RadioBanter - View Single Post - HD RADIO is no worse than DAB or DRM radio

Robert Orban

In article . com,
says...

David Eduardo wrote:
wrote in message

There are millions of obsolete televisions which will stop working in
just over a year. Does it look like the advertisers care?
They won't care about obsolete radios either.

Radio stations are not ready to go all digital, and probably will not be
for
8 to 10 years.... if ever.

Both the UK and Germany have "tentatively" set 2015 as the shut-down
for FM. (They expect DAB to fill that role.) I figure the U.S.
transition will require a similar time period of fifteen years, so
sometime around 2020 will be the end of analog.

Although, I'd like to see AM die as early as 2010 since so few people
listen to it. Just make it pure digital, 10 kHz per channel.

FM can continue until 2020 (it has no interference problems).

FM can continue forever because, unlike the digital television transition in
the US, HD Radio required no new spectrum and there is no proposal to auction
off any of the current FM band (88-108 MHz in the US). I know of no serious
broadcaster who claims to have any real idea of when analog FM might be shut
down.

If this ever occurs, it will probably be because other transmission channels
finally provide a cheaper pipe to the listener and that pipe reaches enough
listeners to make the loss of analog-only listeners inconsequential. FM in the
US tends to use high powered transmitters with concurrent large electric
bills. Digital transmission can get equivalent reach with much lower power --
power efficiency is probably close to 100x in favor of state of the art
digital coding. Meanwhile, the cost of electricity is likely to continue to
increase, at least in the medium term. (If the world ever gets practical
fusion reactors, that trend could of course change :-).

Bob Orban