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Swiss here: Pretty certain this is part of a pressure campaign by the SRF ("Swiss Radio and Television"). They are facing budget cuts nationally through an initiative that will be voted on probably later this year (https://srg-initiative.ch/). By preemptively cutting services on their own (that they are not forced to under the text of the initiative) they probably hope to sway voter's opinion.
Cutting service costs on their own while burdening the cost to their listeners is so backwards. My car radio can't do DAB and it would cost me quite a bit of money to install a replacement radio if I want a proper setup (i.e. as before in terms of usability/integration).
I wonder how often such attempts backfire ("well, they're going to cut what is useful for me anyways, so why should I vote to give them any money?").
Funny how it's always the SVP trying to cut the SRG funds, after their first initiative to completely abolish the tax failed.
Can there be an initiative to force them to keep FM?
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.
2015 was WAY too early for that switch.
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.
[0]: https://www.worlddab.org/system/news/documents/000/012/060/o...
I have a genuine question, what's to gain from this? I could half-understand it if they were going to re-allocate the 88-108 MHz block, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I could also understand why such an action would be taken if that meant that they could pack more stations in the same spectrum, but considering that Switzerland is a relatively small country, so is there really a market? Even if considering multiple languages per niche.
I guess a case could be made for power savings by virtue of (assuming local topography allows) lower power transmitters or by multiplexing various stations on the same transmitter.
On a personal level, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about all forms of analog broadcasting being slowly phased out. The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner, but if this trend continues and analog FM really goes the way of the dodo, then I surmise that DAB (or whichever local flavor is chosen) will become easily and cheaply available, which makes my gut feeling a moot point anyway.
I don't know, I just don't like the idea of needing a processor to receive broadcast audio, and I can't quite put my finger on why.
Norway phased out FM in 2017, and went from 5 national channels to over 30.
There's an article from back then here: https://radio.no/2017/01/norway-makes-radio-history/
It probably lets them scrap large amounts of FM transmitters, relays, broadcasting hardware and maintenance. I assume in a mountainous country such as Switzerland this adds up to quite a lot
"The tinkerer in me likes the idea of being capable of constructing an information receiving device in an almost "survivalist" manner..."
I agree. I'm concerned the more advanced broadcast technology is the easier it is to control and or shut down.
A broadcast service can be shut down for various reasons, political, economic,etc. or because of some unforeseen disaster, natural or human-made. Whatever the reason the population is then cut off from news and information. The simpler the technology the easier it is to restart or resurrect.
Whilst Europe has largely dispensed with AM radio, we're seeing this debate playing out in the US over AM radio in cars. And now we're seeing this with FM, and Switzerland isn't the first.
Let's look at this holistically for a moment. AM radio is easy to establish and it works well—witness both local and shortwave services in the 20th Century. An AM receiver can be as simple as a tuned circuit and diode (a crystal set). FM is a little more complex but mono FM is nevertheless very easy to get going. Similarly, an FM receiver can be as simple as a single valve or transistor circuit configured as a superregenerative† detector (I've used one to listen to FM over a 100 miles from the transmitter, they can be extraordinarily sensitive given their simplicity).
This simplicity and ease of establishment just isn't possible with DAB. DAB requires advanced electronics, ICs etc. that cannot be improvised without high tech production.
It seems to me these debates over the closure of AM and FM services are being conducted without the public's interest and national security in mind.
__
† https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_circuit
https://www.qsl.net/l/lu7did/docs/QRPp/Receptor%20Regenerati...
> if they were going to re-allocate the 88-108 MHz block, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
they definitely will do that though. spectrum is valuable, they're not just going to let unallocated spectrum sit there unused.
DAB has worse behavior with marginal signal quality. When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
I really hate that engineers, regulators, and businesspeople managed to work together to make something simple and reliable less reliable but more "modern".
Probably because DAB has been designed to be spectrally efficient, allowing one to cram as many radio channel as possible into a slice of spectrum. It's a property of error control codes, as used in DAB: that the closer one gets to optimal performance, the sharper the cutoff between working and not working. As range increases: works, works, works, BAM, gone...
If it's optimal, the quality of a digital link will be pretty well perfect up until that cutoff (but no link is truly optimal). DAB's design placed emphasis on more channels rather than longer range, so the point at which DAB cuts out will likely be before the point that FM has degraded to unintelligibly. In theory there can be a region where FM has degraded but DAB is still holding up, but in the name of more channels this region is probably small.
