Discussions on the merits of DAB and FM always feature two separate issues, namely sound quality and reception.
Firstly, sound quality. The poster who said that 64K bitrate on DAB sounds terrible is absolutely right. Receivers a decade old based on the Radioscape 200 module, for instance, couldn't even decode it properly. It seems to be a case of engineering people, who know this as well as we do, being overruled by sales people, who are determined to sell mulitplex space for two 64K channels. Never mind the quality – feel the width.
Like others on this forum, I've done comparisons between FM and DAB variants of the same stations. My equipment is a top of the range Roberts radio, connected by optical link to a Sony hifi and a Wharfedale subwoofer. Not the world's top-league setup, but a good level of sound quality. My completely unbiased findings are that there is a bass rolloff on FM at a higher frequency than that of DAB, on a variety of stations. This is not surprising, considering that the spec for the radio says that the FM frequency goes down the 50 Hz, whereas the one for DAB goes down to 20 Hz.
The upper frequencies, and the colouration of the audio, depends upon the bitrate on DAB, which is where FM is capable of winning out. A case yet to be answered on DAB is the one by classical and light music fans, who say that DAB can only reproduce the loudest sound at any one instance in time, so things like opera, drama, and band music don't reproduce the spacial accuracy that FM can. And opera fans are an incredibly fussy bunch to upset.
Regarding the transmission and reception of DAB, previous posters have said it all. The DAB network was wrongly specified at the start. Instead of regional transmitters mounted on TV towers, it should have been a cellular network of low-powered transmitters. Hence the infill now going on to put this right – but it's not going far enough. There should be, for instance, transmitter modules that can be mounted on any old lighting pole on a traffic island, putting out a tiny but adequate signal, and powered by a solar-charged battery. My opinion ( worth nothing ) is that the regional transmitters should be removed in favour of a properly designed cellular system, with all multiplexes in any area available from each node in the cellular system. No need then to spend hours going round the outside of a house trying to find a point where all multiplexes can be received !
The rule of reception is clear-cut, whether in a car or in a building. There is a substantial reduction in signal strength by having the aerial inside as compared to outside. If at all possible, get an outside aerial. Effects inside such as radios only working in certain parts of the room, or the signal being destroyed by the use of other electrical devices, are legendary, and again only entirely solved by using an outdoor aerial. Some people note that the signal in a room seems strong prior to an electrical device being switched on that then destroys the DAB signal. I'm told that the signal artificially looks strong, because of the effort that the radio is putting into error correction. DAB is considerably better at rejecting multipath problems from aircraft, but not totally immune to it, hence posts on this forum of the nature …..my DAB radio sometimes cuts out for 3 minutes....
The conclusions are these. Buy good quality equipment, professionally installed if in a car. Get a good quality outside aerial. If the radio works inside on it's own aerial, be pleased. Don't worry too much about the sound quality whether it's FM or DAB – just have a good time and enjoy the music.
I don't see any advantage in the more expensive option of lots of low power "cells". It has taken the mobile phone companies many years to roll out mobile broadband and even now there are large areas with no or poor coverage so I can't see that they would roll out DAB transmitters any quicker.
It would result in coverage along motorways and some trunk roads but leave many areas with no coverage even in urban areas. One more transmitter site would complete coverage through the Great Glen for me, it could be done with many more low power ones but they would not provide any coverage down the side roads that the existing sites do. Also DAB has the useful feature of several poor signals combining to give one usable one so higher power transmitters on hilltops can combine in unexpected locations to give coverage.
Giving my personal take on the original question before getting stuck in, yes, it's not only possible but obvious to replace FM with DAB, for the national services at least. Audio for the various stations is shuffled around to transmitters as a NICAM 3 group, why not do it as an ensemble, send it via satellite and transmit it from a single TX per site while you're at it.
The Beeb are making a big splash about the FM network now being at 'end of life', with spares being increasingly hard to source. This one has been thrashed to death in other threads on here. Whether this is true or not is academic. The situation could well arise where FM TXs fail and are not replaced in areas where there is good overlapping DAB coverage. They'd probably trial this with a small relay rather than a main station first, to see how much flak would result. The disclaimer is that I've no idea what the spares holding is either for the main-site category of TX or smaller relay kit.
I don't see any advantage in the more expensive option of lots of low power "cells". It has taken the mobile phone companies many years to roll out mobile broadband and even now there are large areas with no or poor coverage so I can't see that they would roll out DAB transmitters any quicker.
