Norway switching off FM radio, going all digital.

Factual Questions
1

Saw this article about Norway switching off FM radio and going to digital soon. Other parts of the world doing similar in the near future.

Question: I know there are distinct pros to such a change, but what are the cons? I am especially wondering what happens in an all-digital scenario if there were catastrophic failure of the systems that enable digital transmission.

I am pretty ignorant of the technical side and don’t know if it’s even possible that “all” the support systems on the backend could fail in a digital setup.

Sort of relatedly, I discuss with friends sometimes the possibility of “the internet going completely down” and how much (or not) that would screw things up in all kinds of ways. Invariably someone will say “yes but there’s too much redundancy built in these days, a complete failure is not even possible.” Well, is it?

The growing dependence on the internet and digital advances more generally makes me a little uneasy, which I know is rich given where I’m posting this question. To say so can of course get one teased or labeled Luddite or worse. Be gentle, Dopers! :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Sounds like it’d suck to be stuck owning an older automobile at the moment.

3

same thing that would happen with analog FM, the broadcast would stop.

I doubt it’s any more failure prone than current analog hardware. thing you have to keep in mind is that radio is radio. Whether it’s AM, FM, TV, your cell phone, it’s all radio transmission. The only differences are what carrier frequencies are used, and how the carrier is modulated. Analog transmission either modulates the amplitude of the carrier (AM,) or the frequency of the carrier (FM.) Digital transmission can use a number of different methods of modulation like OFDM or PSK.

I’m guessing Norway wants to free up the RF spectrum currently used by analog FM radio for other purposes, since they (like most of Europe) broadcast digital radio using the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) standards which are in a completely different “band” of the spectrum. In the US, we’ve settled on IBOC (In-Band, On-Channel) better known as “HD Radio” which is piggybacked on the existing AM/FM signals being sent. Which means the likelihood of North America abandoning analog FM broadcasting any time in the forseeable future is pretty slim.

4

[QUOTE I am especially wondering what happens in an all-digital scenario if there were catastrophic failure of the systems that enable digital transmission…

…and don’t know if it’s even possible that “all” the support systems on the backend could fail in a digital setup. [/QUOTE]

Digital transmissions still require analog radio carrier waves (radio transmitters) that are just as susceptible to failure as before the digital concept was introduced. The fact that the transmitter and receiver are designed to encode/decode digital signals doesn’t necessarily make the system as a whole any more, or less, reliable. So yes, a digital transmitter could fail… But it’s cause and remedy would not be any more catastrophic than the present analog method, just different.

5

This^, with the added complication that older radios would be locked out of the transmissions.

6

with the transition having started 20 years ago there is not likely to be major impact.

auto and high quality radios will likely have digital for the past 10 years or longer.

7

Is it going to be like the digital TV signal? Because that sucks. I hate the “all or nothing” of it. At least with analog if there is a weak signal you still get some picture and audio. Not so with the digital format.

8

Goes to show you how messed up the US is. Very little is going on here (as far as listeners are concerned). The “standard” is HD Radio which is proprietary, low quality and FCC limited to make the quality even worse.

So very little going on at the consumer device end. Mainly as an option in some recent car models. (Satellite radio is seen as the better digital option.)

If you have it, you’re probably using it mainly for the digital info feed.

The switch off of analog FM in the US isn’t going to happen for some time.

9

The US doesn’t need catastrophic failure of systems to have huge coverage issues. There are still significant areas of the country where rural populations aren’t supported by hard wired internet connections. They tend not to be supported by faster/more recent cell data transmission standards, either. In plenty of places there’s weaker analog cell coverage with no/extremely limited data signal. I’ve known people in rural areas where an effective home internet connection beyond dial up means a satellite supported system. Any wonder why satellite radio, the parallel, has wider penetration.

Even where there’s effective cell coverage the range of the towers is much lower than for an FM station. In the event of natural disasters they are more prone to damage because they are in the same area. They also are subject to being overwhelmed by the traffic generated in the affected area in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. FM at least provides a way to disseminate information in those instances.

Even where there’s effective cell data, think about the effect of putting everyone currently using FM in their cars on a cell data plan for sound. That’s really what we’re talking about for an even bigger chunk of the population in the US if we tried now. There’s not much else for available connection that’s portable (some places with public wifi might work while you are in them). We’re talking both a significant monthly cost to users (who haven’t seen the cost to benefit to pay for satellite radio) and cost pressure on data usage for all the current smart phone users.

The pro of course is that we’d free up a big chunk of spectrum that potentially could be used for something else.

10

i see a mention that this is for national and regional services. local services can still continue analog for a bit more.

11

This would be a MAJOR fail in the whole Internet concept from the ground up, if indeed it were ever possible.

One of the bedrock foundational principles of the Internet, back when it was first being designed in the 1960’s (or even back in the late 1950’s?) was that it would provide redundant pathways among the various connected sites so that no failure anywhere in the system could take out anything beyond the affected site itself and possibly its immediate neighbor sites, but without breaking the connectivity of the remaining unaffected sites.

