Yeah, that’s been my experience at Bowral too. It’s really only at Moss Vale where Braidwood starts to dominate
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I’m in the Lane Cove Area and unable to get 8D at all from a TV antenna.
I get full signal of 9A/B/C
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I wonder if they’ve made technical changes? Did you try a rescan?
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I’ve just tried now.
Yes it’s currently off.
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Hopefully there will be something permanent for community radio as a result of this test. Its just nice with the trend of using mobile apps / smart speakers this goes against the trend with some testing of old fashion terrestrial radio, especially with the sector having issues getting sponsorships.
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I just don’t see the need - there’s no genuine chance FM shuts down, and there’s not a multiplex worth of content. Most stations struggle along in the community sector - so the added cost of digital is likely to mean only simulcasts of FM will make it.
Unless this was a serious measure - including sub-metro commercial radio to help pay the way - and digital only new entrants being allowed on the multiplex, both commercial and community - full multiplexes carrying maybe 4 programs? Pointless.
I dunno if they tested it, but surely you run the whole mux with EEP-1A mode, maximise robust signals at low power, given there’s no chance it’s going to be utilised anywhere near the max.
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I’m not sure the sub-metro community DAB will get off the ground or very far if it does, mostly as Moe says, because of available money & costs for setup & ongoing operation of it. It essentially won’t be run or paid for directly by the individual community stations, the CBAA will do it, all the same as they do the current metro wide community services on DAB, & if the CBAA puts many of these sub-metro, smaller area DAB services to air, they’ll start to go broke very fast & they won’t be able to support the community broadcasters & the community broadcasters won’t have the funds to keep the CBAA afloat. Commercial radio isn’t going to help them with funds, they don’t now in fact it’s the other way around, the community stations pay the commercial stations to be part of the multiplex’s.
Also a couple of things that might interest you guys & not surprise, this has nothing to do with my work, just things I’ve heard recently on the grape vine.
The only real reason DAB got up & was pushed so hard by CRA in Australia was it was a spectrum grab & to stop any other new entrants possibly getting that spectrum & entering the market, if CRA hadn’t got the VHF spectrum for DAB & had gone with HD Radio or DRM instead, they wouldn’t have got any more (free spectrum) & couldn’t have blocked any new entrants from using the VHF DAB spectrum.
It’s also unlikely DAB will go any further (roll out to any more areas) than it already has, apparently the ABC may have been looking at DAB in Newcastle but costs & the lack of any commercial radio support makes it not worthwhile for the ABC to go it alone, they only did DAB on the Gold Coast because the commercials had already done it.
Also while on the Gold Coast, the main reason Grant Broadcasters/now ARN did DAB on the Gold Coast was to reduce/avoid APRA/AMCOSS copyright fees, they wanted to stream a number of other/alternate stations to Hot Tomato & being streaming only would’ve cost them a packet of money in copyright fees, but if they are broadcast they come under a different fee structure & broadcast & streaming the same thing is only charged fees once & the cost offset to setup & operate DAB on the Gold Coast was worth their while to do it, so they went that way with SCA chipping in for the same reasons.
There’s now not really any more markets or radio networks where those cost offsets make DAB worthwhile, so starting DAB in any more markets will be at a huge cost for very little gain, as the likes of SCA & ARN already have their streaming & broadcast costs covered from the other existing market areas.
One of the reasons SCA chop & change their DAB stations so much is for that reason also, to offset streaming costs on alternate stations they have on Listnr, if they have a streaming station they think will attract a lot of listeners & big copyright fees, they put it on DAB so it comes under “broadcast” & cheaper fees structure.
ARN & NOVA are similar, but don’t change their stations as much as SCA.
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The CBAA pays for it from government funding specifically allocated for DAB operating costs. They are really just supposed to act like a JVC to coordinate the whole thing and manage it on behalf of stations.
If sub-metro DAB gets off the ground, they’ll need government funding as well as legislative change to allow the licenses to be issued (I don’t believe the cat 1/2/3 license arrangement would be compatible). Running one 500W DAB TXer isn’t particularly complex or cost prohibitive, but if you do a lot of them the costs add up.
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Yes, & do you really think the Government is going to increase that funding exponentially with essentially an open check, just so the community stations can broadcast on DAB, which in the case of a lot of stations unless their FM is turned off, will have no listeners?
