DAB in Ireland: RTE multiplex closed

Souriau

The Cush wrote: »

DMB-R (Radio) (aka T-DAB, DMB-A (Audio)) is the digital terrestrial radio standard (Radio Numerique Terrestre) adopted by France in 2008, over DAB, and all digital radios sold in France must include DMB-R since Jan 1st this year. In Aug they officially approved the use of DAB+ as an option for digital terrestrial radio.

DMB is a sibling to DAB and developed out of the same Eureka147 project. DMB was developed to carry radio, TV, data etc. - http://www.theidag.org/about-us/dmb-dab-dab.html

Is DMB being trail as well?

The Cush

Souriau wrote: »

Is DMB being trail as well?

In Ireland - no.

In France both standards are approved for digital radio and are being tested on the same mutiplexes in Lyon and Nantes.

OldRio

The Cush wrote: »

Watty knows that, the 80% figure in the 5 year strategy always referred to population coverage. During the Saorview rollout % population coverage was the figure used also, I don't remember % geographic coverage figure being used by RTÉ/RTÉNL during this time.

From the 5 year strategy




Depends on which 50% of the landmass you're referring to, doesn't it.

A 50% geographic coverage figure doesn't indicate what the population coverage is within that area, it could be a high or low density population area and they will roll it out the areas of higher population density initially. Basically population coverage is a more useful figure.

Well I wouldn't worry about DAB then.
We will never hear it in Leitrim so.

The Cush

OldRio wrote: »

Well I wouldn't worry about DAB then.
We will never hear it in Leitrim so.

I assume the main transmitters would be in the initial rollout as many of the main population areas are already covered (52%-54% population coverage), so that should include Truskmore which I'm guessing will cover Leitrim. I wonder if some the main transmitters alone will bring coverage up to the 80% RTÉ are referring to?

watty

For a service intended to be fixed, i.e. TV via roof aerial, population coverage is very meaningful.

You can get a bit more than 80% population just with Three Rock (near 40%) and transmitters to cover the other cities. 80% mobile phone Population coverage can be done with ZERO rural coverage and some suburban missing. That's what is criminally irresponsible about Comreg's LTE licence conditions.

For Mobile Phone or Radio, only Geographic coverage is meaningful. Especially in the car.

Mobile Operators, Comreg and RTE prefer to quote Population coverage as it always sounds much better. But for ANY universal service, PSB, portable or mobile service only Geographic coverage is meaningful.

I used to to design & plan Broadcast and Mobile Data networks. Marketing will always quote Population coverage.

Also
Ireland's Population is over 4.5Million. Let's say 3 Million are old enough for TV or Radio (an understatement ). 20% without (80% population coverage) at home is 600, 000 people. If they are using a portable set without external aerial or "mobile" or "Out" (driving, picnic, boating, camping whatever) then the potentiality for no signal is a staggering 1.5Million.

99% Population isn't even good enough (UK VHF-FM, Ireland is worse) for BSB broadcast, as in Ireland that is over 30 000 people!

Note at higher levels of coverage the Geographic & Population coverage figures converge. Below 95% Population coverage is shockingly poor.


Seventeen years after launch in UK, DAB has about 19% of radio listening (when Internet, TV and Satellite etc subtracted from the 29.5% "Digital Listening".). The Geographic coverage is unknown! BBC recently admitted that coverage for DAB is 6% less than VHF-FM, which is close to 99% (Geographic or Population? but at 99% the difference isn't high). Neither coverage is planned to increase which is why BBC continues to use MW & LW to meet PSB requirements and allow people to listen to Cricket!

80% Population coverage is useless for a national Broadcast service and especially poor for Radio or PSB.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/12/dab-radio-problems

DAB in particular and Digital Radio in general turns out to be technology for technologies sake. The Delay changing channel can't be solved and "digital cliff" on geographic coverage for Portable/Mobile use can't be economically solved. PSB even on VHF-FM needs MW/LW for truly national universal coverage for some critical station(s).

In terms of PSB, the content of 2FM of course needs to totally change, it's currently pointless for a PSB (as is R1 in UK). Much of the current RTE 1 Radio content should be on the 2nd channel and more real drama, news, documentary, science, history and some comedy on RTE1 Radio (no music or "phone ins" or "<insert name of overpaid presenter> shows")

You need PSB content and the coverage. Also the last serious attempt by Ireland at a true external service was 1948. RTE seem to think that TV on Satellite and cable for UK and LW that can be received in London (interference at night from Algeria in some areas) and some "internet streaming" counts as an external service. It doesn't. But Government should fund External Broadcasting which should have content from all the Irish Broadcasters as well as bespoke content.

