20 years ago, Germany decided to stop FM broadcasting in 2015. Digital radio (DAB+) was heavily advertised. Despite a fear campaign ("your radio will stop working soon!"), almost nobody cared or replaced their working cheap kitchen or car radio. The plan to stop FM broadcasting was finally abandoned in 2011, because radio stations would've lost 80% of their listeners. My parents bought a DAB+ kitchen radio in 2009, but never liked it and it stopped working after a few years. They replaced it with a new FM radio.
Yeah to me, it seems like FM radio + internet audio over cellular is a great mix of choices, and "digital radio" is pointless. If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
> If you want to do digital radio, make a carplay/android app.
Rather a streaming service with an open protocol, and then users use whatever they want to listen. Fine if there's also an app for those who want, but I don't want to install an app to listen to a specific audio stream. I have VLC and it's enough.
The other problem is people without cellular data and/or cellular phone, and those with limited data plans. But if most radio stations stay also on FM, that's basically a non-issue.
Correct. I don't see a huge amount of use for ~20MHz (probably less) of very long range spectrum. Potentially for smart meters and other IOT stuff, but current cellular networks deal with that pretty well (and there are other alternatives available). Plus I don't know much equipment that could use it at least out of the box so it is going to be fairly custom and very expensive.
That's a blessing and a curse though for interactive applications. One FM transmitter can easily cover millions of people - and 20MHz of spectrum isn't very exciting spread over that many people in my eyes.
So the way to use it more effectively is to build more transmitter stations at a lower power, but at that point you're competing with cellular networks which have access to probably 10x the spectrum and already have a load of infra built out to support that.
For example, if you used FM for LTE/NR it would be completely congested 100% with even just signalling overhead of the time apart from very rural areas (as suddenly everyone's phone that has no service because of being out of the reach of any mast suddenly gets it - perhaps because of thick walls etc).
Similar if it was used for WiFi - the transmit power would have to be so low to avoid interference it would have no benefit over current spectrum (2.4GHz doesn't work in most places for this reason).
And rural areas already have starlink - which has 2GHz of downlink frequency alone (plus they can add more somewhat easily, which is impossible for FM).
But on the other hand it's been used for audio for so long that the world is saturated with transmission equipment. I think I'll become a pirate radio band as soon as public stations stop transmitting. Of course you can police that but the 80s showed that it wasn't very effective. It's just too easy to build one with a few components.
Also there's often going to be a lot of interference from abroad, 100Mhz signals while VHF can carry far under the right conditions.
Any new systems will be digital, and I doubt they are that sensitive to highly localized interference. If the interference isn't highly localized the FCC will rapidly perform an operator attitude adjustment.
All the pirate stations back in the day were ultra high power AM stations operating out of Mexico.
I've heard others say similar things. Apparently, how good or bad it was depends a great deal on where you are.
Around here, following the digital switchover, most people could no longer receive all stations, but which ones depended on exactly where they were. And those that can be received are of exceedingly low quality. Very heavily compressed and relatively low resolution. But each station now provides multiple streams.
On the positive side, that did help me finally stop watching TV entirely!
In my country DAB has station dedicated to playing classical music, jazz, youth-oriented pop music, current affairs, religion, rock music - not to mention dozens of local radio stations!
FM allows for only a very limited number of stations, which means it ends up in a bidding war between the large commercial stations - who in turn have to play fairly generic music to attract a large number of listeners. With DAB there's plenty of space left over for niche stations, as they can transmit essentially for free.
Once you get beyond the cities, there is still plenty of open FM spectrum. Getting a frequency isn't the real hurdle. Human effort and licensing are the much greater challenges.
Especially licensing. Even on commercial radio you can regularly catch them playing "10 second" clips of different songs, to stay within fair use, that they wish to play but cannot legally do so. The college stations are more brazen about it and will flat out tell you that they can't play different jobs for legal reasons.
Indeed, commercial radio does have to appeal to an audience, but that audience would unquestionably enjoy other music – at least within the same genre. But playing it for them opens up a huge legal minefield. It is a lot easier to pick a small catalog that you can properly audit and disallow anything beyond that.
However, since December 2020 the EU mandates that all new cars equipped with a radio must be able to receive DAB+. In H2 2019 only 22% of cars sold in Germany were equipped with a DAB+-capable radio, in H2 202 this already rose to 80%.[0]
So yeah, in 2015 they'd indeed lose around 80% of listeners. But it's a completely different story in 2024, as anyone with a car bought in the last 5 years would support it. Give it another 5, and the switchover might be possible without anyone really noticing.
As for Switzerland? 99% of cars sold in 2019 were already equipped with DAB+, so they probably mandated it even earlier.