Not really a fair comparison, as the licence requirement for 3G was only ever '80% population'. From the outset, everyone in the mobile industry understood this to mean that there'd be islands of 3G in urban and built-up areas, surrounded by a continuum of 2G coverage.
In any SFN coverage is not the problem, mutual interference is. You manage this not by having hilltop sites, but by having sites largely shielded from each other but allowing for 'handover' zones where you move between coverage areas. 3G combats mutual interference by having different scrambling codes for each site. 4G has dedicated 'tones' for use at the cell edge with degraded data throughput. Both also use equalisation further to clean up the signal. DAB/+ has neither any way to transform interferer energy to AGWN at baseband, nor any equaliser.
For the case of DAB installed high on hilltop masts, the only realistic way to manage out-of-window interference is to tailor the antenna pattern, either via a fixed array or a variable, smart antenna. There is some history for fixed antenna patterns at least, in the complex arrangements used in past decades to manage Band III PMR interference towards the continent.
Finishing on the OP's actual topic, I can think of a few additional catalysts for widespread adoption of FM from the late 80s onwards, two of which were the 97-102 MHz sub-band being vacated by the blue-lighters at the end of the 80s and 105-108 MHz becoming free at the end of 1995, meaning the full 88-108 MHz was at last available from 1996 onwards. In parallel with this the broadcasters converted from H-pol to mixed, to enhance mobile and portable reception.
DAB was intended to make retuning and interference in the in-car environment a thing of the past. If modern vehicles had proper installations commentors would probably agree that this has been achieved, bitrate/quality issues aside. The only equivalent enabler to the extra bandwidth and mixed pol that brought FM to dominance in the 90s would be the additional L-band frequencies, which could easily be used as in-fill and local coverage solving the mutual interference issues. This would require the band somehow to be wrested away from Qualcomm.
The two sites at each end of the Great Glen are near the maximum separation distance for SFNs and both on reasonably high locations. On one trip there was a mains failure / fault at one so it was off. There was no sign of any signal from the distant one until quite close which suggests it would not cause any interference to a site slightly further away.
The only benefit I get out of it is v. Radio 5 on MW at night which swells according to atmospherics. The reception on every DAB radio I tried is especially bad, both on DAB and especially FM. Weird and worse than any normal FM radio. How's this reception going to be reliable in cars? And I can always tell the bitrate effects.
I can't get a DAB radio of any sort for less than £20. I can get a £1 FM radio which is far more frugal on power too.
One thing that shocked me is that my girlfriend has just brought a new Toyata Yaris with the new Touch and go radio in the vechile, she had the dab upgrade and its a winderscreen mount aerial. and to be honest there is no dab dropout at all even around Derby which is not strong for dab, I dont know if it has a booter within it, but its as good as the one in my car with the rooftop mount
FWIW most people have never listened to their own Digital Radio receiver (in any form), ever.
Cheers,
David.
According to RAJAR (Q3 2011) 48.4% listen to "digital radio" at some point in a typical week.
Of course many of them are listening to stations that are simulcast on FM or AM, but they are choosing to listen to them on a digital platform. I think it's fair to assume that the 50% mark will have been reached when the Q4 figures are released in early February.
Was UHF System I rubbish compared with VHF System A ?
i don't remember much of VHF,
We had colour with UHF, not sure if that could have been done with VHF, i presume it could have been, after all it is only a carrier.
the only improvement with digital T.V is more channels if you call that a improvement, the problem is more channels means less content, less new stuff and worse quality due to squeezing all these channels in.
DAB radio is the same, push more stations into a limited space.
According to RAJAR (Q3 2011) 48.4% listen to "digital radio" at some point in a typical week.
Of course many of them are listening to stations that are simulcast on FM or AM, but they are choosing to listen to them on a digital platform. I think it's fair to assume that the 50% mark will have been reached when the Q4 figures are released in early February.
We had colour with UHF, not sure if that could have been done with VHF, i presume it could have been, after all it is only a carrier.
the only improvement with digital T.V is more channels if you call that a improvement, the problem is more channels means less content, less new stuff and worse quality due to squeezing all these channels in.
DAB radio is the same, push more stations into a limited space.
Digital TV provides very much better signal quality than analogue, particularly in weak signal areas.
We had colour with UHF, not sure if that could have been done with VHF, i presume it could have been, after all it is only a carrier.
the only improvement with digital T.V is more channels if you call that a improvement, the problem is more channels means less content, less new stuff and worse quality due to squeezing all these channels in.
DAB radio is the same, push more stations into a limited space.
