokia N900. One could power it up with the car's charger.

We're now in 2017, 8 years down the line. Its not far fetched to have a FM to Bluetooth or FM to WiFi converter. Exactly for situations where backwards compatibility is desirable. It might also be worth it to upgrade the car to more recent standards e.g. an Android mini computer made for the car.

> OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios.

Keyword: Maintenance. It costs money.

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.

Add to that tunnels. In western Norway one drives up to 10% of time in tunnels and only very few channels and only in longer tunnels have coverage. Mobile networks work reliably most of the time.

What is a fjord?

https://www.google.no/search?q=fjord&tbm=isch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjord

It's a steep-sided inlet. They're award winning you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjord

So "steep-sided inlet" as in "mountian going into a lake".

more likely going straight into the sea

Lovely crinkly edges.

I cannot describe how disappointed I was that the awards were not mentioned in the wikipedia article :(

A coastal mountain type originally designed by Slartibartfast. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast

Something that Parrots pine for..

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pining%20for%...

A classical fjord is a U shaped valley carved out by a glacier. Quite different from a valley carved by a river.

Problem is DAB coverage sucks compared to FM, it's not an improvement. In the Western Norway with hundreds of tunnels only the bigger ones are equipped with radio relays. Plenty of dead spots outside major highways too.

I had to drive Bergen-Voss 4x last June around the time a landslide ruined E16, taking a different detour each time. Very spotty in the tunnels along Hardanger, which is a major route. Even worse out there along fv344 which goes mostly on the surface, but through numerous tiny valleys.

There was a talk about postponing the FM sunset, which would be wise given that majority of vehicles don't have DAB support, and some of the most popular models are still sold without DAB tuners. Either way, DAB is an unfortunate transitional technology. Sounded nice in 2000, obsolete now. I concur that 4G network streaming would make much more sense in this era.

Radio is great at broadcast, sucks at point to point with thousands of people. Multicast doesn't work on the internet. Broadcasting digital signals is a better way to use bandwidth.

Interesting idea! There is cell broadcast for emergency text information, why wouldn't it be possible to broadcast a bunch of audio streams over 4G along with the telephone and internet service? Better than everyone listening to their own stream over 4G.

(Edit: the technology and protocols for this exist and are discussed elsewhere in this thread.)

>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.

Doesn't that imply that there wasn't anyone to hear anything in the first place?

No. There are lots of bits of Norway with no or few inhabitants but there is a road with traffic.

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.

Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot, I just want to listen to the radio on my way to work. ;)

> 'We are simply not ready for this yet'

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.

Yet FM still can't beat AM for simplicity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

Don't worry, there's a new digital standard for AM radio too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio#AM

Isn't HD Radio a proprietary thing and not a real standard that anybody can use?

The new digital standard for radio is DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale). Given a choice, nobody would adopt 1990s-style DAB today. Problem is that countries are so deep in failing DAB systems that they don't have the will or the guts to change. It would involve a lot of humility and a huge loss of face.

Sobering thought for the day: DAB was developed at the same time as the World-Wide Web.

DRM is an international standard.

So of course in the USA they have their own propriety standard. "In-band on-channel" or IBOC. Different versions for the AM band and the FM band.

It's even easier to demodulate at high power :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHSuInSkHtA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82s5Q3GIO9I

I have no idea how this works.

looks like a plasma speaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snibt3CNqBA

Effectively AM recreates a sound wave using the EM spectrum in the most direct way possible.

When the clamp is held just right, an arc forms between it and the mast that recreates the AM signal with enough energy to vibrate the nearby air.

Remind me to never climb an AM radio tower...

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?

It's because the infrastructure for FM is quite expensive to run. Because of all the fjords and valleys, you need many weak transmitters to avoid reflections. Also, because it's FM, they can't overlap in frequency.

With DAB, two time-delayed signals (either reflections or multiple towers transmitting the same data-fountain) will enhance the signal. This means that you can have fewer towers.

> It's because the infrastructure for FM is quite expensive to run.

Won't the free market decide if it's too expensive to run? Or is even radio run by the state in Norway? Otherwise, why prohibit private companies from licensing & broadcasting FM radio? I mean the free market would decide stop to broadcasting when it's not profitable for them anymore.

Or is everything state-run in Norway? When I read "one member of the ruling coalition was scathing" and "MP from the Progress Party", I'm thinking, the state (and these MPs) shouldn't even be involved and thinking about this, and should leave it to the free market.

Probably they have State infrastructure, maybe it was never profitable for businesses to invest in FM radios in that geography. They still CAN do it, but they won't.

The infra used to be state operated, under a cooperation between NRK and Televerket (that in the 90s was turned into Telenor). In recent years NRK has transferred ownership of this to Telenor, and instead rents capacity from them.

So effectively it is privately owned and operated, under a "natural" monopoly.

With the caveat that Telenor is 54% owned by the Norwegian government (as of September 2016) [1], with a further 5% owned by Folketrygdfondet (government run social security fund), and a further 0.8% by DNB Asset Management, a subsidiary of the bank DNB ASA, which is again 34% owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry...

[1] https://www.telenor.com/investors/share-information/major-sh...

And? The government has declared itself to be a hands off shareholder...

