On Sunday just gone, I accidentally pressed “quick scan” on my Roberts Solar DAB II. Amongst the new stations that came up, was “Share Radio”. It was on the station list but couldn't be locked on to by the radio. So up the garden I went to listen… I have a big garden, on a north-facing hillside. It sounded interesting… intelligent people talking sense about financial matters. Back indoors, I Googled “Share Radio” and found it to be part of SDL. Now being in the sticks, we don't get SDL; I worked out that it must be getting down here from Sutton Coldfield. Excitement ! That means I can get the DAB+ channels that my radio is supposed to be able to decode !
Back off up the top of the garden. They weren't on the list. Did a factory reset. Still not on the list. A look at the firmware version reveals that my Solar DAB II has an early version of the firmware.
Starting out knowing nothing about the inside of DAB radios, my knowledge has greatly progressed in the past couple of days. The firmware started with “dab-mmi-FS2027”…. It turns out that this is a module made by Frontier Silicon, who supply modules for something like 80% of the DAB radios made. The processor on this is known as a “Venice 7” which has always been able to decode DAB+ and DMB etc etc. It is just not able to decode DAB+ in my radio as it doesn't have firmware in it to do so. Now with Pure, things appear to be much simpler. When you active DAB+, you pay a fee to do so. That fee actually is a licence fee to use the patented AAC coding… I think that the patent on that is going to expire soon… Hansolo – am I correct please ? With Roberts, there is nothing on their website to indicate what, if anything, that I can do, so I'm going to email them and ask. People with Roberts Solar DAB II radios with a firmware version later than my early one, which in case I have other owners of these sets interested is “dab-mmi-FS2027-000-0004-V4.0.13.27373-7” , are probably going to be OK in that it will decode DAB+ . I'll wait to see what Roberts say.
It will really annoy me if I have bought a radio where the hardware can decode DAB+, but I can't do so because I can't upgrade the firmware… there is a socket on the side to do so...
I have done an awful lot of reading about this in the last few hours.
Firstly, the “tick mark” that people keep taking about. All radios using Frontier Silicon modules are by definition conforming to the “tick mark”. This is because it is the MODULE not the RADIO that is the conforming part – Frontier Silicon mention this on their website as a selling point for using their modules. The radio without the module is just a plastic case, a display, the controls and buttons, a power supply and an audio amp and speakers. So it is a “standard”, but by virtue of the module inside the radio being “conformant”.
I then read an incredibly lengthy thread about a group of guys taking the modules out of surplus DAB radios, and fitting them into car computers. It was like an epic journey. They had to get the modules from “master mode” that they operate in when in a radio into “slave mode”, design a power supply, write an interface in Visual Basic for the car computer, battle with power supplies to eliminate the generated interference… but once it worked, the DAB modules worked great in cars – far better than they seem to do in radios ! Then one guy started selling kits, all the others fell out with him and the saga shortly ended after that. One guy used a forum name very similar to someone who I have the utmost respect for who is still around, so I'm not citing the thread, but it was useful to me as an education about DAB radios. It proved that when correctly set up, DAB can work very well – but the radios we use are not always the best at doing that. Work on getting the best reception that you can...
Going back to DAB+ and the number of sets in the market. The number of “DAB+ capable” sets sold doesn't mean that early ones like mine are going to work, or be upgradeable. DAB has been going on since 1978 or 1979, with equipment available to consumers for 20-or-so years… my first one cost £200 all those years ago. Then there are the hundreds of millions of FM radios in the UK, with another container of FM devices of different sorts arriving from China every few minutes. To switch off DAB and FM completely in favour of DAB+ will be environmental sacrilege because all of that hardware will just likely go to landfill or exported to third world countries to be burned by kids extracting the metal content. Is that the world that we want ?
Two things should happen. A firm switch-off date for both FM and DAB should be issued, to give us time to plan recycling. Secondly, radios commercially available should be based on SDR ( software designed radio ) so that the hardware stays, but only the software changes as new encoding methods come along. It is your world now – I'm 65 so my influencing is very much in the past – you need to be pressing for some common sense in these issues. We have to get away from throwaway hardware.
Me ? If I can't get Roberts to upgrade the firmware on my early Solar DAB II, I'll be looking at internet radio – I just renewed my EE contract and have a fantastic data allowance now...