It was claimed that every changed degraded the systems.
DAB has given much improved reception in cars which is what it was designed to do.
Many of the digital TV channels are poor quality but I don't watch them, it has given a few extra channels that I use a lot like BBC4, BBC News and even Channel 5 occasionally. I am sure the vast majority of people do not find the picture worse and most will find it better.
Ofcom's interim statement (21/12/2011) on the work of digital switchover - DAB matching FM and extending editorial boundaries. Full report due 2012 Q1 they say....
DAB is like the MiniDisc of radio, it's almost a stopgap technology.
MiniDisc was the original way to record high-quality audio in domestic setups. Before that, you only had cassette.
But suddenly CD-R became affordable and blew it out the water.
I thought MiniDisc was used more for portable applications which took a bit longer for cheap storage to come along. Presumably the analogy for VHF FM is 78 rpm records?
With any technology there will always be something else coming along in a few years time. DAB does a perfectly good at providing reception in a mobile and portable environment without the disadvantages of MW or VHF FM. The Internet has some uses in a fixed location at home though I find it often does not give reliable "reception".
We should not be considering replacing FM with DAB at all in my view, what we need to be doing is moving with the rest of Europe (as does Ireland) in having a transition period with DAB/DAB+ simulcasting in a similar way the Swiss did in their transition from DAB to DAB+, a trade in for old un-upgradable DAB equipment to reduce the cost of buying a DAB+ compatible radio and then down the line, an eventual switch-off of the DAB services. And sooner, rather than later.
Unfortunately that ain't going to happen with a radio industry so committed to DAB and whom dismiss DAB+ completely for their own vested interests.
DAB is a radio industry thing & it's been driven by them & the advice they have given governments, rather than the consumer.
.
As per usual, you're speaking utter twaddle. Most of the radio industry does not want DAB at all, the smaller groups are terrified of it as most of their stations are not on it, most of the big groups have lost a lot of money on DAB, in fact in GCap's last days they were proposing pulling out of DAB as a cost saving measure.
It's the government who bribe the commercial operators with promises of extended FM licences and other rewards if they commit to DAB. To commercial operators it means a lot more expense than FM and likely smaller audiences due to more stations competing.
It's Ofcom/the government who want DAB, not the industry.
With any technology there will always be something else coming along in a few years time. DAB does a perfectly good at providing reception in a mobile and portable environment without the disadvantages of MW or VHF FM.
Which is like saying that Video CD does a perfectly good job of delivering moving pictures without the disadvantages of VHS. Yet the world went with DVD instead
FM will be replaced at some point, this country have a habit of replacing a decent system with rubbish, you only have to look at our T.v service.
FM is not being "replaced" - no more than AM was "replaced" 20 plus years ago. Some services are intended to be moved to DAB from FM, but that will enable other services to be made available on the freed up FM space. I would prefer it if they kept a couple or three national services on FM (say 2 BBC & 1 commercial), but as has been said elsewhere this is not about to happen overnight. It took 35 years for FM to largely replace AM, so by that calculation we are well over 20 years away from the 1990s type changes that affected LW,MW & FM - and AM is still there!
Personally I find that on the BBC stations that DAB coverage in my car is already better than FM coverage was less than 15 years ago (I don't listen to any of the D1 stations regularly enough to comment on them), with the added bonus of not having to re-tune. As others have said you do need to have a proper roof mounted aerial (much like you need for reliable FM signals). I can see FM and DAB being available side by side for at least the rest of my time on earth - and probably for some time afterwards!!!
We should not be considering replacing FM with DAB at all in my view, what we need to be doing is moving with the rest of Europe (as does Ireland) in having a transition period with DAB/DAB+ simulcasting in a similar way the Swiss did in their transition from DAB to DAB+, a trade in for old un-upgradable DAB equipment to reduce the cost of buying a DAB+ compatible radio and then down the line, an eventual switch-off of the DAB services. And sooner, rather than later.
Unfortunately that ain't going to happen with a radio industry so committed to DAB and whom dismiss DAB+ completely for their own vested interests.
Too many standard DAB radios out there, otherwise conversion to DAB+ would be easy and relatively cheap. DAB is fine for most users, and DAB+ can always be slipped in at the side of DAB on existing muxes. That might eventually add another % or so to the final coverage being built out on DAB at the present time.
I don't think it will for donkeys years due to the fact that virtually no run of the mill cars have DAB Radios as standard, and most listening is done by commuters / school run DAB is an expensive folly.
