nigelmercier
RIP
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Digital Radio is the way forward, but DAB version 1.0 is not it.
All change to DAB radio
- Thread starter finlandia
- Start date
Digital Radio is the way forward, but DAB version 1.0 is not it.
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
For fixed - ie home - use I can't see the point of or future in any sort of over-the-air radio receiver. Wifi IP radios are where it's at ... just a shame they are still expensive.
elton
Well-Known Member
IP radio will work fine, until everyone has them and they block up the internet.
I listen to Planet Rock over IP, because it's in stereo (whereas on DAB it's mono like every other DAB station except BBC). Unfortunately the bandwidth is pathetic; verging on criminal.
It seems the evolution of radio is going backwards.
With apologies, I'll repeat my theory that broadcast standards are dictated by middle-aged men, who've lost the full spectrum of their hearing due to age.
lw395
Well-Known Member
A lot of radio stations are on freeview and freesat.
A lot of UK DAB radios have the potential to get Sattelite DAB.
The problem is, the market for broadcast is changing rapidly.
st599
Well-Known Member
As I said earlier. Cost.
Broadcast is one signal feed to a transmitter.
IP is on signal feed per viewer with many intermediate routing points.
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
Streaming radio doesn't even dent my broadband connection, which in the midst of rural nowhere is 5Mbps. In a world rapidly moving to online video streaming, audio is trivial.
Cost to whom, though? If you want to broadcast a radio station across the UK you either need access to dozens of transmitters, which cost a bomb to run (BBC2 was £50k per hour, 20 years ago, if my sources are correct) or you need a reasonably chunky connection to the net and ISPs will sort out the rest.
lw395
Well-Known Member
The difference is, consumers seem happy to stump up £20 a month for an internet connection, few will pay to subscribe to broadcast, until you get to talking about Sky etc, then you are really paying for the content as much as the channel.
Internet seems seriously inefficient, but people want it.
Broadcast people just moan about it, but won't pay for better.
lw395
Well-Known Member
The difference is, consumers seem happy to stump up £20 a month for an internet connection, few will pay to subscribe to broadcast, until you get to talking about Sky etc, then you are really paying for the content as much as the channel.
Internet seems seriously inefficient, but people want it.
Broadcast people just moan about it, but won't pay for better.
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
I'm not sure that it's inefficient. It allows information to be sent only to the people who want it, whereas broadcasting sends it to everyone, just in case. In most places there are, what, a dozen radio station at most available on-air and a few hundred online.
It's not that long since I was regularly paying £100/month for 56k dialup ... now I pay £15/month for 5Mbps, and that's in the back end of nowhere.
nickf
Well-Known Member
Your doing well in our village (Notts) your lucky to get 1.5Mps and that's download forget upload!
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
Maybe it's a rural Scottish thing. is your router reasonably new, by the way? I use Netgear 834DGs (I always have a spare or two because they get knackered every time the local telephone exchange is hit by lightning) and flashing to the last firmware increases my connection speed from 3Mbps to 5Mbps.
elton
Well-Known Member
Of course it doesn't. But if everyone was listening to IP radio simultaneously, it would certainly cause a problem. You know how it works, don't you? You don't have your own wire all the way to the broadcaster
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
Of course, but all the same it's a tiny part of the internet infrastructure capacity - typically 128kbps. Sure, if everyone listens it adds up, but when everyone does anything on the internet it adds up. BT have well over a million IP TV subscribers now, and they need a heck of a lot more bandwidth than radio listeners.
Ten years ago everybody in the country using IP radio would have been unthinkable. Five years ago, impossible. Today, inconvenient. Five years from now, trivial.
KellysEye
Well-Known Member
>Does anybody know when "normal" boat fm radios will need replacing with DAB ?
The government hasn't set a date DAB coverage isn't national. Car manufacturers are fitting DAB radios.
The government hasn't set a date DAB coverage isn't national. Car manufacturers are fitting DAB radios.
AntarcticPilot
Well-Known Member
Not all are. I've just bought a new car; it has an FM radio, and no option for a DAB one.
ronsurf
Well-Known Member
I would have thought LW will be around for some time to come, it's used for Economy 7 switchover - the signal is encoded with the Radio 4 LW transmission.
There are plenty of factories still making valves for guitar amplifiers and hi-fi's, and mini valves are used in military applications, so it wouldn't be impossible to make some more....
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
Radio-controlled clocks use the DCF77 long wave time signal from Germany.
There is a HUGE difference between the titchy little valve used in guitar amplifiers ad the bad boys used in high power transmission. Here's an article about the problem: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/09/bbc-radio4-long-wave-goodbye
elton
Well-Known Member
That's the same vacuous argument that predicts self-driving cars, and nuclear fusion are "just around the corner".
Incidentally, do you know of any IP radio streams that provide half-decent listening quality? (say 160kbs?)
doug748
Well-Known Member
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
The personal abuse is a bit of a shame. That said, while fusion scientists have always been a tad over-optimistic, predictions about the development of network infrastructure have, if anything, been over-conservative. In view of what's happening for 4G mobile, and happening for 5G, the bandwidth needed for digital radio is already manageable (the peak LINX exchange traffic last month was enough to support 15 million good digital radio streams) and will soon be trivial. BT has no problem serving streaming video to Infinity customers.
In addition, it's likely that if/when IP radio takes off, the infrastructure will mutate to adapt. There was a proposal, which I believe went ahead, for the BBC to place servers inside some ISPs to reduce backbone load. That would obviously make sense for streaming of national radio stations.
Radio 3 streams at 320kbps.
What bit do you think is a lie? That Droitwich is dependent on high power transmitter valves or that these valves are in short supply?