Hi Telamon,

"Telamon" wrote in message
...
I have not seen a poll of SW listeners who have compared DRM to analog.
What poll are you referring too?

I don't. I said, 'I bet...' but that doesn't imply I actually have any
proof. :-) It's just my opinion.

The majority of the SW broadcasters are not for profit national arm of
their respective governments so this has nothing to do with private
companies or the profits they make.

Fair point. Still, in -- most -- countries the government respects the will
of the people to some reasonable degree, and as such the broadcast content
will change similarly.

If you take a careful look of the DRM system, you will understand that
the first order benefit is a reduction in electrical costs to the
broadcaster.

I'm thinking that the same effective range can be achieved for less power,
OR one can keep the same (average) output power and increase their range a
skosh.

This transmission mode is not supposed to require as much power
as analog for good reception. The result will be lower signal levels at
the listeners radio. This will make the transmission more difficult to
decode with good quality.

It's a digital mode with plenty of error correct, so the quality of
reception will fall off VERY rapidly with a dropping signal to noise ratio.
Again, for the _same_ power, DRM will provide _better_ reception quality for
the listener.

The big picture is even worse when you consider that the listeners radio
must now be more complex

Yes, although it all gets boiled down into an IC or two these days anyway.

require more power to operate.

Not at all necessarily. As I mentioned last time, the processing
requirements are not so great that it isn't reasonable to figure that --
after a couple of generations of receiver chipsets-- the decoding power
requirements will be negligible compared to speaker amplifier requirements,
so the power 'issue' then only becomes a potential problem for Walkman-style
radios.

(BTW, satellite radio in the US -- XM and Sirius -- are on about generation
#3 of receiver chipsets now, and they've just started introducing would-be
Walkman-style radios. They're not much to write home about yet, but give'em
another year or two and I think they'll have it.)

New radio
receivers will cost more

Not necessarily. Digital processing is a lot cheaper to implement than
analog processing -- besides performance, there's a cost reason that good
car stereos now digitize at IF and 'do the rest' digitally, and cell phones
have always tried to push the digital processing as close to the antenna as
possible.

and will cost more to operate.

Only if they use more power...

Almost all the
existing radios from the beginning of SW broadcasting to now will be
obsolete and the rest converted at no small cost.

Yes, although it's not like that's going to happen overnight. In the USA,
HDTV is taking decades to surplant the old NTSC system, and the same is
surely going to be true of digital radio broadcasts (although perhaps not
_quite_ as long, as radios cost a lot less than TVs to replace).

The listener will not benefit in any way over analog if the broadcast
power is reduced so that the broadcaster will be able to derive the only
real benefit of the DRM system. The signal that could have been clearer
and free from interference will degrade and instead of being noisy on an
analog receiver will cut in and out on a digital unit.

If the broadcasters choose to cut their power, that's a possibility. But I
don't see why the broadcasters would tend to do that?

Under any but the ideal conditions of very good signal to noise the DRM
receiver will cut in and out. This behavior is much worse to most
individuals than the analog fading on current receivers so this is just
an example of different tradeoffs in the system design instead of DRM
being a better system.

Digital transmissions finally cut out well after an analog transmission is
completely undecipherable. I think most people prefer brief 'cut outs' to,
e.g., fading and static crashes, but I suppose that's largely a matter of
personal preference and I don't have a very large sample size.

I could go on and on about the pros and cons of DRM to analog but the
end result is no better or actually worse for the listener.

OK. :-) I guess we'll see how it plays out... you tend to make certain
assumptions about broadcasters' and listeners' behaviors that are different
from mine.

[a bunch of somewhat repetitious stuff deleted, not that I think it's
invalid, but rather I don't have the time to address it right now]

All that said the thing that ticks me off about the DRM consortium is
that they lie about the system. The claim that the encoding, decoding
system is open is as false as the real benefit will turn out to be if
DRM is implemented as envisioned.

I'd agree with you there. Unfortunately the same thing has happened on the
amateur radio bands -- digital modes such as Pactor III just barely squeek
by the FCC definition of being 'documented,' yet trying to implementing the
decoding/encoding algorithms onesself is nigh impossible.

---Joel Kolstad