[cma-l] DAB & FM

Sun Sep 6 16:53:11 BST 2015

The simple answer at the moment Nick is - no-one knows.In maybe a few months' time, to duplicate the kit being used in the trial would cost no more that an FM system - say £3500 I would suggest.But there is no route to anyone being able to apply for or obtain a licence - so the question of how much it will or would cost is, I suggest,  a bit academic.
I'm sticking however to my point that DAB as we have it now is up against a brick wall - as its capability to expand to accommodate a lot more stations is very limited.
To progress with any degree of positive certainty we have to adopt a different format which isn't specifically "DAB" - but probably will get called that by everyone else out there.

Ian Hickling
Partner

Office: 01635 578435  (7am-11pm UK time)Carphone: 07530 980115 (only responds when driving)6 Horn Street, Compton, NEWBURY, RG20 6QS

From: office at thethread.org.uk
To: cma-l at mailman.commedia.org.uk
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2015 13:08:46 +0100
Subject: Re: [cma-l] Eddie on DAB v FM  new discussion   DAB & FM

Chaps

All this technical Radio jargon is very
interesting indeed and very educational …. I have to confess I don’t
understand all of it but I’m getting to learn about 40% of it with a
couple of our tecky chaps hovering around 70% ….you guys are clearly
experts   (re :- James / Ian / Alex / Glynn et al)      however chaps, we never
seem to manage to get to the nitty gritty, and I would imagine at least half of
the folk on the message board are slightly more interested in how much money does
each Community Radio Station need to save in its Piggy Bank to get itself on
small scale DAB & FM, as opposed to learning about algorithms  …..
(this is a tongue in-cheek joke chaps merely asking what I feel the more
important question, so don’t shoot the messenger)

I have already asked the question and I
would imagine that the likes of Ian being in his field of work (for example)
would be able to come up with a ball-park figure)     I know DAB trials are
taking place but surely whether successful or not the end result is can it be
afforded ?     if it can’t be afforded then the whole exercise is
pointless anyway    isn’t it ???

I am merely picking up on James’s
observations and Glynn (I think)   who pointed out that possibly this DAB malarkey
is one of those situations whereby we some of us may end being dragged kicking
and screaming as failure to hook into it would mean the big boys clear up
completely.

We all understand what Community Radio is
about, but regardless of the whys, whats and wherefores we still have to
compete at some kind of level or we wither and die    (unless of course we win
the lottery or receive grants that don’t exist)(re my post earlier this
week)

Would you gentlemen of great Community
Radio loveliness please flop a ball park figure on this message board for all
to see re the cost of medium priced equipment, set up and running for DAB ……
on top of what I have roughly worked out to be and ongoing cost of around = £5000
quid for those already broadcasting  (new additions of course would have their
initial set up – transmitters / aerials / installation etc)

This five grand figure allows for
maintainance and includes PPL/PRS/Canstream/other licences/Internet/Ofcom
licence ….. I have kept it top side as opposed to lower end.

Assuming that PPL/PRS will be hovering,
circling and then charging additionally for something that technically is
already covered, would the figure be roughly the same? as I have to admit
reading all the posts we seem to have gone from DAB being really expensive to
it not being quite as expensive as we first thought, to it being rather cheap
and then back to reasonably expensive again and for us to do it we would be
doing it because we simply ‘had to’ ’or else’  as
opposed to wanting to do it     in otherwords the ‘getting left behind
discussion.

I hope you have followed my thread and
got the gist of it, apologies if it is in laymans terms. 

Let’s us call the discussion not ‘’’versus’’’  
but DAB & FM

Thank you

Regards

Nick

From:
cma-l-bounces at mailman.commedia.org.uk
[mailto:cma-l-bounces at mailman.commedia.org.uk]
On Behalf Of James Cridland

Sent: 05 September 2015 20:47

To: Two Lochs Radio; cma-l

Subject: Re: [cma-l] Eddie on DAB
v FM

I use TuneIn's app too.

Radioplayer provides:

1. A web player that actually works, and that lets people find your
station from BBC Radio 2!

2. A capable app that surfaces your station - first - for people in
your transmission area on iOS and Android, Amazon and Windows.