The government declares itself a lot of things until it declares itself something else. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying that implying it's entirely privately owned is a bit misleading.

Given the number of debacles involving both Telenor and DNB mismanagement in recent years, one would have thought there would have been plenty of opportunities for the government as shareholder to take action. But so far none of that has materialized...

Remember that the government ownership of large chunks of DNB was a result of the bank crisis. And it's not the first time a Norwegian government has taken over banks and managed them. E.g. if you're old enough you might remember the bank takeovers in the late 80's, including Christiania Bank og Kreditkasse ASA - the same crisis also created DnB when DnC and Bergen Bank was forced to merge to survive.

Norwegian governments have decades of history of extensive interference in the markets (and today control ~1/3 of the value of the companies on the Oslo Stock Exchange)

Again, I'm not saying this is necessarily bad - it's generally worked well, and it's worked well probably largely because there certainly is tradition to stay hands off when possible. And during crises give them enough rope to either save themselves or hang themselves first - no politician wants to step into the middle of a scandal and risk being tainted...

At the same time influence can be subtle - because Telenor knows what is politically acceptable, they'd be highly unlikely to do anything that'd create political pressure to interfere. That can be as effective as direct control.

> Or is even radio run by the state in Norway?

As a Scandinavian, that is kinda fun to read. Of course Radio is state run. I still get surprised when I hear commercials on the privately owned stations. Private radio stations pretty much became a thing after I grew up and stopped listening to Radio.

When I was a kid, there were maybe one commercial station and they didn't air in my city. Commercial TV-station were still mostly broadcasting from England, due to the former state monopoly.

To many Scandinavians this is the most natural thing in the world.

> Commercial TV-station were still mostly broadcasting from England

Apart from TV2 I think they all still are? Mainly to avoid restrictions on content in commercials (Norwegian ban on online gambling commercials etc).

This makes a lot more sense. The article came off as a ban on FM. It's actually only that the state will no longer put money into FM radio and infrastructure.

> The article came off as a ban on FM.

Interesting cultural difference; I would never have it interpreted it like that. I did wonder whether the commercial stations would also leave FM. A large country like Norway is likely to have only state broadcasting in its more remote areas, but additionally commercial broadcasters in the more populated regions.

As far as I can tell the commercial stations are leading the way.

> Commercial TV-station were still mostly broadcasting from England, due to the former state monopoly. To many Scandinavians this is the most natural thing in the world

A state monopoly is a restriction on freedom.

I'm fairly libertarian-leaning (on some issues), and what you're saying sounds to me like: "our lack of freedom is the most natural thing in the world".

It's like a slave who's lived in slavery all his life saying that "slavery is the most natural thing in the world". Doesn't matter if the slave master has treated the slave well and given him/her a comfortable life.

A law that prevents private television broadcasters from existing is a violation of the people's freedom to organize and form their own broadcast networks.

I find your acceptance and nonchalance at this honestly quite disturbing.

There's nothing natural in a state monopoly. It's a restriction on individual freedom, and it's as simple as that.

The thing I find unnatural is people not caring about their freedom, and willingly (and happily) surrendering it over to the state.

Just to be clear, you are not "fairly" libertarian-leaning, you are very libertarian-leaning.

In a lot of places like this the infrastructure wouldn't exist in the first place if not for the state, so it seems natural to me that the public should retain ownership after paying to develop it.

> Or is even radio run by the state in Norway?

Radio and TV have been run by the state (in some way or other) in most European countries from the 1920s until the 1980s. There were exceptions, most notably Luxembourg, which transmitted commercial radio to all its surrounding countries.

There is only one reason. It's much more efficient. Engineers have to keep slicing things thinner and thinner to accommodate more and more people and needs. This impacts everything. Food, water, shelter, medications, transportation, communications, etc. Efficiency is king. It has to be.

FM works, and doesn't need any addition when you increase the number of listeners. I don't get it. Why throw away millions of perfectly fine radios?

Digital is more narrow and compact and allows more efficient use of the spectrum in general. More transmissions, different uses, sharing, freeing space up for other allocations, etc. All of that is resource/demand driven. More people is more demand.

While DAB transmission is more efficient than FM, the receivers are more complex and draw more power than FM receivers. I'm not sure the tradeoff is right in this case.

I get that argument for tv transmission, but the FM bandwidth is tiny by comparison, so just doesn't seem to justify the switching pain (particularly regarding cars)

It's because FM broadcast is at a relatively low frequency that makes it valuable.

It has much better ability to penetrate into buildings, and through foliage, etc.

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).

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...

I doubt that 4G is capabable of replacing FM/DAB. Radio is broadcast, 4G is individual streams. For a whole morning queue full of cars, that's a lot of bandwidth.

Probably the next generation will be good enough to handle it.

But this still ignores other benefits of DAB over mobile data. One is emergency broadcasts, the other is future-proofing. DAB will probably be a standard for decades. But what if you want built-in streaming in your car, which standard do you support? There are none. You have to have apps. Do you think your car will still get software updates for those in 10 years?

I also think we tech geeks overestimate the popularity of streaming in cars. Hell, I'm a geek but even I actually prefer radio when driving.