> When a FM signal may be slightly degraded with static, DAB just gives up entirely.
You'd think that this would be a good scenario for 'hierarchical modulation':
> Hierarchical modulation is particularly used to mitigate the cliff effect in digital television broadcast, particularly mobile TV, by providing a (lower quality) fallback signal in case of weak signals, allowing graceful degradation instead of complete signal loss. It has been widely proven and included in various standards, such as DVB-T, MediaFLO, UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband, a new 3.5th generation mobile network standard developed by 3GPP2), and is under study for DVB-H.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_modulation
Combine that with scalable audio quality:
Agreed. DAB reception is very poor in comparison.
It's worse on purpose. They did not even try to be "modern".
Here you can read what it's about: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102300_102399/102367/01...
FM is so simple and robust. It should never be turned off.
AM is even simpler and even more robust. I think we never should have switched it off.
In the US, our "HD" radio (we don't have DAB) sounds so bad, I end up turning it off and listening to the analog version.
It sounds like they reduced bitrate by pitch-shifting down prior to transmission, and then pitch-shifting back up at playback. Everything just has this metallic ring to it: When I tried the classical station, at first I thought there was bells in the piece they were playing until I realized it was a compression artifact. When I listen to talk, I keep hearing a bell/ringing over everyone's voice.
I know a lot of the newer codecs also sound great (for the car) at low bitrates, so I don't want to go and blame "quantity over quality."
Digital audio is also relatively expensive for some people. There are people who in my community who ride around on their bikes listening to fm radio. A monthly data fee could be hard for some.
Switzerland has a national siren network, tested annually, and regularly reminds its citizens "if the sirens sound, turn on the radio to DRS/SRF 1". They've added the swissalert mobile app more recently, but I guess everyone is going to have to buy new radio sets who doesn't have a DAB+ one already.
The reverse scenario happened here in Singapore. It was the first in Asia to introduce DAB in 1999. The national broadcaster MediaCorp then decided to cease DAB transmission in 2011, forcing those who've invested in new DAB equipment to throw them out the window (while many are dual-FM/DAB sets, some more affordable ones are exclusively DAB-only). Interesting that the decision was made to go backwards in technology, likely motivated by economics.
> the decision was made to go backwards in technology
What is so forward about DAB ?
In theory it sounds excelent. In practice it sounds like crap due to using the lowest bitrate possible.
DAB has also effectively been abandoned in Ireland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_in_the_Republic_...)
Does DAB really offer better quality? From what I know, stations opt for puny 64kbps streams which sound nowhere near as good as FM can.
In theory, yes, it really can, but as you stated, in practice, no. This is basically the equivalent thing on digital TV between the US and Canada: most US broadcasters tried to pack as much channels as possible (that sometimes digital broadcasts are objectively worse than analog ones because of bitrate starvation) while Canada usually only have a 1:1 correspondence between virtual and physical channels (sometimes 2:1 but there isn't really much more than that).
This is not Switzerland, but the BBC apparently uses 192 kbps only at Radio 3 (their classical music station), while other BBC stations are either 128 kbps or 64 kbps only.
That's done on purpose so that they can roll out conditional access / DRM.
In order to make people pay for that, they need to be invested in hardware first ( DAB radios ) and suffer from poor quality channels....
DAB is optimized to make money, not to serve the general public.
My fav ... part of di radio ... is tha you only he ... ha of the broadc ... whe sign i poor...
It's useless in the car, in my experience on-and-off the last 10 years or so. Too many blackspots (in the UK)
Analog radio and and video signals like VGA, fail way more gracefully and linearly, which is why they're still used in many applications today where rough environments are involved and high availability is desired as a degraded signal is better than no signal at all due to some CRC or handshake failure.
Digital connections have a terrible failure model, it either works perfectly or not at all, with little in between.
In modern datacenters or in radio broadcasting equipment, you can still find VGA connectors or LCD displays using that signal.
The UK is a bad example, as it adopted DAB (without the "+") far too early. DAB uses the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II "MP2" codec which is a very old codec, and while MP2 actually sounds pretty great at appropriate bitrates (256kb/s or higher), it was decided that quantity was better than quality and so the UK has a large number of poor quality, low bitrate, stations. Sometimes in MONO!
DAB+ uses HE-AACv2 which is much better suited to the bitrates that the UK has chosen to use, and in addition has much better error correction, reducing the "bubbling mud" effect that UK DAB listeners are all to familiar with.