3. Logos, schedules and broadcast details for your station for a
variety of uses including Radioplayer Car, RadioDNS-enabled tuners, and other
things

4. A Chrome app (which I wrote <- disclosure) that puts your station
onto everyone's desktop

5. An app that puts your station onto Ford Sync, Apple CarPlay and
Android Auto (and lets you control it from Apple Watch and Android Wear)

6. Liason on behalf of the entire radio industry to set-top box
manufacturers, car manufacturers and other organisations that you don't talk to
nor have the clout to

7. Usage data

...and is run on behalf of the radio industry with your goals in mind.

Even for #1 on that list, it's worth the £99. I appreciate it isn't
free; but then, it isn't slotting ads in front of your streams or making you
compete with 100,000 other stations, either.

//j

On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 8:32 PM Two Lochs Radio <tlr at gairloch.co.uk> wrote:

Your fee for Radioplayer is £99.
“A more proportionate fee”?!

Just so,
but Michael originally asked £300, which we negotiated down to £90 (that was at
launch, it has increased 10% since).

TuneIn's
app provides more advanced facilities than Radioplayer and the service is
entirely free to originating stations. They also provide a schedule and 'On
now' without us having to lift a finger - they scrape our own published
schedule periodically (I must ask them to update it as it seems to be slightly
out of date).

Alex

On 05 September 2015 at
20:03 James Cridland <james at cridland.net>
wrote:

Your fee
for Radioplayer is £99. "A more proportionate fee"?!

On Sat, 5 Sep 2015 19:47 Two Lochs Radio <tlr at gairloch.co.uk>
wrote:

Yes, of
course I'm aware of the other variants of FM, my point was that there seems ot
be alarge enough market for RDS for set makers, even portables and some phones,
such as HTC, to judge it worthwhile supporting RDS. 

And you need to be continuously scanning
the FM and DAB bands to populate this station list name, otherwise when
travelling you'll never find local radio.

The radio
does that for itself unbidden. I routinely use the radio's station list to see
what stations are in range.

Incidentally, I cannot comprehend why
anyone wouldn't be on Radioplayer, I must say: its the R&D department for
the whole of UK
radio.

The main
reason for not being on RadioPlayer would be the cost and the fact that ithey
won't allow you to be on mobiles if you don't provide a low-rate bitstream. We
joined it when the BBC was on it and didn't have its own radioplayer which
rather undermined  UK Radioplayer's proposition. But we did first have to
negotiate a more proportionate fee!

As a
user, I still prefer to use TuneIn. It has far more facilities.

Alex

On 05 September 2015 at
18:45 James Cridland <james at cridland.net>
wrote:

Hi, Alex,

The UK market is a
tiny and inconsequential one to most manufacturers. The Digital Radio tickmark
thing is actually deliberately set to mirror similar accreditation systems in
Europe and Australia.
Further, the radio industry is uninterested in how radio sets operate, and not
big or united enough to talk to most manufacturers in a coherent manner.

Really,
we have a "North America vs
rest-of-world" thing going on in radio receivers. You are correct that AM
is different - so is FM, in fact, with different deemphasis values used as well
as different frequency spacing. Pedants: Japan's different still, with FM
from 76 to 108MHz. And parts of ex Soviet countries use something different
again.

"Animated
and dynamic RDS names do not break tuning by name" - I bow to your obvious
knowledge. I'd only observe that scrolling now-playing info, in place in many
parts of the world, means that you end up with station names like "TY
PERRY" or even "LE NOW O" which really isn't the sort of user
experience any one wants to give, and certainly isn't recognisable.

Tuning by
station name doesn't work on AM - but I'd argue that AM isn't part of radio's
future anyway. (Pedants: it does, if you use AMSS, a kind of RDS for AM. Nobody
does).

Further,
the ideal is tuning by station name irrespective of waveband - so you'd get
"BBC 6 Music" in the same list as "TwoLochs". (You want
that, right?) The issue here is that de-duping the list isn't simple; "BBC
R Scot" on FM in your part of the world could be different to "BBC
Radio Scotland"
on an available local multiplex, because of local optouts. The BBC have
deliberately broken service-following between FM and DAB, which has the side
effect of also breaking any way that your radio can de-dupe Radio 4 FM from
Radio 4 DAB. And so on.

And you
need to be continuously scanning the FM and DAB bands to populate this station
list name, otherwise when travelling you'll never find local radio.

