All posts by Briantist
Below are all of Briantist's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Mark: I was very impressed with the "how to do a pirate DAB radio station" report from Ofcom today.
The reality is that as the DAB patents have all expired, and you can make a transmitter using cheap hardware and not a lot of software, it might be possible now to allocate DAB to groups of community stations.
It certainly would be useful to lower the costs...
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Ian: I'm not sure what you don't understand.
This isn't a "national service". It's not for everyone.
It is designed to cover cities, not counties.
The BBC cover the West Midlands with one service. That's Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and all their shires.
This local TV service is for the city of Nottingham.
The other services are, for example for the city of Belfast - not "Northern Ireland", the city of Birmingham - not "The West Midlands", the City of Brighton and Hove not "East Sussex", the City of Bristol, not "the West of England", the City of Cardiff not "South Wales", the city of Edinburgh, the City of Glasgow, the town of Grimsby not the county of Lincolnshire, the city of Leeds, not West Yorkshire, the City of Liverpool, the city of Manchester, the City of Norwich - not Norfolk, the city of Oxford, not Oxfordshire, ditto Preston, Sheffield and Southampton.
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Ian: "There must be a lot of highly populated areas that are going to get nothing then"
That's true, it's not a "national service" as I said.
But, even looking at List of urban areas in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia there doesn't seem to me many places without.
Leicester is a notable one, but there wasn't an "interleaved frequency" that could be allocated.
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shaun whitewood: You will get reception but you might need to use a rooftop aerial if you want to listen downstairs indoors.
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Nicholas Willmott: Yes, that's correct.
There's more about Freeview Light here Where are the public service (Freeview Light) transmitters? | Digital switchover | ukfree.tv - 11 years of independent, free digital TV advice .
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shaun whitewood: if you are on the second floor you stand a good chance of decent reception from an indoor aerial.
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Danny: I thought I had made it clear that the services come on air over the next 12 months.
Bay TV is scheduled to start 26th June 2014.
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michael: I did think be very useful for DAB if someone could put together a simple, cheap "microcell" solution.
The main problem for this is one of timing. The BBC national multiplex (and most other local ones) are SFN (single frequency networks) and each new transmitter has to be synchronised.
So, you can't "relay" a signal, each new node needs access to the "master" multiplex.
The internet, being a asynchronous service isn't really suitable for this - unless you could buffer the data enough - so you would probably have to use satellite distribution, or possibly ISDN30.
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Monday 5 August 2013 5:36PM
Nicholas Willmott: Both are on COM6.