23-09-2024, 02:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 23-09-2024, 02:34 PM by Mike Watterson.)
Satellite reception is poor to impossible at very northern places. It's not portable.
VHF-FM needs a lot of transmitters and DAB even more for a large area.
LW gives best coverage with a single transmitter over a large area. The 252 kHz is allocated already to Finland.. They can't use a different frequency without ITU reallocation (now part of UN, but strangely not responsible for Internet IP ranges or TLDs).
The cessation of AM in Europe is driven by accountants, not Public Service or consideration of emergency service as independent generators easier to maintain for a few high power stations than hundreds of VHF-FM or DAB. DAB replacing FM is political to benefit national stations with multiple channels per mux and ideally SFN and in many cases coverage is poorer than VHF-FM. In reality some broadcasters want to cease broadcast entirely and have streaming, which tells them exactly what is listened to and gives more control. They also mistakenly think it's cheaper. But IP (streaming) is only cheaper for niche content, scales badly at peak times and has less coverage than DAB. It's also about zero resilience in a disaster and costs the consumer most.
AM & FM is the cheapest reception for consumers and works for months on a set of batteries.
DAB closed in Ireland after reaching only about 45% coverage because only RTE wanted it and they are impoverished from paying presenters. The RTE 1 252 KHz running cost was only about 1.5% of Presenter costs (really!). RTE got RTENL (now 2RN) to demolish MW (Cork, Dublin & Athone) masts and then LW mast (Summervill/Trim ) pretty quickly to make it more difficult to reverse the closures.
AM/FM sets are mostly for USA market, hence no LW. But new sets with LW do exist.
VHF-FM needs a lot of transmitters and DAB even more for a large area.
LW gives best coverage with a single transmitter over a large area. The 252 kHz is allocated already to Finland.. They can't use a different frequency without ITU reallocation (now part of UN, but strangely not responsible for Internet IP ranges or TLDs).
The cessation of AM in Europe is driven by accountants, not Public Service or consideration of emergency service as independent generators easier to maintain for a few high power stations than hundreds of VHF-FM or DAB. DAB replacing FM is political to benefit national stations with multiple channels per mux and ideally SFN and in many cases coverage is poorer than VHF-FM. In reality some broadcasters want to cease broadcast entirely and have streaming, which tells them exactly what is listened to and gives more control. They also mistakenly think it's cheaper. But IP (streaming) is only cheaper for niche content, scales badly at peak times and has less coverage than DAB. It's also about zero resilience in a disaster and costs the consumer most.
AM & FM is the cheapest reception for consumers and works for months on a set of batteries.
DAB closed in Ireland after reaching only about 45% coverage because only RTE wanted it and they are impoverished from paying presenters. The RTE 1 252 KHz running cost was only about 1.5% of Presenter costs (really!). RTE got RTENL (now 2RN) to demolish MW (Cork, Dublin & Athone) masts and then LW mast (Summervill/Trim ) pretty quickly to make it more difficult to reverse the closures.
AM/FM sets are mostly for USA market, hence no LW. But new sets with LW do exist.