The
"Radioplayer Car" unit, currently in test, does all you have asked
for and more - linking to IP as well (and more importantly linking back), and
letting you tune by station name and logo. https://media.info/radio/stations/two-lochs-radio
tells me that you are on Radioplayer, so you'll benefit when that is available
for sale later this year.

Incidentally,
I cannot comprehend why anyone wouldn't be on Radioplayer, I must say: its the
R&D department for the whole of UK radio.

James

On Sat, 5 Sep 2015 18:17 Two Lochs Radio <tlr at gairloch.co.uk>
wrote:

The reason RDS names aren't used as a
method of tuning is that RDS isn't ubiquitous in the US,
and in Europe many stations use animated and
dynamic RDS names, which breaks this stuff.

I can't
see any great force in that as a reason for not using station name tuning by
default. The RDS radio market is clearly big enough to support it as an option
perfectly economically in the rest of world without needing to work in the US. More to the
point, I don't think DAB is exactly ubiquitous in the US either is
it? And yet we have a market full of DAB sets!

Same sort
of thing applies to push button tuning on AM - the US uses 10kHz channel
spacing and we use 9kHz, so radio circuits/chipsets in portables have to
support both. Anyway, a radio that can tune by station list can still be
operated by frequency if it finds itself in a non-RDS region, so it can only be
a gain or neutral, not negative.

Animated
and dynamic RDS names do not break tuning by name - as I said, my car can tune
by station list, and it works perfectly well in continental countries that use
more advanced techniques - the station list shows a static shot of the 8
character name which is usually perfectly recognizable. And again, if not, you
can fall back to frequency tuning. Tuning by station name doesn't have to be
the only mode available, but it should (IMO) be available and the default
option for a radio to get the tick mark.

The IP
stuff is a further argument, and perfectly fine, but no bearing on my
suggestion that for DAB/FM radios sold for the UK market should have been
required to offer tuning by station name across FM & DAB. 

Alex

On 05 September 2015 at
15:59 James Cridland <james at cridland.net>
wrote:

The
reason RDS names aren't used as a method of tuning is that RDS isn't ubiquitous
in the US, and in Europe many stations use animated and dynamic RDS names,
which breaks this stuff.

Neither
RDS nor DAB offer handoff to IP, nor direct links to other IP-based resources
either, so they're not, by themselves, future-proof.

RadioDNS
provides that mapping, which makes radio receivers significantly more user
friendly.

IP is
four times smaller than DAB use here in the UK, and is growing slower as well.
(Indeed, growth appears to have stagnated for most.)

The
future is multi-platform, and better sets. Sadly, existing broadcasters aren't
entirely on-board.

James

_______________________________________________

Reply - cma-l at commedia.org.uk

The cma-l mailing list is a members' service provided by the Community Media
Association - http://www.commedia.org.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/community_media

http://www.facebook.com/CommunityMediaAssociation

Canstream Internet Radio & Video: http://www.canstream.co.uk/

_______________________________________________

Mailing list guidelines: http://www.commedia.org.uk/about/cma-email-lists/email-list-guidelines/

_______________________________________________

To unsubscribe or manage your CMA-L mailing list subscription please visit:

http://mailman.commedia.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/cma-l

-- 

http://james.cridland.net
- get my weekly newsletter

https://media.info - the media
information website

Tel: +44
7941 251474 | @jamescridland

-- 

http://james.cridland.net
- get my weekly newsletter

https://media.info - the media
information website

Tel: +44
7941 251474 | @jamescridland

-- 

http://james.cridland.net - get my weekly
newsletter

https://media.info - the media information
website

Tel: +44
7941 251474 | @jamescridland

				This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.

_______________________________________________

Reply - cma-l at commedia.org.uk

The cma-l mailing list is a members' service provided by the Community Media Association - http://www.commedia.org.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/community_media
http://www.facebook.com/CommunityMediaAssociation
Canstream Internet Radio & Video: http://www.canstream.co.uk/
_______________________________________________

Mailing list guidelines: http://www.commedia.org.uk/about/cma-email-lists/email-list-guidelines/
_______________________________________________

To unsubscribe or manage your CMA-L mailing list subscription please visit:
http://mailman.commedia.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/cma-l 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.commedia.org.uk/pipermail/cma-l/attachments/20150906/e22e2ca3/attachment.html>