> But what if you want built-in streaming in your car, which standard do you support? There are none. You have to have apps. Do you think your car will still get software updates for those in 10 years?

None. You add a plain 3.5mm line-in plug.

Or better yet, a 3.5mm plug, USB, and Bluetooth. No matter what happens with the 3.5mm plug, USB and Bluetooth aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Might as well toss them all in to make sure it's actually future-proofed.

USB-A, USB-B or USB-C?

It honestly does not matter, since they're compatible. You're trying to make it controversial, but it's really not. My phone uses Lightning, but that doesn't make a bit of difference when I plug it into my car.

Well, they’re not entirely. I recently bought a Nexus 5X, and realised I don’t have a single compatible cable – and had to buy some adapters.

Not everyone will have adapters easily available, nor will people want to deal with them.

Your phone didn't come with a USB-C to USB-A cable? I find that hard to believe.

The 5X only comes with a C-C cable. The 6P comes with both an A-C and a C-C cable.

Wow, that's a huge mistake. Especially considering how rare USB-C was in 2015.

It will have to replace it because users chose different things. In Austria more people now listen to Spotify than DAB.

>I doubt that 4G is capabable of replacing FM/DAB. Radio is broadcast, 4G is individual streams. For a whole morning queue full of cars, that's a lot of bandwidth.

-True, but surely one could simply allocate bandwidth in the 4G network to multicast at least the most popular channels? (This may be a very stupid question; I know a thing or two about broadcast networks, but hardly a thing about computer networks. It all went downhill after Token Ring, as far as I am concerned. :))

That being said, I think it would have been smarter to stick with FM, but we should cut our politicians some slack - I think it would be unfair to expect them to realize in 1992-1993 or whenever the decision to go DAB was made that by the time it gained some traction, there would be a national, wireless, high-speed data network which could to a large extent provide the same service DAB does.

DAB coverage is still spotty, though, claims to the contrary nonwithstanding - when I drive along one of the most heavily used routes in Møre og Romsdal county (E39/E136 between Ålesund and Vestnes), I get consistently good FM coverage and DAB with decent quality most of the time, but several dozen dropouts lasting from a few seconds to perhaps a minute.

> -True, but surely one could simply allocate bandwidth in the 4G network to multicast at least the most popular channels? (This may be a very stupid question; I know a thing or two about broadcast networks, but hardly a thing about computer networks. It all went downhill after Token Ring, as far as I am concerned. :))

Such technology seems to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Broadcast_Multicast... I really don't understand why everyone builds broadcast networks using a separate technology these days instead of just integrating it into mobile broadband networks. Building separate infrastructures (even radio and TV broadcast typically don't use the same technology) seems insane. Also the model of having a few broadcast stations will most likely loose more and more dominance while users are shifting to streaming and non linear things so a technology which is flexible enough to adopt to that change in demand seems just right.

> instead of just integrating it into mobile broadband networks

Because mobile networks are oversubscribed. They're simply not designed to support everyone using them heavily at the same time - it's why folks are advised to stay off cell phones during emergencies, or fail to be able to connect if they do use them.

Much like other ISPs, there's little incentive for mobile providers to build out to properly support their customers when it works most of the time even when oversubscribed.

> For a whole morning queue full of cars, that's a lot of bandwidth.

Yes, but that's a problem for the telco's to solve, if they want to continue selling mobile internet. So they have strong incentives to solve it.

> One is emergency broadcasts

How is having to buy an expensive device to listen to emergency broadcasts a benefit? One of the reasons DAB was scrapped in Sweden was this. Everyone and their grandmother has a bunch of FM radios already, no purchases necessary, it's deployed, it works. Shutting down FM means less people will be able to listen to emergency broadcasts. That's bad, not a benefit.

Besides, most modern smartphones have emergency broadcast functionality that's accessible to local authorities. And everyone and their grandmother already has a smartphone.

> the other is future-proofing. DAB will probably be a standard for decades.

DAB or DAB+ ? The poor bleeding edgers who bought a DAB radio got pretty pissed when they had to throw it out and buy a DAB+ radio instead. All five of them. Not a good track record exactly. Meanwhile, FM has been going strong for almost 100 years now.

> But what if you want built-in streaming in your car, which standard do you support?

There's two: iOS CarPlay and Android Auto. Works great. Everyone already has a smartphone, and can then use whatever streaming app or service they want.

> I also think we tech geeks overestimate the popularity of streaming in cars

The only thing being overestimated is the general public's eagerness to run out and buy a DAB+ car radio. It's pretty much at zero.

Look, broadcast radio is going away just like broadcast television. It's a dying medium. And to force a change while it's dying will only hasten its demise.

If the power goes out because of an emergency, you can probably say goodbye to the mobile phone network - towers tend to have, at best, a few hours of battery backup if that. The sheer number of towers and the fact they're unmanned installations located mainly in urban areas where space is at a premium means there's not really any way to change this.

Emergency broadcasts should run on AM radio if we're worried about reliability. AM is brain dead simple to demodulate to the point you can do it accidentally with the right length of wire really.

Kill FM, reserve AM for an emergency band.

In Norways case I wonder if AM does not work due to the hilly terrain or something. Don't think there are any stations, I never listened to AM at least and just barely heard about it.

