"Kristoff Bonne" wrote in message
...
Gegroet,



[snip]


Quite a lot of shortwave station broadcast at more then one frequency at
a time so it possible to have a radio tuned to two frequencies at the
same time and let the radio "interleave" the signals from two sources
when one of the has a drop-out.

(DRM includes "alternative frequency" information, so the receiver is
able to find out these additional signals by itself).

That's diversity reception. Diversity reception is almost as old as SW
radio, but it never has been popular with the public. I can imagine
diversity reception would be easier to do digitially, but diversity
reception doesn't always help. There will be moments in which propagation
will be bad on all frequencies, and longer times, such as during solar flare
events, in which SW will be useless.





The choice is upto the broadcaster if he wants to pay for the additional
cost of this. (It will probably be that this is only needed during
certain times of the day).



[snip]


We will see. If DRM works well for most of the time and additional
stations have interesting content, people will get one of these
"RTL-radios" (which will happen to be a DRM-radio and which happens to
work on shortwave-frequencies).

SW radio works well most of the time, at least in the target areas. Let's
say a target area gets good reception 95% of the time. How much more
reliable might the reception be with DRM? 98%? 99%? Will 99% reliable
reception be good enough for non-hobbyists? I really don't think so.



Why do the DRM proponents make such a big issue of "near-FM" audio? Is
that
really one of thier best arguements for DRM?

Beats me. Because it is the argument what most "normal" people
understand best. "It does away with fading" is something most people do
not understand as most of them do not listen to SW anymore anyway.

True. Normal people don't have a strong interest in high fidelity radio.
They consider thier radios to be appliances. And they want their radios to
work as easily and reliably as their refrigerators and stoves. They don't
want to hear anything about the ionosphere, interference from halfway around
the world, weird propagation and solar flares.

[snip]


For RTL, the reason is pretty simple. They see that people are moving
away from MW and LW to FM just because FM sounds that much better.
But getting a FM-licence for just a new radio-station is not that
simple. (you are dependent of the policy of every country involved).


In additonal, in some regions (like for their German market) it allows
them to cover a large part of the country with one single radio-station
from abroad which is impossible as the media is organised on the level
of the "Lander" and not on federal level in Germany.

DRM allows them to start up new stations without them being subject to
the legislation of all these individual countries and if DRM provides
them with "FM-like" quality (whatever that might be), that will probably
be good enough to keep people tuned to *their* stations and not move to
FM-stations.

Won't the European Union standardize some of these bureaucratic problems?

Is there really much advantage to having one transmitter covering a huge
area? In the US, stations are individualized to the extent that they
usually carry the news, traffic and weather for their local market.


We will see, but as DMR is a digital broadcasting-system, you can expect
additional improvements in the receivers too.

The performance of analog radios could have been improved, if people wanted
to pay for the improvements. The real improvements in analog radios over
the last few years has been in price.

Cheerio! Kr. Bonne.

Frank Dresser