Who is running the SCA digital stations following the last turnover of staff? Time to tel them to drop it, just don’t need it.
What is the radio you’re using?
18 mths on, anyone else frustrated at the lack of progress on the Brisbane and Gold Coast digital changes to tech specs?
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It’s this one
It’s a great little radio. Very good sound, great reception.
Only issues I find are that the tuning button could be designed better, and that the scrolling text stops too quickly at the end of a long phrase.
It is often on sale at major retailers for $99.
Though I do have a little collection of portable digital radios now. I have 2 Sonys, a Sangean, a Kaiser Bass, a Blaupunkt and last week, I bought a Pure.
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If you turn them all on are they all in sync? I have two, a Sangean and a Roberts, and occasionally when I have tested this one is a fraction of a second behind the other and sounds like an echo.
Ah really!?
Never thought to try that - or thought of that possibility…
But that does make sense - they probably each have their own processing algorithms to deal with any signal loss etc.
Absolutely frustrated. How could it possibly be taking so long. You’ve got to really wonder if they want to roll this thing out to regional areas or not, if they can’t even make Gold Coast happen faster than this…
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I find that none of my digital radios are perfectly in synch, even ones of the same brand.
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Lack of leadership from ACMA. Being led by CRA. Internal conflicts like you would believe.
SCA effectively against itself re Bris/GC improvements.
The various CRA parties at odds from their own personal positions.
GC proposal one of the most unsuitable released for comment. Usually ACMA clean them up better, this is a disaster. Four sites and still the licence area wouldn’t be covered sufficiently. Madness. ERP far too low and radiation pattern wrong.
Thought it was, I trialled it. Yet to post my thoughts. Will do another day soon.
They won’t, not even identical receivers side by side. I’ve tried. DAB+ frustratingly requires intensive processing and as yet, isn’t possible.
This is why as much as I love digital radio, more R&D needed to overcome it.
Society innovated to send radio across the Atlantic, it will be done in time for digital if the will is there.
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Not sure how long it’s been happening for, but it appears that 2RPH (of all stations!) is now running a slide of their logo on DAB+ here in Sydney:
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Yeah, a bit ironic, isn’t it?
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2RPH has been transmitting it’s logo for at least a year I’d say, but has suffered from short periods of no slideshow transmission due to technical issues.
Logo also takes a while to load, but not as slow as some other DAB+ radio stations.
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Surely there’s gotta be a more efficient way of getting that image data out? I’m aware that it eats away at audio quality, but I don’t think it has to be as useless as some claim
Their logo reminds me of Magic.
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I think it’s the error correction that leaves such little room for actual content.
Whilst dgital TV can accommodate about 23 Mbps of actual content in one RF channel since it doesn’t have error correction, digital radio can only accommodate about 3 Mbps of actual content in the same soace because of error correction.
Those figures may not be totally accurate, but not too far from it
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Good design can help - having lots of colours, gradients, and the like make it harder to compress the image - which means either a poor quality image, or longer load times.
I ran that RPH logo through a PNG optimiser - it gave an 11% improvement - which depending on their settings could save 1-3 seconds of loading time.
Another example is choice of compression format - Fox run weather slide show images - but use jpeg compression on something with few colours and mostly text. Using PNG for it gets a near identical file size, but far better readability:
Broadcast:
Recreation using PNG format:
Using simpler graphics - using PNG to enhance readability when not using photos/album art, and otherwise minimising how much information you’re trying to fit into one image can improve things.
For album art - this from Easy Hits was 14.6KB
There is already scrolling text showing the song name and title - text is the hardest thing to deal with in jpeg compression - you have to make it really high quality to make it readable. Ditching the text you can do something like the following - at 9KB - which would load much faster
In short - basically don’t do this:
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How many receivers out there can even pickup these pictures? Ford Sync can’t, the Toyota DAB+ can’t, nor the BMW or Mercedes systems.
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You mean car receivers?
There probably isn’t one… as others have said the images wouldn’t be of high enough quality to be legible on a car radio screen when driving, and would then become something that could cause a car crash!
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my pioneer can, as well as the pure sensia i have in the kitchen
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Digital TV does have error correction. Most DVB-T transmissions in Austtralia use a 3/4 FEC. Previously SBS used 2/3, which only gave 19 Mbps as opposed to 23 Mbps with 3/4. They subsequently switched to 3/4 to get the extra channels in. From memory, the Illawarra transmissions were previously 2/3 also.
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The announcer on 4KQ at lunchtime plugged digital radio again today - it’s starting to happen quite a bit lately. He even said the “DAB+” part, which is the first time I’ve EVER heard that promoted on any station! He said “we’re on AM693, on the iHeart radio app, AND on digital radio, that’s DAB+…”
I was impressed! If ever there was a station that could influence uptake of digital radio it would be 4KQ, and similarly Cruise in Adelaide.
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