There aren't any as far as I can tell. I think it would have pretty horrible performance with lots of multipath distortion.

Audio is surprisingly low-bandwidth compared to what today's networks are designed for. I'm not sure what the total bandwidth of a site is, but I've gotten 130 Mbps speed test results over 4G - right there you have up to 2000 typical DAB+ streams, and I'm certain a site can handle multiples of that.

And if people are listening to something like Spotify, a lot of the data will be cached.

Still, listen a lot to the radio on 4G and you will most likely hit you mobile data cap (1GB ~ 1h of 64kbit audio a day for a month)

Yeah we can only hope that data plans get right-sized so you can't burn through your whole cap in 60 seconds of full-speed downloading.

Although for music in particular we are seeing a lot of "music services are unmetered" types of plans. I remember in Sweden back in the early 3G days (384 kbps of pure speed), the public broadcaster audio streams were unmetered and I would usually listen to those instead of FM since I used Bluetooth headphones.

T-Mobile in the US doesn't limit data usage for many streaming services, including Spotify.

LTE networks allows for muticasting data too though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast-broadcast_single-fre...

I wasn't really talking about "replacing 1:1 now". The point is radio is about to die the same way broadcast TV is about to die. (The radio and TV stations may do just fine, you can listen/watch shows from them online too...it is just not being able to hit the pause button that will seem queer in some years). Perhaps it may take as long as 10 more years, but we could have kept FM alive just fine for that long. This just accelerates the process.

I sure hope the DAB investment was meant for a lot longer than 10 years.

And in the end it would be Telenor that benefits either way...

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.

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.

If I get rid of FM radio, I will not replace it with DAB. I'll listen to some streaming service over IP.

Most newish cars in the UK come with DAB as standard now.

Around here (Finland, neighbouring Norway), the average car on the road is 12 years old, so if we start to get DAB radios now, almost half of them will have it by 2025.

Many more cars have right now Bluetooth connectivity in the audio system, so it'll be streaming from the phone then.

An aftermarket head unit with DAB+ costs about €150 with installation. Owners of older cars aren't stuck, but they will have to pay for the privilege of continuing to receive radio broadcasts.

Will that integrate into the car electronics, and be able to run e.g. the satnav UI if that is included in the previous one?

This is just another example of satnav being a terrible option to build into cars. Who wants to use a "custom" nav system kludged together by the lowest bidder ten years ago when we have much better on our phones?

Well, someone who doesn't want to reveal his/her driving habits to Google, NSA et al?

Good point, but one probably does that as soon as one purchases a smartphone...

DAB service in the UK is a significantly better experience than FM when driving.

However, receivers vary wildly.

I rent cars frequently and while all new cars have DAB, the quality of implementation is not consistent.

There's a huge difference between the crappy ones that constantly drop the signal and the good ones that almost never do, even in really remote (and hilly) areas.

The whole car radio situation hasn't be handled correctly by politicians, at least not here in Denmark. When regular service began, in 2002 in the case of Denmark, politicians should have parsed regulation that required all new cars to be delivered with DAB radio within a certain time frame.

You can get a DAB/DAB+ radio in your new car, but you'll have to pay extra. At this point is should simply be the default, otherwise a migration will never be well received.

I agree. Here in germany it was also planned to shutdown FM in favor for DAB already for 2010. It was then canceled and postponed due to the fact that nobody has a DAB receiver.

But of course nobody wants to get a DAB receiver as long as they cost 200€ extra, and therefore FM is still the standard in cars. As cars have a super long lifetime that means every car that is now sold with FM works against a FM->DAB switch in 10 years. So even the new plans like "we switch FM off in 2025 if the majority has a DAB radio then" won't work. There should now (or even multiple years ago) have some regulations that car manufacturers have to offer DAB for the same price as FM to get more traction. In the meantime building DAB receivers is often even not more expensive than FM if both are build on top of a software defined radio. However car manufacturers still sell DAB extra for maximising profit.

BTW, technical requirements for cars are EU-wide. Country specific requirements for "a car sold here must have a DAB radio" are an illegal obstacle for free movement of goods, or a state subsidy to domestic industry.

So, DAB radio won't be in all cars unless DAB radio is an EU wide requirement. Not happening overnight.

Requiring things like winter tyres is OK because they can be installed separately. I'd be happy to insist that all cars in EU must have block heaters and cabin electric outlets, it would surely reduce prices here a bit.

Over here (Finland), a car is not required to have a radio at all.

In fact, even speedometer only became mandatory in new cars in 1984, so cars older than that are legal without one.

(Otherwise, the authorities here have been ridiculous with car equipment requirements, particularly before EU time, as they wanted to ensure the revenue collection from car taxes. For instance, one year third brake lights were illegal as "dangerous", then very suddenly at the time of EU membership they then became mandatory in new cars. The authority is still in constant breach of EU rules, and the authorities do nothing; officials break the law and there are no, zero, zilch consequences.)

Well, that's a chicken-egg situation, cars won't get DAB+ radio's until there's DAB+ broadcasts and it won't really be accelerated until FM is closely on the horizon to be shut off.

