[cma-l] Community & Local Radio - the Digital Issue

[Two Lochs Radio]

No, I know they are slowly working towards the inevitable DAB+, but their antithesis to it over the past 7 years is demosntrable fact.  I believe they seriously let us down by a badly misjudged nervousness about disenfranchising early adoptors. As I said, there were perfectly good strategies available around 2008 onwards for signalling an intention to move towards DAB+ and to take practical steps in that direction without causing difficulties for the existing owners.

By not doing that they have simply set up a much greater higher-profile problem for the inevitable switch to DAB while there are, as you say, now millions of non-DAB+ radios out there. 

As late as last year they still had the opportunity to start the process when the decision was taken to do an additional roll-out of DAB to the next-to-last 10% of the UK, such as the far northwest. At that point there were virtually zero DAB radios in these areas, and they were terrain isolated (and still are) from existing DAB- areas, so no issues of interference. The only likely migration of listeners and their radios between the existing and the new DAB areas was by car users, and all prefitted car DAB radios are DAB+ capable.

So even as late as 1-2 years ago 'they' flunked what I feel was an evidently a perfect on-a-platter opportunity to serve the listening public better and make a highly rational start on the switch to DAB+, and at no significant extra cost to existing plans.

Yes, as I said before, I know DAB can work quite well in urban areas that are attractive to commercial multiplex operators, and can financially support the installation of more tranmitters than on FM, and I'm sure it provides you a decent service. I think it takes 11 DAB transmitters to serve London adequately at present, compared with typically a couple needed for each FM service. 

In that situation DAB clearly has an advantage with its Single Frequency Network allowing fairly unlimited on-channel relays, and avoiding the sort of (very ingenious) technical trickery that was needed to squeeze the Crystal Palace BBC relay into the FM band (although it does result in Crystal Palace TX breaking engineering codes by being deliberately slightly off-frequency).

I must get back to the day job...

Alex
 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: James Cridland 
  To: Two Lochs Radio ; The Community Media Association Discussion List 
  Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 1:21 PM
  Subject: Re: [cma-l] Community & Local Radio - the Digital Issue


  You believe that "the authorities" are against DAB+. They're not. http://media.info/radio/news/dab-starts-in-the-uk-what-you-need-to-know shows that a trial is taking place, and that it'll (probably) be part of the new national digital multiplex next year. The nervousness is because there are millions of sets out there that won't pick DAB+ up. That's relatively understandable nervousness that they don't want to force early adopters to go out and get new sets to continue listening to the radio.


  In my kitchen, incidentally, I can't get FM stations at all, but get a good selection of DAB services. I'm in the wilds of... North London. Adequate reception is horses for courses. I've seen other Scottish contributors saying that DAB is a significant upgrade when in-car in comparison to FM. The moral of the story is that no platform is perfect; so a decent radio should hide all these platforms from audiences, and just connect them to brilliant content.


  james.cridland.net


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