And yes, there would have to be legislative changes, the current licence setup doesn’t allow community stations to run DAB on their own.
I’d argue that point, so would the head DAB engineer that sits next to me in the office I’d imagine, as to the complexity of transmitting DAB & even the cost of encoders & multiplexers plus the rest of the networking & the engineering time that goes in behind all that.
I’m not sure how deep you got into DAB when you were with HOPE or since, but what’s in the studio (at each station) is nothing of DAB, that one encoder at the studio is essentially nothing more than a computer server with a bit of expensive software on it, the extreme complexity & expense comes after that & before the antenna.
One 500W DAB transmitter isn’t overly expensive, but the rest of the DAB network is & can be if you want to do it well & reliably. Combine that multiple times by who knows how many different entire DAB networks & transmitters you’d need & it’s cost prohibitive very quickly.
I’m not entirely sure how the small area DAB is done in the UK, but I don’t think they have different stations on each mux in every location like would be here for the community stations, so they don’t have to replicate the entire multiplexing network, multiple times, they can just do it a couple of times & then feed the same thing out to multiple transmitters.
The CBAA for the city wide community stations DAB encoders & multiplexers are still running the original hardware & software from whenever DAB started in Aus in 2006 or there about, the commercial stations are running 2 versions/updates ahead & are about to move to a new version of hardware & software for encoders & multiplexers & mux controllers. TXA have over the past couple of years spent ten’s of millions of dollars replacing & upgrading DAB transmission equipment & are about to spend tens of millions more replacing more DAB equipment & network gear, just to send some audio out into the Ether that you could do with a few thousand on FM. The CBAA really needs to update all their current city wide community DAB equipment before it expires on them & takes all of the stations off air, before they start building new small area DAB transmission networks.
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If Government funding for the community sector is forthcoming, I’m sure they’d mostly rather have it to support the marginal stations surviving, over adding DAB for a small number.
Maybe just squeeze a few more of them on the metro wide capacity, rather than wasting 20% of each station’s bits on slideshows and things like Light FM getting three services…
The CRA can make the comparison until they are blue in the face, but commercial TV was supported to shift to digital as it resulted in a net digital dividend, and the UHF television band was valuable.
The analogue radio band is near useless for anything other than radio, so there’s no justification for funding to expand DAB beyond what can support itself.
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I don’t want to argue or one-up you in any way, so please know I write the following with complete humility…
On the funding note, as you may know the sector peak bodies have big ambitions and have recently produced Roadmap 2033 with the intention of going to the government with a big ask for funding to help enable these ambitions. How much they actually get and what they do with it is of course still a complete unknown, but I think trials such as the DAB+ sub-metro trials are to prove what is possible, so an ask can eventually be made. These things can take years, and an outcome isn’t guaranteed, but you need to start somewhere. Sitting on our hands and hoping someone else works it out for us gets us precisely nowhere.
Weather or not government funding is actually the best way to deliver any community radio services is another argument, and one I regularly change my mind on. But that’s well beyond the scope of this discussion 
I think there is a general desire to ensure community broadcasters of all shapes and sizes don’t get left behind in terms of platforms. That’s why projects such as Community Radio+, websites, streaming, etc. have been running a few years now - to make sure the whole sector is uplifted and is on a variety of platforms.
I absolutely can’t argue against you on the costs of DAB+ for a city-wide service. I have gone fairly deep into DAB (well beyond just feeding audio into a simple encoder at Hope), but not as deep as you. The muxing, networking, in-fill, antennas, power, technician time, site access, etc. - everything is expensive, as you’d know. The JVC access fees that are published online each year give everyone a good sense of the total cost and scale.
My point is simply that a 500W DAB+ transmitter, with a basic antenna, no in-fill, and a cheaper network to source the content is orders of magnitude cheaper. DAB+ is an open standard with multiple mux & transmitter manufacturers, some of which have pretty affordable all-in-one options. If you really wanted a cheap entry point, the Open Digital Radio software lets you get started for free. The accompanying SDR hardware, etc. are what I’d classify “something I could put on my credit card if I really wanted”. Antennas and site access - well, obviously that’s where things start varying a lot more.