Similarly it took quite a while for the first CD players to appear in cars, and a lot of older cars only had casette tapes, keeping casettes alive for quite a while longer just for car use.

I've actually got a iPhone to cassette interface (I would call it a cable, but one end looks like an actual cassette) in my desk drawer, so that I could play my music in my car.

New car now (well, new to me), so it's redundant.

>The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers.

It's not like anyone was asked when digital TV was the only thing left working..

True, but you didn't have to replace your TV, just add a cheap set-top box. (And not even that if you had cable or satellite TV.)

Also, at the time, most people only had one or two TV sets.

With DAB, you have to buy a new set, and most people have multiple FM radios: typically living room/hi-fi, kitchen, bedroom alarm clock/radio, car radio, boomboxes, and FM radios in smartphones and MP3 players.

We have about a dozen FM radios at home and there is zero chance of us buying any more DAB radios than the DAB/FM/CD "kitchen radio" we already have....

The obvious option is to buy a DAB receiver that broadcasts an FM signal to all your existing radios. That's how some of the DAB "radio adaptors" for cars work.

Actually getting my car to receive "digiTV" costs about $700 :)

It's the only TV I have, too.

Why can't there be a cheap set-top box for radios though?

UI for digital radio requires a more expensive hardware than for TV set top box (which will be happy with just the antenna in / signal out and power interfaces, and a remote control).

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?

Be careful what you wish for, DAB is pretty horrible too.

In what respect? I have DAB at home and in the car in the UK and find it reliable and decent quality.

DAB sound quality can be as good as you like, but as implemented, it's generally very low. (Stations use low bit-rates to reduce costs.) On average, in fact, DAB sound quality is much lower than FM, assuming you're in a good signal area and/or have a decent FM aerial.

You also need a lot more expensive masts to provide DAB coverage. In many places where you get poor FM reception, you get "bubbling mud" or no DAB reception at all.

You must be from the UK. The "bubbling mud" is a property of the old DAB which also uses MP2 for the audio (an 80s technology codec).

Here in Germany it's all DAB+ which has better error correction with a more robust signal (and no bubbling). Radio stations in Germany also tend to use 96-128 kbit AAC/HE-AAC which sounds way better than FM radio.

Yes, I've already mentioned that.

See some of my other comments, including: "Some countries have stations at 48kbps. The UK is leading the drive to lower sound quality with DAB+ stations on the SDL multiplex at 32kbps."

> Radio stations in Germany also tend to use 96-128 kbit AAC/HE-AAC which sounds way better than FM radio.

Lucky you. Most UK stations are on 80kbps with MP2, and we have music stations broadcasting at 64kbps in mono. The BBC often manages 112-128kbps but only ONE station does better than that: BBC classical music station Radio 3 is at 160-192kbps. No DAB+ station broadcasts at more than 32kbps.

In other words, there isn't a single UK radio station that reaches FM quality. None of them sounds way better.

If you want to feel my pain, see http://www.wohnort.org/DAB/uknat.html

Look at London 3, which I get at home, and weep....

Bulky, expensive DAB receivers. Try finding a portable DAB receiver that isn't huge and drains batteries like it's a hairdryer.

Meanwhile I have a 20 year old Phillips AM/FM receiver that's about the size of an iPod nano, slips into my pocket and lasts days on a single AA.

There's a huge marketing / awareness campaign going on right now in Norway to get people to upgrade their FM radios.

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.

Many will definitely just switch their habit to Spotify instead, will be interesting to see the numbers...

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.

My local alt-rock station has also turned itself into a golden oldies station without changing anything.

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.

In Germany AM is already completely dead, the last station shut down about a year ago.

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.

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.

Exactly. It nearly happened in neighboring Sweden, but luckily the plans were cancelled.

I mean just imagine that the plans to scrap FM and go digital were made before mobile broadband, podcasts and streaming music.

Before they would have sworn billions, every person and every car would already be streaming internet audio anyway.

That's what will happen in norway.

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.

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.

Won't the spectrum be used/sold for other purposes? Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

> Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

I think the main motivation to shut down FM is that now that DAB is built-out sufficiently (or so they say), running both at the same time is expensive. FM transmitters are supposedly quite power hungry and expensive to operate.

It will take at least a decade or two to free up the FM band for other uses anyway. Norway will probably wait and use it in a way that aligns with the rest of the world, rather than finding its own local use for the spectrum.

Correct; FM is very power inefficient, particularly in Norway where one needs quite literally thousands of repeaters to provide coverage to every nook and cranny where someone saw fit to settle down... :)

Also, only the national broadcasters vacate the FM network; local radio stations are free to keep using FM for the foreseeable future.

DAB was significantly worse powerwise compared to FM transmission. DAB+ has rectified some of the issues, but it remains to see if it actually better.

>It will take at least a decade or two to free up the FM band for other uses anyway. Norway will probably wait and use it in a way that aligns with the rest of the world, rather than finding its own local use for the spectrum.

And that's the difference between an entrepreneurial, capitalist minded society and a socialist minded one.

It's not clear that there are any good alternative uses for the FM spectrum.

The UK plan is to move the national stations to DAB and use the old FM bandwidth for community and local radio.

My personal expectation is that the FM spectrum will be taken over by pirate stations.