The sad truth is that FM actually works very well, and can have extremely good audio quality, but capitalism must ruin all good things. The death of the BBC, as now seems inevitable, will be the final shame.
Nobody wants this especially since there are still quite a lot of cars that have old radios.
I thought there was an agreement that we would wait a little longer but for what ever reason the SRG thinks they know better.
Something similar happened with TV broadcasts in the US ~15 years ago. The solution was just to provide an adaptor for free for anyone who wanted one.
An FM receiver is pretty basic, cheap, and easily understood/home-built technology. Does DAB+ require an encryption key, license, or otherwise limited-access component that would prevent people from rolling their own receiver?
No encryption. Manufacturers do have to license HE-ACC, I think (at least in theory; wouldn’t really be any issue for amateurs)
I understand why the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRF) wants to pull the plug on FM radio. But I think there are still some good reasons to keep it around. FM radio is simple and strong, and it can be heard by a lot of people even in areas with bad internet access. FM radio also comes in handy in emergencies, like when natural disasters knock out other ways to communicate.
>even in areas with bad internet access.
They stop the analog signal, not the whole "air transmission":
>>Those who listen to the radio now largely do so via digital audio broadcasting (DAB+) or the internet
It's literately the first sentence.
This is the analog (pun) in radio technology of abandoning physical cash and switching exclusively to digital money.
Optimisation, efficiency and monoculture versus redundancy, resilience and diversity.
Oddly, in Ireland we did the opposite; the last DAB transmitter was switched off a year or so ago (digital radio, oddly, is still available bugs DVB-T2, bundled with the terrestrial digital tv signals, though I’m not sure anyone really listens to it that way).
DAB made little sense in Ireland. The FM figures used to argue for DAB adoption were skewed by a huge captive drivetime audience who were already pivoting to podcasts and live-streams instead of to DAB/Digital stations.
Combine this with cheap and ubiquitous 4G Internet, the introduction of mass audio and podcast streaming services, and the prevalence of smart-home devices at loss-leader prices like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and the writing was on the wall from the get-go.
In short, the National Broadcaster (RTE) were latecomers to DAB to the point where it was no longer deemed necessary by the time it was implemented. Case in point was when RTÉ shut down the DAB infrastructure, but didnt shutter the digital services populating it: RTÉ Gold/2XM/Pulse continue as online streaming services.
The majority of people - even my parents - are now far more tuned in to the likes of Audible and Spotify. When they want e.g. Death Notices or GAA they use a streaming app or the native webcast from the FM station Website.
Synchronous single-infrastructure dependent Audio Streaming is now a use-case in search of a problem for the average consumer, outside of certain niches like Naval/Aviation traffic.
TV signals have lot more spare bandwidth. So packing a few audio only channels is not really that much extra work or cost.
Interesting. I live near Switzerland and the only time I listen to radio is using FM in my car. I hope this same idea doesn't make it to the country where I live.
I guess this will start to happen everywhere in the EU, now. In Germany it has also already started:
https://www.heise.de/news/UKW-Radio-Schleswig-Holstein-schal...
It made me sad when I got into amateur radio to learn that SRI had shut down their famous HF (shortwave) transmissions just a few years prior.
But I still listen to podcasts and streaming from RTS/SRF. They do great world news coverage from a kind of detached perspective. Gotta know French or German, for next 6mo until it becomes commonplace to have live transvocalized podcasts.
Might be an anti-anti-fragile move…
Does it mean the 88Mhz -> 108Mhz frequency band will go to back the auction block ?
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation is pulling the plug on FM radio. How quaint.
I'm not a fan of DAB+. The range is less than FM, and the compression artifacts are a real treat. Why not just go back to good ol' analog AM, then? Oh wait, it's been deemed too "rustic" and "unmodern".
FM was a great way to listen to the radio, don't you think? You could actually hear the music without it sounding like a tin can on a string. And don't even get me started on the so-called "HD Radio" nonsense in the States. It's just a way to cram more commercials down our throats and make our radios more expensive.
What's with this obsession with "spectrum efficiency" and "bandwidth management"? Can't we just have a simple, reliable way to listen to the radio without it sounding like it's coming from a broken tape deck?
I still remember when LW was around. That was real broadcasting. None of this fancy-schmancy digital stuff. Just pure, raw signal strength. You could pick it up with a pair of cans and a piece of twine, no problem.
So, yeah, Switzerland, go ahead and pull the plug on FM. See if I care. I'll just use my trusty AM radio and enjoy the beautiful, analog sound of static.