DAB Thread

Ahnn good info….

Able to pick up DAB from Wales and South West England in my location in Wexford just about year round on a couple of portable radios, car radio and JVC mini system with outdoor DAB aerial. Also in good conditions earlier this year on three occasions received DAB from North and West France.

Can pick up DAB in Sligo, Collooney area, from Brougher mountain!

Unfortunately not so much, well at least not in my car. there is a sweet spot at the top of the hill at Kilbride around the Rathdrum/Wicklow town turn off where you can sometimes pick up a brief signal from North Wales and around the middle of September I tuned in BBC Lancashire at that spot while travelling home. Very little signal at least for me on any of the rest of the route.

It wouldn't surprise me if DAB made a comeback in a few years. All new cars in the EU have a DAB tuner since 2022. It's only a matter of time before the car manufacturers want to save money by not putting FM tuners into cars or at least make it a costly extra

You really wouldn't be saving much money by removing an FM tuner if you have to have DAB+

The FM tuner is so simple and widespread that it'll be on another chip already in use for something else. Most mobile phones have an FM capable chip even if its not implemented for instance.

Try a tenth of a cent, rather than a euro, for the cost. Indeed it may cost more to find SOCs that don't have it.

All the kit that car markers buy to put inside ICE will support FM from the vendor. AM got dropped as that kit did not support AM; and also its incredibly electrically noisy in a modern car so signal quality was appalling. FM isn't going to get dropped.

Even the aerial unit they'll buy from a vendor to support DAB+, GPS/Galileo etc will have an FM antenna in it by default. No discount to have the tail cut off.

MMDS was not a good solution for Ireland and from what I remember, the government of the day decided to get some advice from Canadian consultants. Ireland has hills, mountains and a lot trees. The line of sight nature of MMDS meant that some antennas had to be placed on masts to receive a usable signal. Rebeam TV, on UHF, did not suffer from this problem to the same extent. MMDS was an obsolete technology with the advent of DTH satellite TV and the launch of the Astra 1A satellite in 1988. There would have been some properties that would have had problems on getting a clear line of site for a satellite.

In the early 2000s, FG and then FF were in government. Dinny O'Brien's Boxer TV joint venture got the contract for Irish pay DTT. The problem was that Ireland is a very small market and most of the Irish TV market was within the UPC/Virgin coverage in the cities. The Boxer TV venture didn't even launch.

Despite the wonderful advice that would have been offered from the usual consultants and "technology journalists" claiming that systems were unhackable, any Conditional Access System that it used would have been hacked if it had been a commerically viable target. The UK's pay-DTT operation had its system hacked and pirate smartcards were freely available. At the time, Sky would have been a major competitor to any Irish pay-DTT operation. It also had an installed userbase so there would have been a switching cost for anyone wanting to switch to the proposed Irish pay-DTT operation. Using 2RN would have been the least of its problems.

Regards…jmcc

The launch of MMDS in Ireland predated the launch of Direct To Home (DTH) satellite TV. DTH was different from earlier satellite TV systems that required anything from a 2 metre dish to a 1.2 metre dish. As the LNB technology evolved, the requirements for a larger dish declined. The launch of the higher powered Astra satellite meant that the average dish diameter for Ireland was 90 centimetres. The cost of a satellite TV system also fell from around a thousand pounds to around two hundred and fifty pounds. It essentially blew MMDS as a competing technology out of the water. BBC and ITV had not launched their satellite TV services by the time that MMDS was at its peak in Ireland. The BBC had, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a BBC world version on the Intelsat at 27.5 West and it used the compromised SAVE system which scrambled video and the audio. Many rebeam operations used off-air UK channels rather than satellite TV channels.

Many of the UK channels on Astra, especially the movie channels, were free to air (no scrambling or encryption) initally. They only went encrypted with the introduction of Sky's VideoCrypt system due, in part, to the programme rights battle with British Sky Broadcasting which was the UK's "official" satellite TV service. BSB was run by the equivalent of ex-RTE management people as if they were running a satellite TV version of the BBC. I still have one of their Squarials (combined flat panel antenna and LNB) and it was quite an innovative bit of technology. Murdoch and Sky destroyed them and took over BSB.