It will be immediately used with for long-distance Wireless Internet.

Testing has already started.

OK, where are they testing it?

How will hams get access to the old FM band?

The band will immediately be re-assigned to other licensed services.

DAB+ sounds terrible to me compared to a (tuned) FM station - AFAICT it's 48kbit AAC.

I believe it. That's not nearly enough bits.

It seems that to achieve the same perceived quality as FM you need about 160kbit/s (when using DAB).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_broadcasting

The bitrate requirement should be lower for DAB+, although this article seems to contradict that: http://www.engineeringradio.us/blog/2013/11/what-bitrate-is-...

If you live next to the radio tower, perhaps. I prefer to have more sound in my noise than FM can offer.

What sort of aerial are you using?

I ask because FM waves are 2.8 to 3.4 metres long, so a quarter-wave FM aerial should be 70-86cm (28-33 inches) long....

No idea. Car radios etc. They work amazingly well in Oslo, but they're useless out in the bushes. Radio isn't fun when you only hear half the conversation. Give me error correction and lossy codecs any time.

Well, if there's no signal you won't get a result whether it's analogue or digital, In fact, digital works less well at low signal strengths: instead of a noisy, hissy FM radio you usually get nothing ;-)

AM goes further, of course, if AM is available...

It can be set independently per station. As an example, in Norway the NRK Jazz channel transmits at 64 kbit/s, while NRK Klassisk (classical music) transmits at 96 kbit/s.

96 kbit/s AAC still isn't enough IMHO. 128 kbit/s OPUS would be awesome :)

DAB mandated the use of MP2, which pre-dated MP3. DAB+ uses MP4 aacPlus(HE-AAC v2).

Unfortunately this doesn't improve sound quality because stations use the extra efficiency to switch to lower bit-rates.

Some countries have stations at 48kbps. The UK is leading the drive to lower sound quality with DAB+ stations on the SDL multiplex at 32kbps.

Note that DAB+ also hides a cost increase because stations have to pay Fraunhofer for its patents. Fun, isn't it? ;-)

> because stations have to pay Fraunhofer for its patents. Fun, isn't it? ;-)

Fun it is, considering that money goes all back to Germany! insert evil German laugh here

The worst thing about DAB for me is that any signal interruption causes complete lack of sound, and then my car takes at least 5 seconds to tune back in. It's extremely infuriating - I much prefer FM radio which gets noisy, but at least you can continue listening, even when driving through poor signal area.

Only with cheap radios.

Any advanced receiver will be constantly hunting for the best backup channel so the change over is undetectable.

I have a top of the line, 2016 Mercedes-AMG - you'd think that would have the best DAB receiver you can have,no? I mean, obviously it doesn't because it does this, but as a consumer I have no control over the type of DAB receiver in my car. So saying that oh it's fine, because only cheap receivers do that does not help - especially since FM behaves consistently, no matter how expensive receiver you are using.

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.

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?

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.

It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.

Not if the crisis involves mains power outage - cell towers don't generally have backup power so mobile phones will be useless.

Edit: Adding generators/batteries to a significant fraction of cell towers is (probably) impractical due to them being bulky, expensive, and attractive to thieves.

This is not correct in the case of Norway, at least - I believe (mind, believe, I do not know for sure) that telcos are mandated by law to have emergency power supplies available; whenever we have a massive power outage, cell service stays up for hours, if not days afterwards.

Them being bulky is a major deterrent to theft, as a lot of our cellphone infrastructure is way out in the boonies and not really accessible unless you REALLY want to get to it...

It isn't the Telcos I think about in this situation.

It is my own phone batter. Or my spouse's - he has a dying phone with a dying battery, which doesn't always like to hold a charge. I'll be good for a while, sure, but once I'm dead... I'm dead. If something would happen late at night, after I've fiddled with my phone all day, I might start out with very little power. Early in the day, and I could make it last most the weekend.

Ah, that figures. Mea culpa. In that case, a $20 power bank should provide at least a couple of full charges - but if you're anything like me, you'll forget to top it up at regular intervals and will find that its capacity is greatly reduced when you need it... :-/ (I cheat; I have a small diesel generator for use during outages - we're typically without utility power a couple of days every winter.

Still, any solution based around a smartphone is going to be subpar, compared to the dirt-cheap FM receiver that can run for weeks or months on a couple of ubiquitous AA batteries.

If I understand correctly, all cell towers in the US are in fact supposed to have at least 8 hours of backup power.

Here's the FCC ruling: http://www.njslom.org/FCC-07-177A1.pdf (page 23)

Many municipalities already have that in place (for sending out alerts about water quality etc).

The problem with cell towers is that the infrastructure is more brittle with more moving parts. There's been cases where fires, power outages etc in small towns have caused base stations to go offline, cutting whole towns off from communication.

Not to mention the recent case where penetration testing done by another operator in Europe accidentally caused the entire cell phone network of the largest operator in Norway to go offline for half a day.

If you know the inner workings of the cell phone network, you can't help wonder how it still works so relatively reliable.

Maybe one could just keep one emergency channel using an analog signal and make sure everyone owns a receiver (they are dirt cheap anyway).

Then you wouldn't be able to shut down any of the repeaters.

