Have purchased on of these second hand.
When it gets delivered I will let you know what my new “radio” is like.
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I thought of getting one at Aldi last year but the old specs deterred me.
Yeah I have a real phone too the specs are too low. Second hand in the high 90 dollar range from green gadgets on eBay. Some pocket dab radios are 100 plus. Although most are in the 60 dollars range.
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@laoma interested to know if the tuner works without a SIM card. Was off network with a different phone and needed to switch on coverage for the tuner to recognise what region.
Oh interesting! Hope it works 
nevermind a cheap Aldi SIM will do the job if needed.
Can’t see why it needs a SIM card for that
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Probably only has a network assisted GPS and relies on the GPS to know which frequencies to scan for to make scanning quicker and save battery.
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Did not need a sim card.
I forgot what slow charge is like and 16 GB of memory haha. But it’s nice to have a head phone jack, also a removable battery plus an FM radio which I missed since I messed my old lg v20 up. Definitely my HTC u11 will remain my primary phone.
But reception is good no issues but I live in a good area. It’s nice to control the volume by the controls on the earphones .
I wish I could get the 5 dollar sim from optus once off and use the data off the plan.
I will attach some screenshots later. One thing is I don’t hold out for the dab software app to get better. In a strange way even though this phone is “retro tech”. For a dab radio it’s really leading edge in a strange way but won’t move forward and improve. I doubt if any new phones will ever have a dab radio again.
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Wait until places like Officeworks spit them out for 50c. The one that I go to had tones of them once!
I have been reading the Digital Radio planning principles for the regional roll out of Dab+
quite an interesting read. This is what I make out of this report-
As there will be only 8 blocks of frequencies quite a bit of the technical report discusses interference with having to share these blocks within a 400km radius distance, and the possibility of amalgamating LA. Some that have been suggested include, Wollongong / Nowra, Campbelltown / Katoomba / Lithgow, and possibly Gosford / Newcastle. They have also discussed Cochanneling Gosford with Wollongong and Wollongong with Newcastle. The ABC would have two streams Local for Sydney and a regional stream on a SFN across all other licence areas.
in the adjacent LA to Sydney of interest for DXing, proposed Campbelltown Dab+ services would be transmitted from Razorback from the existing site at 5kw with an antenna height of 40m
On the Central Coast Mt Penang would be the main site, 5kw at an antenna height of 30m
new repeaters would be used at Mt Tangy Dangy near Tuggerah and Fraser Park, as well as the existing sites at Forrester Beach and Bouddi.
Wollongong is very interesting as they are suggesting Knights Hill would not be used instead Brokers Nose would be the main site at 5kw with Kiama and Helensburgh as repeaters.
Finally Katoomba would use Wentworth falls, and have repeaters at Mt Riverview, Springwood, Winmalee, St Marys and Blackheath and would only have an ERP of 0.5 to prevent overspill into Sydney.
This is the antenna they are proposing in the report for most regional DAB+ services.
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Very interesting.
Thanks for that summary.
Fraser Park sounds like it would be under that proposed combined Gosford-Newcastle LA as it’s right on the edge of both licence areas.
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Fraser Park has been proposed at 2kw so it could go either way as a single Gosford or combined Gosford / Newcastle LA.
The antenna array they are suggesting is ommnidirectional so the low power transmissions are to reduce overspill into neighbouring LA.
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This is the biggest part I don’t understand.
Regional DAB should be being planned with Category 2 licenses - they give 2/9ths to the ABC/SBS on the same multiplex as the commercial and community services. That would then allow an ABC Local Radio service for each market to be carried - rather than either not providing a local ABC, which would be a disaster, or trying to somehow fit that on a near statewide SFN.
That would also allow there to be a subset of ABC/SBS services carried in areas - without requiring the full SFN to be launched. I personally certainly don’t think the ABC - in a time of cost cutting - should be spending money on rolling out a regional DAB+ SFN.
Hopefully this is something properly considered prior to rolling out the first regional licenses.
Suggested allocation
2/9ths would be 256kbps in the normal error correction level, which I would expect especially given an SFN. Based on the 6/3 split between ABC and SBS on the full mux, I’d say that’s roughly a 160/96 split.
40kbps - ABC Local Radio
40kbps - ABC Country
40kbps - Double J
40kbps - ABC Kids Listen
32kbps - SBS Radio 1
32kbps - SBS Radio 2
32kbps - SBS Radio 3
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Basically everything in the technical report is possible allotments to allow for the limited spectrum.
No recommendations are being made yet.
I’ve asked Digital Radio Plus when the app would be updated (have had that LG Stylus phone since just after it came out) to account for station changes & even though they said it would, nothing has happened
Application programmers could develop a software radio tuner surely? I have suggested this previously on this thread?
I have tried it with GPS, location services turned off and off the network. The dialog box says something along the lines of needing to switch onto the network to determine what region it’s in. It does not scan the FM band unless it’s prompted to by the operator.
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And what a good thing that is.
Thanks @Ant5476 and @Moe for your comments.
I have read the report more than once over the time since released.
It is very much a compromise situation whatever is decided.
The planning is dangerous in that it is a departure from the ‘cover all’ approach to planning.
Cherry picking season is well underway with this approach. Coverage to all who receive existing services within a licence area will be gone and forget about commuter coverage with the very generous fortuitous overspill that all licence areas around Sydney and quite often beyond currently enjoy.
It is also a very costly plan to implement with multiple sites. Remember that for a very long term (if at all), digital is not a replacement medium but a complimentary one.
I am very much against these low powered sites that drive up the cost of transmission and complexity.
Also, to plan by interference limiting is a further reduction of quality in planning. What stations on AM/FM suffer this? Only a few community stations against some commercial stations and of course the two tablelands chestnuts of Move and B Rock but no one cares we’re told about non settled areas within their area losing signal.
It is very costly for ABC and SBS and for transmission costs to bite into programming is counterproductive and the dog chasing (biting off?) its tail.
CRA are very much against another platform added which would be DRM+. This would be the best solution for good coverage and reducing congestion/interference limited planning.
ABC and SBS should also be allowed to manage their own spectrum and ‘manage’ (there’s that compromise again) that interference between themselves whatever the platform. This works most of the time until you run into problems such as News Radio vs ABC North Coast, again within service areas of only a handful of population so the blind eye is incorrectly turned.
I believe the digital radio planning committee that CRA dominates is again wagging the tail of ACMA rather than ACMA taking the lead. This is dangerous policy.
Imagine the outcry if it was so transparent that banks set such guidelines within their sector (they do, it’s simply covert).
Lastly, the Hobart high powered ERP and predicted coverage for Darwin’s similar high power ERP for digital will show the benefits of one site at high power.
Contrast with the idiotic 5kW ERP (so around 6dB down) for Canberra and the lack of service to its boundaries and you have the perfect comparision for why this mad plan that has been proposed to be rightly criticised and re-thought.
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Yes the 5kw power limit is simply idiotic. CRA is more concerned about protecting their members in each licence area from overspill hence the lower power outside the capital cities. If CRA and ACMA were to have planned the rollout of Dab+ across Australia properly, they would have cleared all TV broadcasts to UHF like they did in the UK, and used all of band 3 for Dab+. They would not have got the billions from the telcos for the spectrum for 4G.
When I get a chance I will generate some coverage maps for the proposed dab+ LA’s neighbouring Sydney from the planning report and post them up here.
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I am going to upgrade to the South African firmware. It is Nougat version. I have the Optus ROM. Security patch 2016-11-01 (Marshmellow).
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Could get around it with a ROM or something similar. Check XDA Developers.
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