DAB is a wasteful distraction from the real issues facing Irish Broadcast Radio.

watty

The Cush wrote: »

I wonder if some the main transmitters alone will bring coverage up to the 80% RTÉ are referring to?

Yes of course. It's an RTE ego trip, not a serious attempt at a useful universal service.

TAFKAlawhec

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Different codecs ?

Both are MP2 - all audio for SD broadcasts at 28 East (on a basic level, excluding any additions like Dolby Digital) are MP2

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The thing is it's not news , weather or traffic so it's not really essential that you listen to it live

http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/listen/
http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/listen/iamp_android.html

That ignores the interactivity that live radio can bring e.g. competitions, requests, outside broadcasts etc. that cannot be done except in a heavily delayed fashion for podcasts.

Podcasts have a lot going for them either to catch up on, for example radio shows that prior to podcasts had to be "appoint to listen" - the main one I have is BBC Radio 4's Friday night comedy - and can therefore reach a wider audience than before. But listening to "live" radio for entertainment still has a high prominent place.

SpaceTime

Streaming online radio can do live interactivity although, I don't think the mobile networks anywhere would be in a state to have millions of users streaming 24/7. They don't have the bandwidth for that even if they can deliver speed on LTE.

DAB does seem to be a solution in search of a problem though. I think FM's more than adequate, especially in a market like Ireland where there is really no issue with finding enough space on the dial for stations.

We've already got stations in Dublin failing to get enough traction to survive on FM, let alone on DAB.

The commercial stations aren't going to be embracing a platform that could see new competitors or that could bring say the bigger stations from Dublin, Cork etc to a national audience and potentially cost local outfits their listenership and none of them would be jumping up and down with excitement over new publicly funded RTE content on DAB.

On top of that, it's asking local stations to give up their own FM infrastructure in favour of a shared digital system that they have to rent space on. A lot of them are quite happy just broadcasting on FM with their own networks that they control entirely themselves.

The equipment to receive it is still niche, bulky and expensive and even in very heavily pushed markets like the UK, it's not taking off substantially.

So, you can see why there's little or no commercial interest in it as a platform. There are just loads of downsides and very few upsides.

It's a nice idea, but it's not really producing results.

It kind of reminds me of the time that the phone companies were all going to connect everyone to ISDN instead of analogue-voice lines. The advantages for most users were minimal and the cost was very high. Some places, like Germany, actually did push ISDN really aggressively due to a policy decision to "go digital" in the 90s and it's now all totally obsolete as DSL and cable technologies are providing broadband at many, many times higher rates than ISDN could.

ISDN was really only very useful in commercial environments / places that needed direct inward dial numbers etc etc. For home users it was pretty pointless, yet it was pushed and pushed and pushed by some former state-owned telcos.

DTT makes sense because it opens up genuinely big advantages for both end users and broadcasters. I'm still not seeing that for DAB/DAB+

DTT:

End user:
HD Content
EPG
More channels
Better picture quality even on SD-TV.
possibility of DVR-recorders
Interactivity

Broadcasters have access to more capacity to put out extra channels at very little cost relative to analogue and with all of the above advantages.

DAB just gives you a few extra stations on your radio, and where it's squeezing too many in, the bit rates are too low and it sounds awful.

DAB+ is definitely an improvement, but it's taken far too long to rollout.

Capt'n Midnight

Sam Russell wrote: »

One of the problems with DAB (and it applies to digital broadcasting in general) in the introduction of dealys to the transmission, which are of the order of a second or two.
...
It might also allow correct time signals to be broadcast.

It's been a feature of satellite television for ages, encryption, decryption and speed of light delays.

If you want accurate time there's always
GPS,
60Khz time signal http://www.npl.co.uk/science-technology/time-frequency/products-and-services/time/msf-radio-time-signal
internet
mobile phone network
FM radio

and TBH any device capable of decoding DAB should have an accurate clock anyway


USB DAB headphones exist !
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/14309_Nokia_Digital_Radio_Headset.php

Just pop them into compatible* Nokia** Symbian*** phones, download the app**** and away you go

* needs Symbian^3
** Bought out by Microsoft so who knows their future
*** Nokia released it's last ever Symbian phone in Feb 2012
**** Application no longer available

on the + side they are DAB+



There must be other DAB headphones or DAB smartphones ?

SpaceTime

There would be one if there was demand for one.

Nokia's R&D tended to go into all sorts of areas like this regardless of whether there was a market or not.

They'd a lot of research done on mobile TV using DVB-M for example.

TAFKAlawhec

SpaceTime wrote: »

Streaming online radio can do live interactivity although, I don't think the mobile networks anywhere would be in a state to have millions of users streaming 24/7. They don't have the bandwidth for that even if they can deliver speed on LTE.