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.

I wonder if shutting down FM and replacing it with much more expensive mobile data is a conspiracy by cellular carriers?

Are you sure your phone doesn't have an FM radio?

A lot of phones have it built-in (just need to have headphones plugged in for the antenna), but don't advertise it much.

But without a custom rom it isn't exposed. This is part of the conspiracy by my mobile carrier to make me buy their hella expensive data plan.

The radio in mine is (in an HTC One A9). I almost never have headphones with me though, so it's not usually of any practical use to me.

People don't even reverse engineer baseband/FM radio chips in phones under the mentality that "it cannot be done." and other stigmas such as NDA's. Sickens me to no end.

That's the one thing I miss on my old Xiaomi - it came with a ROM that enabled FM and even had a nice app for it.

>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.

Subscribe to the NPR shows you like via a podcasting app (which will pre-download via wifi), and donate the $20/month to NPR.

You could buy a cheap Nokia or an MP3 player with built in FM radio for less than $20....

Sure, why keep something that's cheap and easily accessible operational when you can have something that's easier to monetise, track, and whatnot...

How is DAB easier to track?

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.

We have digital radio, digital television broadcast, separate emergency frequencies and so goes the list.

What about gathering around standard that work and are already in place? What about making cell phone and Internet connectivity more robust?

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!

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.

Good thing we already pay so much taxes we don't even notice the difference.

Except for the bumpy roads and understaffed elderly homes.

Errr - are you really suggesting that we really move all broadcast media to TCP/IP? You're going to give free streaming plans to everyone in the country?

Or does it perhaps make sense to use dedicated broadcast technology for free-to-air broadcasts?

The disadvantage of radio broadcasting is that it ties up valuable spectrum, has only one direction, and only allows a limited number of channels.

The advantage of streaming internet is that it allows unlimited channels, while only using bandwidth for one channel at a time for each user.

Depending on the number of channels you wish to provide, and the number of users in each area, there is a point where Internet streaming is way ahead.

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.

Clearly money or techno-determinism is at play.

I believe they said they will look again at the issue once usage exceeds 50%. Which would probably mean a decision to switch including a multiyear runway.

Yes. Unfortunately the numbers are based on cheating the public. The 50% isn't 50% of people using DAB, it's 50% of listening to digital sources in total, including DAB.

This could allow them to switch off FM even if more people listen to FM than DAB radio, depending on the growth of other forms of digital listening.

I know I am properly a outlier but how many people on HN actually listens to radio over FM/DAB/Other non IP systems?

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:

- Streaming or locally stored music - Podcasts (which may include shows produced by radio stations). - Audiobooks.

At home its the same, either played directly on the playback device (sonos) or from the phone.

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.

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 listen to pretty much only broadcast NPR when driving. It still has better ease of use than anything else. Nothing to set up or plug in to delay my departure (just press the power button and it's on), I don't have to choose an episode, the content is generally interesting, and there are no obtrusive ads. I have a short commute so I don't run into the problem of hearing repeat newscasts. If I spent more time in the car I might bring my own media (and I do when I go on road trips), but I quite like it for the 30-45 minutes a day that I'm in the car.

You're gonna get self-selecting responses to this, but I listen to FM a good amount -- maybe not every day, but several times a week, mostly in the car. For me, it's a way to attune to mainstream music or a particular station format and briefly escape my otherwise carefully curated playlists, and available at no cost to me, unlike some smartphone streaming service.

In truth, to me the method of delivery is not relevant: it could be IP or OTA Digital or Analog. Rather, I sometimes enjoy the unattended, externally curated format of radio, vs. having to select the next playing item myself.

I listen to the local NPR music station. My car seems like it's one year too old to have some sort of expandable input, and there's no sensible way to install a Lightning cable or Bluetooth adaptor into it since the stereo system is super-integrated.

Of course, once I do get a car that has a Lightning hookup…I'll probably just listen to podcasts at every possible opportunity. Right now I usually only turn the radio on if I'm going to be in the car for 30 minutes or more, which happens maybe once a month at most.

When driving is the only time I listen to radio. And only radio.

I mostly listen to the UK stations BBC Radio 5 (no adverts) and Talk Sport which are only available on AM (MW). And my reception generally is always quite crap.

I can't wait for my next car which will definitely have DAB+ where those channels are available without the analogue AM noise.

I do. Whenever I am in the office, 2-3 days a week, I listen for about five hours a day. A radio is just easier, especially since I don't like headphones or ear buds. At home, at night, I'll sometime listen to the radio, eve though the phone is sitting right next to it. Heck, having a working FM radio in my phone was part of the reason I have a Sony Z3.

I have a radio alarm clock, so almost every day.

Every single day. I listen to the local sports radio, and the local rock stations in the car when I'm driving.

A lot of the places I go don't really have cellular data coverage strong enough to support solid streaming audio. Meanwhile, there is one FM station broadcasting from a mountain top that I can pick up everywhere within a 250 mile radius with ease.

I've almost never listened to radio, but I don't like music. Been listening to podcasts since 2005, when I split them into 5 min segments and sent them via IR to my feature phone.