My neice can't see why she should replace her Volvo FM radio, for a DAB one, (if it exists) to listen to the same station she does now (Capital Yorkshire).
I don't think it will for donkeys years due to the fact that virtually no run of the mill cars have DAB Radios as standard, and most listening is done by commuters / school run DAB is an expensive folly.
SMMT have reported that the proportion of digital radios in cars and commercial vehicles “as standard” has risen from 5.3% in September 2010 to almost 18% in September 2011. This means that over a quarter of a million vehicles have been sold with digital radio in the past year.
Combined with this Ford have announced that all their vehicles will have digital radio fitted as standard by the end of 2012, with the new Ford Focus already hitting the streets with digital radio.
There are other new vehicles launched with digital radio......all of this puts us on target for the majority of new vehicles to be sold with digital radio as standard by the end of 2013 which is a very positive story.
I think that they should get on with it and announce a date sooner rather than later so we can receive more radio stations and have a reduced crackle experience on FM
I live in London about 100 miles from the Sandy Heath transmitter and I can only get Digital One
and the BBC stations from there, but no local radio stations, as it has not been turned on yet
As for in-car radios things will change next year, as all cars have to be fitted with DAB radios as standard
Because VHF FM often gives poor reception in many locations, the proponents of it tend to be line of sight to a main station using a good quality tuner and fixed antenna. DAB will usually be much better mobile or on a portable receiver.
I don't have a particularly good quality FM tuner or a fixed antenna, nor do I live within line-of-sight of either Wrotham or Crystal Palace. As for judging a technology by my own personal experience with it - well, so do you, when you use your own experience of using DAB in the Highlands.
I'm quite prepared to believe DAB reception is better than FM in a car in Lochaber, with all the multi-path reflecting off the cliffs. I'd seriously dispute any claim that reception is better than FM indoors on a portable, though, from my own repeated difficulties with DAB in such remote outposts as Manchester and West London.
But the main problem with DAB is really economic. I can't see how it can be made to pay, even with the current network, let alone with the scores of new line-fed transmitters planned to improve indoor/portable reception. At some point the state subsidy currently provided via the BBC and other channels will dry up, and commercial radio will suddenly be left saddled with transmission networks for which they simply can't afford to pay the rent.
I am not in any way "anti-digital" - I'm very much pro-Freeview - but I think DAB is not the system to go for. To replace FM we need a system which can be transmitted cheaply, while still having usable portable reception. Broadcast radio needs to be low cost these days - or the internet will crush it utterly.
Comments
Firstly, sound quality. The poster who said that 64K bitrate on DAB sounds terrible is absolutely right. Receivers a decade old based on the Radioscape 200 module, for instance, couldn't even decode it properly. It seems to be a case of engineering people, who know this as well as we do, being overruled by sales people, who are determined to sell mulitplex space for two 64K channels. Never mind the quality – feel the width.
Like others on this forum, I've done comparisons between FM and DAB variants of the same stations. My equipment is a top of the range Roberts radio, connected by optical link to a Sony hifi and a Wharfedale subwoofer. Not the world's top-league setup, but a good level of sound quality. My completely unbiased findings are that there is a bass rolloff on FM at a higher frequency than that of DAB, on a variety of stations. This is not surprising, considering that the spec for the radio says that the FM frequency goes down the 50 Hz, whereas the one for DAB goes down to 20 Hz.
The upper frequencies, and the colouration of the audio, depends upon the bitrate on DAB, which is where FM is capable of winning out. A case yet to be answered on DAB is the one by classical and light music fans, who say that DAB can only reproduce the loudest sound at any one instance in time, so things like opera, drama, and band music don't reproduce the spacial accuracy that FM can. And opera fans are an incredibly fussy bunch to upset.
Regarding the transmission and reception of DAB, previous posters have said it all. The DAB network was wrongly specified at the start. Instead of regional transmitters mounted on TV towers, it should have been a cellular network of low-powered transmitters. Hence the infill now going on to put this right – but it's not going far enough. There should be, for instance, transmitter modules that can be mounted on any old lighting pole on a traffic island, putting out a tiny but adequate signal, and powered by a solar-charged battery. My opinion ( worth nothing ) is that the regional transmitters should be removed in favour of a properly designed cellular system, with all multiplexes in any area available from each node in the cellular system. No need then to spend hours going round the outside of a house trying to find a point where all multiplexes can be received !