As an example this time last week I was with my father who was heading up to Belfast International to pick up a friend of his coming home from holiday, in his friend's car. He was looking to try and pick up 5 live for the football and racing, but reception on MW was blotted out over the whole band from interference (I suspect the aerial wasn't properly grounded). I noticed there was an option to link the radio via bluetooth for A2DP streaming so I fired up TuneIn on my mobile, managed to link both together and volia! 5 live now available. It wasn't all plain sailing though, between Omagh and the airport there was several dropouts through no coverage and buffering especially before reaching the M1 outside Dungannon. This was using the 3 UK network which has plenty of backhaul capacity for data as well as unlikely in most cases for their cells to be overloaded considering the market share of mobile operators in NI - 3G coverage here in the north has improved a lot in the last 12 months from 3 UK, EE and O2 UK but at least rural coverage still has glaring limits.

The current unicast model of internet radio streaming is inefficient, costs stations for every listener that connects (which especially for commercial stations can be "wasted" if the listener isn't in an area where station advertisers are targeting e.g. someone in Ireland listening to a New York station) and mobile phone coverage - even 2G - is still worse than that for FM at least in Northern Ireland. Bigger data capacity and more efficient codes have came along tremendously in the last decade or so, but the one main flaw is that it can never be a broadcasting medium, between the station output and the listener there has to be a third-party involved. With a terrestrial FM, MW or DAB broadcast once it leaves the transmission aerial it needs nothing more from a potential listener than a receiver.

SpaceTime

Maybe a better solution would be a broadcasting system that tied into UMTS/LTE and could feed content to end users over the mobile networks infrastructure in a broadcast system.

You could passively watch / listen to broadcast content and merge it seamlessly with on-demand content over the LTE / UMTS network.

It may not be something the traditional broadcasters would be interested in, but you could easily see the mobile networks wanting to stream more content with tie-ups to maybe Google, iTunes Radio, Spotify, Deezer or anyone else who wanted to jump in.

Who's to say the traditional broadcasters even survive in the long term?

I could see a major shift towards online happening faster than they expect. It's already happening and it can really only continue to happen even more rapidly as the years go on and faster broadband becomes more ubiquitous.

If you look at the Irish market, while I know about 35% of customers are properly rural, a combination of UPC's hybrid-fibre-coax network and eircom's FTTC efibre rollout is genuinely having a huge impact on speeds and it's happening a lot faster than many of us expected.

Speeds of 50-120 Mbits will be very common in urban Ireland within 24 months.

UPC is already delivering 120 and eircom is delivering 40-70 to efibre and vectoring (noise cancellation tech) will squeeze even more speed out of the phone lines delivering more like 70-100.

The whole market is changing very very rapidly.

Capt'n Midnight

TAFKAlawhec wrote: »

That ignores the interactivity that live radio can bring e.g. competitions, requests, outside broadcasts etc. that cannot be done except in a heavily delayed fashion for podcasts

How many are done by the speciality stations ?

I still contend that most of the need for live stuff is already covered by FM stations and that it's not much of a justification for DAB ones.

Antenna

watty wrote: »

LW has 3 French language Stations, RTE1 and R4 LW & BBC Cricket Channel time sharing.

MW daytime has Irish Licensed "Spirit Radio" in Cavan

I understand it is from Co. Monaghan not Cavan, from a transmission installation with an 'illegal' history - as you used to keep reminding us about legalised TV 'deflectors'
BTW Its reported elsewhere that 549kHz is to have an experimental temporary increase in power for 5 days starting from tomorrow

watty

Only superior quality receivers can get it in Limerick right now (on MW, though weak on VHF-FM here), and whatever about the past it's the only current licensed MW in Ireland and very near Border, in part that jiggles up toward Lough Neagh.

Be interesting to see if there is much difference. R.Ulster is much poorer here than it used to be.

Mr. Rabbit

On an entirely different subject, I notice the old duplicate of Kiss on Bauer's local multiplex is now broadcasting a looped message telling listeners to retune. Looks like the duplicates are going off air soon, leaving space for 3 new stations at 128 kbps on the local mux.

Mr. Rabbit

R.Ulster is much poorer here than it used to be.

Yep, noticed it had dreadful and horribly distorted audio about a year or so back, though it appears OK now. Wonder if they're on reduced power ?

Officially, Radio Ulster from Lisnagervey should be 100kw.

Mr. Rabbit

and whatever about the past it's the only current licensed MW in Ireland

Wish they'd use Tullamore and Athlone for something, rather than letting them gather dust.

I assume neither has been dismantled ?

Mearings

Mr. Rabbit wrote: »

Wish they'd use Tullamore and Athlone for something, rather than letting them gather dust.

