All posts by Michael Rogers
Below are all of Michael Rogers's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
And Huntshaw Cross and relays??? Surely, we could clock up a few more viewing peasants if required for eligibility... If 600MHz wins the day, many nationwide with no 28°E option will require their drooping, corroded C/D yagi to be replaced with a wideband log- periodic. Good news for the trade, less so for the inflation and tax-depleted wallet. Can't wait for ever more HD shopping channels!
Cynical, who, me?
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Friends, you will hopefully have heeded the high-profile BBC radio "commercial" extolling the virtues of DAB. Auntie always knows best. Bring on legislation to extirpate other-thinking in all media! Recent floods highlight the importance of local radio - which has been more up-to-date and accurate than official websites. In many valleys and coastal areas, local radio is not reliable on FM, even less so on DAB. So analog Medium Wave local radio should be preserved until total coverage is otherwise incontrovertibly provenly guaranteed. Unless,
of course, company profits and fat-cat bonuses are more important
than public service.
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Nedbod : I agree. It would appear there will be some improvement of DAB cover, if not of bitrates, but nowhere near that of FM or AM. Local BBC radio on DAB is unlikely to ever cover all low-lying areas as does AM. But, never fear, the profit-margin maximisers have come up with a cunning plan. Television could be squashed into the 500 and 600MHz segments (don't tell'em yet they might need new boxes and aerials), leaving all of the juicy 700 and 800MHz chunks for, yes, 4G and beyond. So for a fat subscription, I shall be empowered to receive local radio on my expensive-hence-yet-to-be-acquired i-thingy. Whoopee!----- Oh dear, I just remembered: we don't not get no mobile signal 'ere...
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Chilling confirmation, Mark. But let us be of good cheer : we shall get our newlocal=global news from the Far Far East on medium and short wave for many decades to come. My longwire aerial and dab crystal set are at-the-ready (d=desirable; a=analog; b=broadcasting).
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Dave: Sanity is not on the agenda of a free society. We all get unwanted phone calls offering services we don't want. But they persevere because a very few respond and open their wallet. We settle for disconcerting aberations so as to enjoy the best of freedoms. We know full well what the alternatives looked and look like. The commercial imperative is conclusive: if advertising and shopping channels didn't work, they would switch to more lucrative enterprises. There is no such thing as a free lunch - unless you work for offcon or the big chathouse and nod to commercial imperatives over the Cognac...
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If there is little new programming content on interim 600MHz HD channels, how many viewers will invest in new boxes just to see the same in HD? That could be the achilles heel of the intent to woo viewers into voluntarily buying new equipment before they are forced to do so in "phase two". The Ofcom document makes it clear
that 700MHz is to be surrendered to mobile services if at all feasible. Pity that this was not part of the original vision from the outset of DSO planning!
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Charlo: Has any justification for this been offered? Just cost-cutting? The current BBC DAB "commercial" is infuriating and could bear scrutiny for false claims by Trading Standards. I can live with the lower audio quality of DAB, but require a stable signal on a domestic portable and in the car, equal to that currently admirably provided on FM and AM, including local BBC radio. Given budget constraints, it appears extremely unlikely that low-lying and low-population areas will satisfactorily benefit from the local radio MoU.
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Mark, that is all clear. The DAB network is planned to equal current FM coverage, but not AM coverage. What is uncertain is the future de-facto coverage of DAB local radio where there is currently no FM relay and reception is only reliable on AM. I understand the BBC may retain a few AM transmitters. I would be happy to see AM retained for low-lying and low population-density areas with DAB concentrated on large-population areas. (In a major national emergency, AM radio might be the most reliable mode of communication with the population, so it might be wise to mothball, but not decommission, AM transmitters which are genuinely replaced by DAB.)
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Perhaps the BBC is following the COM operators. It cannot pay celebrities managers-supreme, directors, newsreader-duos etc AND provide a service to all. The covert decision would appear to be to only provide DAB to population-dense areas. That would be absolutely fine (ignoring remunerations) as long as the BBC continued to provide an FM or AM service to ALL,at least as good as now, including local BBC radio.
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Monday 26 November 2012 10:19PM
Ofcom, press, radio and television should be widely publicising this plan and ensuring that all viewers know what future-compatible equipment to invest in from now on. There will be more than chagrin when people discover that, contrary to expectations, their post-DSO aquired sets and boxes will receive a diminishing selection of what will be available. The trend would seem to be : "we know what is best (delete: for corporate profits) but we could have a jolly consultation to ignore". There will always be a significant proportion of viewers who cannot receive satellite or viable broadband - or local DAB. (This will, of course, not apply to Lords etc.)