The original Internet was called ARPAnet, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department. In the early days, of course, there were only a relatively few sites, namely a few major research universities, some major government (especially military) sites, and various defense contractors that were involved in building the system.

It was part of the specific design that there would be multiple redundant pathways between these sites, so that if any pathway got bombed by the evil godless Commies or whatever, there would still be connectivity among the remaining sites. The design of the Net involved software at each site that could automatically route or re-route packets among the various paths as needed.

Now that the Net is worldwide and consists of a million bazillion sites, this foundation principle is still at the core of the modern Internet.

12

The main difference is that the digital radio will be broadcast as one transmission,
while analog radio is broadcast by multiple transmissions.

Pro: saves on power usage, or with the same costs the signal can be spread further
Con: If the digital system breaks every radio station stops.

13

Explain what you mean by one “transmission.” Do you mean one “station”?

14

this is true for things like satellite (SiriusXM, etc.) and the way DAB is done in Europe, but it is not true for HD Radio in the US. Each station broadcasting digital radio is doing so on its existing carrier.

many digital broadcasts (again, like satellite and DAB) transmit a single stream of multiplexed channels. The receiver decodes the stream and “picks out” the listener’s desired “channel.”

I’ll give you proprietary, but I’m going to have to ask you to support your other assertions. DAB uses old MPEG Layer II compression with a max bitrate of 128 kb/s per program. HD Radio uses HDC compression (based on High-Efficiency AAC) with about 150 kb/s to be divided between the main program and sub-channels (if any.)

satellite radio’s main draw is the variety of content it offers. Sound quality is objectively and subjectively worse than HD Radio because the max bitrate they can assign to one program at a time is ~ 48 kb/s.

It’ll probably never happen. The switch to digital TV was mandated because analog TV occupied a huge chunk of desirable spectrum which the FCC auctioned off after analog broadcasts went dark. Nobody is trying to grab spectrum between 87.9 and 107.9 MHz, so there’s no push to turn off analog FM broadcasting.

IIRC one of the big reasons the FCC went with Ibiquity is that if the FM signal becomes too weak for the receiver to reliably pull in the digital stream, it will blend back to the analog broadcast more or less seamlessly.

15

Probably that a single digital transmission can carry multiple channels of data.

16

Not that you explicitly claimed otherwise, but it is important to remember that the ARPANET was not explicitly designed to survive nuclear war; it might have been able to at some point during the Cold War, but that would have been a side-effect of good engineering, not an explicit design goal.

17

One downside would be that all the pirate radio stations broadcasting on FM would die overnight. That is assuming Norway has a vibrant pirate radio scene. Britain has/ maybe had well over a hundred stations broadcasting illegally but I suspect it is in decline.

Upside (for the radio authorities) is they can sell the bandwith off to telephone companies, emergency services etc.

18

They probably won’t be able to sell off the FM spectrum. As jz78817 posted FM is 87.9 and 107.9 MHz. This is not a lot of bandwidth. But the main reason is that it is really low frequency compared to other cell phone frequencies of 700 MHz, 2.5 GHz and in a few years 3.5 GHz and 5 GHz. To use the FM frequencies you need to have a bigger antenna than will fit in current phones.

19

which is why phones with an FM tuner need to use the headphone wire(s) as an antenna.

20

Digital radio had the potential to be fantastic in terms of sound quality.

The earlier DAB radios had outstanding sound quality, so much so there was an emerging audiophile market for DAB recievers

The greedy bastards decided to cut the bandwidth to each channel, so now its shite, and that’s one big reason why it has not taken off.

By cutting the channel bandwidth, you can sell more operators licences.Yo9u can also sell off the FM bandwidth to make more money if it becomes available

There is simply no reason for the consumer to want to switch from FM to digital because the sound quality is so poor.

Instead the authorities are trying to push it on to consumers, instead of encouraging voluntary take up.

Example of that is that major national broadcasters, such as BBC have been levered into pushing it, trying to broadcast exclusive content on DAB, but have used licence payers money to do it, without any real consultation with the audience that it purports to serve, all at the behest of government agencies.

If you already have digital tv, then you already get most of the DAB content you would want anyway, so there is no real pressure to buy a DAB receiver.

In the years since digital radio was first broadcast, technical changes have all but made the reasons for digital broadcasts redundant, that’s down to internet broadcasting, you can choose your quality and select a far greater number of channels. Mobile devices have eaten into that market even more - download whatever music you want and cut out the channel host.

Internet radio also cost far less to set up, no need to pay for the expensive licence any more, its also far more flexible because you can download the podcasts and listen to shows when you want to.

So why would new stations want to move on to a format with very limited takeup, when FM can do everything already and for less cash, and where there are many consumers with equipment to receive.

DAB radios are not especially cheap.

Digital broadcast model assumes that consumers will choose to tune in the same way they always have, but that model has already changed and will continue to evolve.

DAB = Dead And Buried

Its a future technology dream that’s already gone, the radio consumption model is gone, and anyway there are already several different DAB standards - and not all are compatible - who wants to buy a digital radio that may well be not backward compatible and is highly likely to not be future compatible either, not when each household already has a dozen or so FM receivers.