The rule of reception is clear-cut, whether in a car or in a building. There is a substantial reduction in signal strength by having the aerial inside as compared to outside. If at all possible, get an outside aerial. Effects inside such as radios only working in certain parts of the room, or the signal being destroyed by the use of other electrical devices, are legendary, and again only entirely solved by using an outdoor aerial. Some people note that the signal in a room seems strong prior to an electrical device being switched on that then destroys the DAB signal. I'm told that the signal artificially looks strong, because of the effort that the radio is putting into error correction. DAB is considerably better at rejecting multipath problems from aircraft, but not totally immune to it, hence posts on this forum of the nature …..my DAB radio sometimes cuts out for 3 minutes....
The conclusions are these. Buy good quality equipment, professionally installed if in a car. Get a good quality outside aerial. If the radio works inside on it's own aerial, be pleased. Don't worry too much about the sound quality whether it's FM or DAB – just have a good time and enjoy the music.
It would result in coverage along motorways and some trunk roads but leave many areas with no coverage even in urban areas. One more transmitter site would complete coverage through the Great Glen for me, it could be done with many more low power ones but they would not provide any coverage down the side roads that the existing sites do. Also DAB has the useful feature of several poor signals combining to give one usable one so higher power transmitters on hilltops can combine in unexpected locations to give coverage.
The Beeb are making a big splash about the FM network now being at 'end of life', with spares being increasingly hard to source. This one has been thrashed to death in other threads on here. Whether this is true or not is academic. The situation could well arise where FM TXs fail and are not replaced in areas where there is good overlapping DAB coverage. They'd probably trial this with a small relay rather than a main station first, to see how much flak would result. The disclaimer is that I've no idea what the spares holding is either for the main-site category of TX or smaller relay kit. Not really a fair comparison, as the licence requirement for 3G was only ever '80% population'. From the outset, everyone in the mobile industry understood this to mean that there'd be islands of 3G in urban and built-up areas, surrounded by a continuum of 2G coverage.
In any SFN coverage is not the problem, mutual interference is. You manage this not by having hilltop sites, but by having sites largely shielded from each other but allowing for 'handover' zones where you move between coverage areas. 3G combats mutual interference by having different scrambling codes for each site. 4G has dedicated 'tones' for use at the cell edge with degraded data throughput. Both also use equalisation further to clean up the signal. DAB/+ has neither any way to transform interferer energy to AGWN at baseband, nor any equaliser.
For the case of DAB installed high on hilltop masts, the only realistic way to manage out-of-window interference is to tailor the antenna pattern, either via a fixed array or a variable, smart antenna. There is some history for fixed antenna patterns at least, in the complex arrangements used in past decades to manage Band III PMR interference towards the continent.
Finishing on the OP's actual topic, I can think of a few additional catalysts for widespread adoption of FM from the late 80s onwards, two of which were the 97-102 MHz sub-band being vacated by the blue-lighters at the end of the 80s and 105-108 MHz becoming free at the end of 1995, meaning the full 88-108 MHz was at last available from 1996 onwards. In parallel with this the broadcasters converted from H-pol to mixed, to enhance mobile and portable reception.
DAB was intended to make retuning and interference in the in-car environment a thing of the past. If modern vehicles had proper installations commentors would probably agree that this has been achieved, bitrate/quality issues aside. The only equivalent enabler to the extra bandwidth and mixed pol that brought FM to dominance in the 90s would be the additional L-band frequencies, which could easily be used as in-fill and local coverage solving the mutual interference issues. This would require the band somehow to be wrested away from Qualcomm.
I can't get a DAB radio of any sort for less than £20. I can get a £1 FM radio which is far more frugal on power too.
I don't know SouthCity - but RAJAR seems to find a few of them
FWIW most people have never listened to their own Digital Radio receiver (in any form), ever.
Cheers,
David.
According to RAJAR (Q3 2011) 48.4% listen to "digital radio" at some point in a typical week.
Of course many of them are listening to stations that are simulcast on FM or AM, but they are choosing to listen to them on a digital platform. I think it's fair to assume that the 50% mark will have been reached when the Q4 figures are released in early February.
http://radiotoday.co.uk/2011/10/q311-radio-listening-the-ups-and-downs/
i don't remember much of VHF,
We had colour with UHF, not sure if that could have been done with VHF, i presume it could have been, after all it is only a carrier.
the only improvement with digital T.V is more channels if you call that a improvement, the problem is more channels means less content, less new stuff and worse quality due to squeezing all these channels in.
DAB radio is the same, push more stations into a limited space.
it is not, but people will still be forced, just like we was with digital T.V,
I am part of that 48.4% but it is only for abot 10 minutes a week as reception is so poor. Internet radio is the way forward for me.
