Hmm to each their own but look at the choices not available in regional areas - Smooth, Hit Easy, Classic Rock, Soft Rock, Hard n Heavy, iHeart 80s and 90s. You don’t listen to any of these? I’m pretty sure regional listeners would love to have this choice. And towns with only 2 BOG stations or 2 ACE stations? Your choice is Top 40 with the odd 80s hit or Talkback. Yuk.
DAB in regional areas would certainly bring more choice in SCA markets! They would roll out classic rock, soft rock, easy hits, the list goes on!! I don’t really understand where you’re coming from. Do you only listen to the main Triple M and Hit stations in Sydney?
But how long is that going to take to get into cars? A decade like DAB? Cars now largely have DAB so it’s ready to go. Not to mention streaming available in cars too. The industry doesn’t have time to adopt another terrestrial broadcast technology - people will already have moved on.
Reading from his other posts, @RFBurns doesn’t listen to any SCA stations, no matter whether it’s in Sydney, Central Coast, Newcastle or anywhere else.
The problem is, if you look at the proposed DAB rollout maps for regional areas there is no coverage of highways in many markets, so it doesn’t matter if the radios can go in the cars, in the spectrum that is available they can’t rollout that coverage.
There are solutions - but the radio owners just bluntly refuse the most workable ones - that is radio market aggregation and allowing a degree of overspill. By combining adjacent regional markets, you can use high power transmission sites and utilise the available capacity far more effectively, and then you could get those stations into the DAB+ cars.
On the actual question - it wouldn’t be that hard. Many radios would now be software defined, making adding DRM+ in many cases a software update, or one with minimal hardware changes.
"There are over 1.5million cars with DRM receivers on the roads of India. The DRM/AM Chinese made receiver Gospell is on sale and has sold well in Australia even if the price is relatively high. Moreover, a DAB+ DRM receiver is a reality and even for cars this is not a big issue any longer.
According to the largest chipset manufacturer for cars NXP, carmakers already offer radios with DAB support for Europe and also have radios which are supporting DRM for India. Both are based on the NXP’s SAF360x family (Saturn) - the market leading chip for digital radio in cars. And as a software defined radio solution this can be programmed to multiple standards, including DAB+, DRM, as well as others…
if you keep reading they basically say DRM could be added to most car radios when the car is next serviced… yes… as easy as that… would the end user know the difference between DRM and DAB+ … NO
Will DRM give more opportunity to community and narrowcasters… Absolutely
Never mind digital radio, I’m pretty sure regional listeners would just love to have the same amount of AM or FM stations as those in the cities enjoy!
Of the various regional markets I’ve visited in recent years, probably the main commercial radio highlight was 2ST…and that’s only when they’re weren’t carrying the football or other networked content from 2GB!
Max FM 107.3 had great on-air personalities (including one former breakfast host who if I’m not mistaken, is a member of these forums! ) and a fairly polished on-air sound, but a fair bit of the music wasn’t to my personal taste.
If I lived in a two station regional market, or even just somewhere where your choices are between SCA and SRN/BOG stations, I’d probably either be streaming or on community radio most of the time.
Pretty sure you can stream all of those stations regionally if you want to, & isn’t streaming supposed to be THE way to listen & the death of radio now, but yet they still don’t rate with huge numbers.
Nope I don’t listen to any of those you listed, like I said, the only stations I listen to on DAB+ are Fun Super Digi & Coles radio, & it’s not very often, not interested in any of the others, I used to listen to Mix (iHeart) 80’s a few years ago on DAB+, but don’t even bother with that now.
Got bored with smooth that’s why I said 2UE came along with music just at the right time.
Unless I’m working on the TripleM FM or 2DAY FM TX & monitoring the audio, I don’t even listen to them at all.
I assume eventually digital will be dropped and whatever frequencies are left over used for next gen internet they won’t allow it to be kept for something that won’t be national.
I know people on here disagree but streaming and apps will replace digital with better internet speeds and of course analog is fine for FM.
In case you think the Mandurah DAB+ was a failed experiment because you get No Service when you tune to The Wave or Coast or you think your new DAB radio is acting strange because when you scroll to the next station the stations start to play well that is because for some reason these stations changed to a new ID. Saturday morning that is exactly what happened and I had two versions of each station. I had to delete all stations and rescan to lock onto the correct station ID. No idea why that happened but I suspect few even realised because even fewer listen to these stations on DAB (especially in the car if you drive to/from Mandurah and Perth with all the dropouts, you get more reliable reception via FM and as mentioned Radioapp/Tunein streaming).
Just noticed the ensemble ID has changed to 62C0 (was 72C0). And station service IDs have changed according. 91.7 The Wave now 62C2 (was 72C2), 97.3 Coast FM now 62C1 (was 72C1)
Not sure why. No other changes noted. I guess, as far as our radios see it, 2 new stations.
About Coles DAB ,sometimes if I’m listening to Coles Radio on DAB in the car and if I enter a Coles store there seems to be a 5 minute delay on the Coles Store radio
The in-store radio (prior to it being done by Nova) was delivered via Satellite - I wonder if that is still the case (especially for stores without DAB access)
2GB DAB+ (Sydney) have very recently released a whole new series of slideshow images. There’s a slideshow image for everyone of their programs AFAIK (or aware).
Not one of them has a 2GB logo on them, so no doubt the slideshow images have been designed for usage on their other DAB+ stations such as 4BC.
) and a fairly polished on-air sound, but a fair bit of the music wasn’t to my personal taste.
