Software NRSC-5 Receiver | Hacker News Reader

Software NRSC-5 Receiver

github.com

44 pointsth0ma513 comments

The whole shift to digital for radio is a bullshit exercise. Radio functionality does not in any way increase in some measurable way by going digital, digital does not degrade gracefully and analogue radio used hardly any spectrum at all to begin with. I really don't see why radios should need processors, it was a perfectly good medium that served a ton of people with limited access to technology the world over.

The only reason this got rammed through in my opinion is that it allowed for DRM to be imposed on radio.

Indeed, imposing DRM is the whole idea :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

But there are some benefits which you didn't mention, such as including text & images in the broadcast for people without internet access, kind of like what Microsoft attempted a decade ago with FM subcarriers. There isn't that much bandwidth available for analogue AM radio either; using DRM would at least double that. And then there's the claim that switching to DAB allows for decreasing the output power, but I don't know if that really holds true in practice.

Some more information (I posted this yesterday but it didn't get much traction). I'm personally really happy about this project, because something about proprietary technology being used for general radio broadcasts rubs me the wrong way. I really wish we would have adopted a system like DRM (digital radio mondiale, not digital rights management) instead of the deceivingly named HD Radio.

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/decoding-and-listening-to-hd-radio-nr...

I agree, but wouldn't there be legal/licensing issues with this implementation?

I'm sure there are, but I would put it in the same bucket as the MP3 decoding libraries that have been included in Linux distros behind a checkbox for ages. If you tried to ship a product in the US based on this, I would expect to spend some time getting to know your lawyer. But for personal use, I wouldn't expect any trouble.

Not exactly the same situation as Ubuntu - the MP3 decoding checkbox downloaded Fluendo's decoder, which was actually properly licensed. But otherwise you're correct (FYI, there are EU and JP patents too).

Ah, good to know. Not sure where I got the idea that it was basically an "I live somewhere without those patents" checkbox.

I have always hated HD Radio from the pedantic standpoint that "definition" describes images and "fidelity" should describes audio.

OTOH, using HF would be easy to confuse with high frequency.

They never said it was "high definition".

The codec is HDC, High-Definition Coding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Coding

For those of us like me who don't know what NRSC-5 is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio

And here is the standard: http://www.nrscstandards.org/SG/NRSC-5-C.pdf

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