I don't get listening to things a) not from the beginning, b) not until the end, c) without pausing, skipping forward/back, d) not your favourite things, e) missing an episode, f) listening to the same thing twice

I listen to radio a lot in the UK, but then the BBC has many excellent ad-free channels.

I'm in the USA, so my mileage varies.

As it turns out, areas without decent cell signal — not even LTE, just a signal in general — is much more prevalent than I assumed. We just moved, only 15 minutes from where we lived, and we went from 4 constant bars of LTE to sometimes we get 1 bar of 3G.

I'm still not used to this, and there are many times where I get in my car, plug in my phone, start driving, then realize I didn't download anything for the ride. So I switch back to FM radio. Up here, sports talk stations are on FM, music is on FM, etc. As much as I hate commercials, the serendipity of a one-way broadcast can be exciting.

Second case: my wife's phone "connects" to her car, but only for phone calls. She doesn't listen to music through her phone really, and still relies fully on music from FM in her car. I don't think that's that weird.

Third case: both of my parents still drive, and neither do these sorts of things with their phones. When my dad is working in his garden, he's got the radio on (FM, generally talk or sports channels). My mom will turn on the radio in the car to listen to while she drives.

So I guess the car is the biggest case I see, and though for me it's mostly a reliable plan b, there's an older generation that still listens to a decent amount of FM (or AM) radio out there.

Most people in the UK listen to live radio most of the time, and that includes me. These bullet points are from RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research), which is the official body in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK.

* Live radio accounts for 74% of the share of all UK audio consumption. It reaches 90% of the population.

* 38% of audio listening is on devices other than radio sets, primarily PC/laptop (11% of all audio) and smartphones (8%).

* On-demand music services account for 6% share of audio time and are listened to by 7.6 million people each week.

RAJAR http://www.rajar.co.uk/

Audio Time – What the RAJAR MIDAS Audio Survey says about listening in the digital age http://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/news/Audio_Time%20_FINAL_pages.p...

I listen to FM radio while driving, about an hour total every day. I can do this because I live in a town with great public radio (Oregon Public Broadcasting, All Classical Portland, and KMHD for jazz).

I have found that there's a strong correlation in the US between livability and good public radio, at least for my tastes.

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.

This seems like a severely premature move.

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.

To play devil's advocate, FM radio broke in my car with a similar price to fix it. What you describe is not unique to DAB radio.

To be fair, that's usually the only solution official dealerships know. When the CD drive stopped working in my LR Discovery 3, the garage quoted me almost £1000 for replacing the whole unit. I took it to an electronics repair shop, who took it apart, replaced something inside, and ended up charging me £100 for the whole repair.

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.

As a Norwegian I support this. However it would be better to focus on 4g + streaming rather than DAB.

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

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!!

Ideally, long wave, AM and FM spectrum will be used for DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) instead.

To quote Wikipedia: "The principle of DRM is that bandwidth is the limited element, and computer processing power is cheap; modern CPU-intensive audio compression techniques enable more efficient use of available bandwidth, at the expense of processing resources."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

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?

Anyone who doesn't own a mobile/cell phone?

A quickly vanishing segment of people. Probably not worth worrying about.

Yeah, soon enough it will be gone, but radio is probably more robust in large scale emergency situations (insert catastrophe of your choice).

Personally, a cellphone hasn't become a routine item for me. I don't really carry one at the ready, though I have a few without plans. When necessary I pay for a month and charge one up.

Probably less people than the number of people that have the radio turned off anyway, so that could be considered "good enough"

If I remember, it plays some kind of tone, and pops the alert up in text.

> Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car?

Who's checking their texts when they're driving a car? Thankfully, that's a ticketable offense in my area now.

Ticketable offense probably most of the places. Still something that happens all the effin time.

Question I have is how resilient is the cell network in the event of a large-scale power outage? Can the antennae towers still operate without the power grid?

They have batteries, but I don't think they last very long.

The obvious flaws in that argument are battery life for one, and that whenever any major event happens, like New Years Eve, the mobile network slows to a halt. In a national emergency, a smartphone isn't going to last long enough to serve you, especially in a climate where winter temperatures are routinely as low as -25 centigrade and battery life is all the worse for it.

Word! Norwegian living in Oslo here, my iPhone 6 can shut down around 40-50% battery around -5 centigrade if I keep it out for long enough that it cools down (5 mins should do it). Now I always try to keep it warm in my hands and stick it back in my pocket asap, and I always keep it the pocket on my thigh, if I keep it in a pocket without close body contact it cools down as if it was outside.. I've heard something about this being caused by the aluminium covering the back of the phone and it accelerating the transfer of heat. Can't confirm it though, my last phone was an iPhone 4 which was equally terrible in the same environment.

> Who doesn't have their phone on them when they're driving in a car?

Err... me? Don't assume the way you do things is the way everyone does things.

Finland used DAB since 1998. It was given up on 2005 because nobody actually used it.

So stupid, I am completely against this.

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.

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.

AM is a great place to listen to NPR, and tons of talk shows + sports are on AM.

And FM being the only option for in car audio? That's crazy. There's cell data and predownloaded music, podcast and audiobooks.

Though I agree that tons of people would fight this change in America.

> It's almost the only option for in-vehicle audio

Also, satellite radio is common.

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