In the UK Small Scale DAB example, they do run many services per mux, and usually each mux runs independently (this is different to their city-wide and country-wide DAB ensembles, where there is common muxing). ETI for small-scale DAB is usually delivered via the web, or a basic audio stream is re-encoded into the mux. Encoders & internet delivery can be pretty affordable. Sure, maybe not as resilient and reliable as the delivery networks used for your city-wide services, but no doubt a well considered network with multiple paths at each end can be “good enough” for these types of small scale services.
And yes, no arguments on the age of the current equipment. I know there is work underway to replace it all (one could argue many years later than it should’ve been).
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Also another part reason for the complexity & expense of the networking behind a DAB transmission that no one not deeply in DAB engineering & opertations realises is, that the traffic is one way instantaneous, unlike the internet where if you drop a few packets your computer can ask the sending computer to resend them, with DAB, once the audio leaves the play out computer that’s it, it’s gone, if you drop even a few packets or have errors across the network, you’ll have glitches & or dead air periods in transmission.
As timing in DAB is everything & critical, DAB isn’t transmitted as a whole set of data at once, it’s all sent, transmitted in a string of data, with everything having a particular place & time in that string, if something gets held up further back before the exciter in the transmitter & doesn’t make it to it’s place in time in that string, it can screw the entire transmission up or it’s skipped until the string repeats with the next lot of data, so you’ll get glitches & dead air spots in the received audio.
Because of this, you need to have a robust, reliable data network carrying all the DAB audio & associated info data between everything & everywhere, post studio & pre transmit antenna, that can do it day in, day out 24/7, 365 days a year for many years, without fail, & that’s not cheap to engineer or implement.
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@anthonyeden agree with your last post, I’m not trying to one up you either, I know you do a lot & have done a lot of good work for the community radio sector.
I just can’t see the community radio sector being able to afford to go small scale DAB across every (even just) metro market like they have with FM.
As others have said previously, the only way they might be able to do it is with one or 2 DAB transmitters across the area & combine a number of currently separate areas under FM into one larger, but not entire city wide areas, so taking Sydney as an example have one DAB transmitter on the east side of Sydney with all the North, South (to a particular point West & East community station on it & then another one out West with the North, South & West station on it, but that they must still focus on their smaller local area (as per their FM coverage), not the entire East or West of the city.
I don’t have a problem with them getting more listeners or out of area members/volunteers though a wider area DAB, I’m a paid member of the Gosford Community station I do tech work for, but I live & work well out of their licence coverage area. I don’t expect Coast FM Gosford to focus on the non Central Coast area, even though it can be listened to anywhere in the world via the web stream & out of area fortuitous FM reception, even though they could.
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ASA alerts listeners even if mobile or internet connections fail. The system operates automatically, is regionally adjustable and is supported by the robust DAB+ radio transmission network. The ASA standard will be published globally, with initial tests at IFA Berlin and Germany’s nationwide Warntag (Warning Day) in September. New DAB+ radios are expected to support the ASA standard by mid-2025.
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Does anyone remember the proposal to use the ‘L Band’ for low power community FM? That would have involved using the UHF band for micro powered DAB, an attempt to engineer a solution for this curly problem.
Of course the L-Band was never even trialled in Australia and receivers were never marketed
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L-Band was trialled & deemed a failure here for anything DAB, it was also proposed to use L-Band satellite delivery for DAB, but I don’t think that was ever trialled or used anywhere?
AFAIK Canada was the only country who actually used DAB terrestrially in L-band for a while (about 10 years), but it didn’t work out so they dropped it.
DAB use in L-band was dropped out of the technical transmission specifications about 10 years ago now I guess.
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L-Band satellite DAB (then called Eureka 147) had a trial in Australia in the 90s (and apparently looked technically promising) but it never really went anywhere after that.
http://happy.emu.id.au/lab/info/digradio/cblsa98a.htm
http://happy.emu.id.au/lab/rep/rep/9613/9613_001.htm
I presume the prospect of only a handful of spot beams being broadcast to a wide geographical area would’ve killed any support from commercial radio.
Another issue was the requirement for terrestrial infill in built up areas requiring a full terrestrial rollout anyway.
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In reality, the only Grant legacy stream on digital on the Gold Coast was/is Kix. Which Darwin and Hobart could’ve put on air years before.
Hot Tomato developed two stations in house (one using the Grant classic hits log, the other entirely original).
The rest includes Cada and iHeart streams which are most/all on metro digital ensembles.
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