Digital TV provides very much better signal quality than analogue, particularly in weak signal areas.
It was claimed that every changed degraded the systems.
DAB has given much improved reception in cars which is what it was designed to do.
Many of the digital TV channels are poor quality but I don't watch them, it has given a few extra channels that I use a lot like BBC4, BBC News and even Channel 5 occasionally. I am sure the vast majority of people do not find the picture worse and most will find it better.
Ofcom's interim statement (21/12/2011) on the work of digital switchover - DAB matching FM and extending editorial boundaries. Full report due 2012 Q1 they say....
MiniDisc was the original way to record high-quality audio in domestic setups. Before that, you only had cassette.
But suddenly CD-R became affordable and blew it out the water.
I thought MiniDisc was used more for portable applications which took a bit longer for cheap storage to come along. Presumably the analogy for VHF FM is 78 rpm records?
With any technology there will always be something else coming along in a few years time. DAB does a perfectly good at providing reception in a mobile and portable environment without the disadvantages of MW or VHF FM. The Internet has some uses in a fixed location at home though I find it often does not give reliable "reception".
Unfortunately that ain't going to happen with a radio industry so committed to DAB and whom dismiss DAB+ completely for their own vested interests.
As per usual, you're speaking utter twaddle. Most of the radio industry does not want DAB at all, the smaller groups are terrified of it as most of their stations are not on it, most of the big groups have lost a lot of money on DAB, in fact in GCap's last days they were proposing pulling out of DAB as a cost saving measure.
It's the government who bribe the commercial operators with promises of extended FM licences and other rewards if they commit to DAB. To commercial operators it means a lot more expense than FM and likely smaller audiences due to more stations competing.
It's Ofcom/the government who want DAB, not the industry.
(except China, for quite a while).
Cheers,
David.
FM is not being "replaced" - no more than AM was "replaced" 20 plus years ago. Some services are intended to be moved to DAB from FM, but that will enable other services to be made available on the freed up FM space. I would prefer it if they kept a couple or three national services on FM (say 2 BBC & 1 commercial), but as has been said elsewhere this is not about to happen overnight. It took 35 years for FM to largely replace AM, so by that calculation we are well over 20 years away from the 1990s type changes that affected LW,MW & FM - and AM is still there!
Personally I find that on the BBC stations that DAB coverage in my car is already better than FM coverage was less than 15 years ago (I don't listen to any of the D1 stations regularly enough to comment on them), with the added bonus of not having to re-tune. As others have said you do need to have a proper roof mounted aerial (much like you need for reliable FM signals). I can see FM and DAB being available side by side for at least the rest of my time on earth - and probably for some time afterwards!!!
Too many standard DAB radios out there, otherwise conversion to DAB+ would be easy and relatively cheap. DAB is fine for most users, and DAB+ can always be slipped in at the side of DAB on existing muxes. That might eventually add another % or so to the final coverage being built out on DAB at the present time.
My neice can't see why she should replace her Volvo FM radio, for a DAB one, (if it exists) to listen to the same station she does now (Capital Yorkshire).
And neither do I !
In-vehicle listening is only 19.3% of the total.
http://www.adambowie.com/weblog/archive/003047.html
http://www.culture.gov.uk/news/ministers_speeches/8509.aspx
Since when have Ford not manufactured "run of the mill" cars?
I live in London about 100 miles from the Sandy Heath transmitter and I can only get Digital One
and the BBC stations from there, but no local radio stations, as it has not been turned on yet
As for in-car radios things will change next year, as all cars have to be fitted with DAB radios as standard
I'm quite prepared to believe DAB reception is better than FM in a car in Lochaber, with all the multi-path reflecting off the cliffs. I'd seriously dispute any claim that reception is better than FM indoors on a portable, though, from my own repeated difficulties with DAB in such remote outposts as Manchester and West London.
But the main problem with DAB is really economic. I can't see how it can be made to pay, even with the current network, let alone with the scores of new line-fed transmitters planned to improve indoor/portable reception. At some point the state subsidy currently provided via the BBC and other channels will dry up, and commercial radio will suddenly be left saddled with transmission networks for which they simply can't afford to pay the rent.
I am not in any way "anti-digital" - I'm very much pro-Freeview - but I think DAB is not the system to go for. To replace FM we need a system which can be transmitted cheaply, while still having usable portable reception. Broadcast radio needs to be low cost these days - or the internet will crush it utterly.