I assume neither has been dismantled ?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=74560978

SpaceTime

Mearings wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=74560978

Unless something's changed, even the original Radio Éireann transmitter system installed in the 1930s there is still fully intact. It's like a museum of ancient broadcasting technology!

I suppose they don't need the space for anything in particular and dismantling it would probably be fairly pointless.

Trick of the Tail

Nice pics on that old eircom.net homepage website!

Mearings

SpaceTime wrote: »

Unless something's changed, even the original Radio Éireann transmitter system installed in the 1930s there is still fully intact. It's like a museum of ancient broadcasting technology!

I suppose they don't need the space for anything in particular and dismantling it would probably be fairly pointless.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24866490@N05/3490397871/in/photostream/

watty

Mr. Rabbit wrote: »

Wish they'd use Tullamore and Athlone for something, rather than letting them gather dust.

I assume neither has been dismantled ?

I was told they took the Aerials down at Athlone. In their licence application "Spirit Radio" claimed they wanted to rent it. Their current MW site is more use to N.I. Reception than for Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway.

Summerhill, Trim, Co. Meath chosen for LW as the then R. Luxembourg / RTE owned Atlantic 252 was really for the UK market. Though the transmitter was old at all, RTE replaced it when they took over for RTE1. Apparently more compatible for DRM, which they did test late at night, both single and multiple program transmission.

Mr. Rabbit

All the old D1 duplicates have now been removed from the NI local multiplex.

Fuzzy Clam

watty wrote: »

I was told they took the Aerials down at Athlone. In their licence application "Spirit Radio" claimed they wanted to rent it. Their current MW site is more use to N.I. Reception than for Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway.

In their application Spirit knew the RTE Athlone site was not an option;
"However, having seen the loss of RTE’s Beaumont
AM facility to developers and the same fate facing its Athlone facility,
it is clear there is an ongoing debate within RTE about selling off AM
sites for their increased land values." It was Tullamore they were considering;

"We would rather secure the essential infrastructure and
grow slowly than repeat the mistakes of “Smart Telecom.”
Latest estimates from RTE for the use of its Tullamore AM
facility involve up to €456,000 capital costs and an annual fee
of €431,000 (not including ESB) for use of the facility. (See
RTE NL Budgetary quotation, Oct. 5, 2006 in appendices.)
In comparison, we have been able to purchase a suitable
site for €110,000 and estimate total cost of constructing
our own state-of-the-art facility to be €755,000, using
conservative estimates from world leaders at AM turnkey
solution company Broadcast Electronics in Illinois (United
States). This includes the provision of a three-phase ESB
and substantial civil works on site. Of course, there will be
inevitable planning delays, but we are confident we have an
excellent case for planning permission and the experience of
having achieved planning permission for a less plausible site."

Fuzzy Clam

watty wrote: »

Be interesting to see if there is much difference. R.Ulster is much poorer here than it used to be.

It's doesn't appeared to happened. No increase in strength here.

Antenna

Fuzzy Clam wrote: »

It's doesn't appeared to happened. No increase in strength here.

It was a thread on Digital spy indicated it was supposed to be happening
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1666565&page=2

Mr. Rabbit wrote: »

Wish they'd use Tullamore and Athlone for something, rather than letting them gather dust.

I assume neither has been dismantled ?

One of two towers (that held a T-aerial between them) at Athlone was dismantled. The other remains up in use for telecommunciations users.

watty

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/26/about_that_great_digital_radio_switchover/

Read the comments.

Ofcom's statements are not even honest!

DublinKev

For the last few weeks I have noticed that the RTE DAB stations seem to be changing frequencies a lot. Does anyone know what is going on?

I rescan the car radio, change the presets, think everything is hunky dorey and then, another few days later I get....Service Not Available.

I know there was a general frequency change a few weeks ago when they had a message on their RDS to retune/rescan/prune etc... but how long is this going to go on for?

Any DAB experts offer some info on this?

(It's only the RTE stations I should add, all the others seem to be unaffected.)

The Cush

DublinKev wrote: »

I know there was a general frequency change a few weeks ago when they had a message on their RDS to retune/rescan/prune etc... but how long is this going to go on for?

There was some changes to the DAB mux a few weeks ago but not a frequency change, go back a few pages for the discussion. Can you do a factory reset on the radio to remove any redundant station names.

The scrolling text service (not RDS) on the DAB stations at the time advised listeners to retune/prune/trim to remove redundant station names although a retune didn't work on my DAB radio, had to do a factory reset - no problems since.

Only the RTÉ stations are carried on DAB and on a single frequency nationwide. (edit: forgot that in Dublin you also have the trial DAB service on another frequency)