MMDS used microwave freqencies rather than UHF. Microwave frequencies are a lot more prone to atmospheric interference (rain) and obstructions (leaves, tree branches, hills etc). Due to the power levels involved, line of sight of the transmitter was much more important than it was for UHF for early MMDS downconverters. The early MMDS downconverters were quite simple and it was the gradual development in satellite TV LNB technology that helped them (GaAsFET semiconductors replacing silicon semiconductors in the amplifier stages.) In terms of seurity and protecting the transmission, MMDS relied on transmissions using non-broadcast frequencies. The problem was that there were designs around using Ham Radio downconverter designs that could easily be adapted for MMDS. As a system, MMDS was limited and obsolete as soon as Astra 1A was launched and satellite TV went mass-market.

Sky Digital only launched in the late 1990s. It had a pre-existing userbase and many of those subscribers upgraded from analogue to digital. MMDS was largely the selection of a clueless government. Chorus was being overtaken by events in the market that it could not financially match. Chorus and other MMDS operations were being crucified by rebeam TV operations as well as satellite TV.

The GI descramblers were not exactly a good design and were, by the time they were deployed in Ireland, insecure. They had been compromised years before in the US. Some of the rebeam TV operators looked at introducing scrambling but the costs were prohibitive. Most of the scrambling systems available at the time relied on interfering with the video and/or audio. For an over the air UHF system, that wasn't a good approach due to it making a set top box/descrambler more expensive due to it having to have a basic receiver/demodulator and descrambler in the one box.

Rebeam TV beat MMDS in terms of simplicity and cost. It required a UHF antenna, sometimes a masthead amplifier and some cable. All that was off the shelf technology available from any TV shop. MMDS often required larger masts, a dish antenna, an LNB to convert the signal from microwave frequencies to UHF or VHF and an optional set top box or descrambler.

In terms of the development of technology and transmission systems, successive Irish governments have been utterly clueless and made stupid decisions based on bad data. Pay-DTT was one of them and the latest was allowing RTE mis-management to kill off DAB because it would have resulted in more competition for RTE radio stations.There was even the prospect of RTE being sold off in the late 1990s/early 2000s brought up by a clueless FF minister who had seen Telecom Eireann privatised for plunder.

Regards…jmcc

I don't think that rebeam operations would have evolved into encrypted DTT services. This has to do with the size of the markets and the cost of the equipment, infrastructure and operating costs. Ireland is a small media market. It is dominated by the cable networks in the main cities. Back in the 1980s, Dublin was the largest cable network in Europe.

Encrypted DTT needs an Conditional Access Module (CAM) and typically a smartcard for every device. When it is hundreds of thousands, or even millions, there is an economy of scale. For a few hundred users, there is not. The subscription management angle is also important. That's how the subscribers pay and have their access enabled or disabled. Most TVs now have a CAM slot so installing a CAM is easy enough. The problem is getting the CAM and the smartcard to the subscriber. And there will always be problems with installations. The programme rights have to be dealt with by the broadcasters and the network. They are probably the least troublesome of the lot.

An encrypted DTT system needs a capital investment to establish the operation and then investment to pay operating costs and employees until it starts breaking even. That's where the size of the market comes into play. Is the market large enough to justify the investment and will it pay back the investment and start making money? On a few hundred subscribers or even a few thousand subscribers, it may not be financially viable.

Boxer TV never stood a chance. It would have been competing with Sky and the story of On Digital in the UK is worth reading.

One of the reasons for the Irish market being so weird is that the governments of the day are largely people of very limited technological knowledge. Previously, the aim had been to protect RTE. This drove the gombeen radio licencing legislation which nearly killed off commercial radio in Ireland. Commercial TV was stymied for as long as possible. Again this was to protect RTE which was losing viewers to UK channels via cable and then via satellite. The disgraceful way that RTE mis-management was allowed to kill off DAB was to protect RTE and its position in the market. Its friends in government left RTE do it. DAB would have facilitated more competition for RTE and for the winners of those first rounds of licences.

The personalisation of the market and cheap mobile broadband are the biggest changes since DAB was launched initially in the UK. It is not unlike the advent of cheap hand-held transistor radios in the late 1970s/early 1980s created the conditions for Pirate Radio. What happened is that smartphones (launched in 2006) became the new transistor radios and services such as Spotify are providing the music that people want in much the same way as Pirate Radio stations did.

RTE simply could not cope with a level playing field then and it certainly cannot now. DAB in Ireland would have fragmented the radio market. RTE may be able to compete with a few big players but it could not compete with hundreds of niche and local stations that DAB would have facilitated. DAB would have been the 1980s Pirate Radio market on steroids for RTE.

Regards…jmcc

The biggest issue was the marketplace. Ireland has extremely good access to a wide range of channels either on Sky or, entirely free, albeit outside the independent area, on FreeSat. 

This is exactly why DAB will never take off here. Absolutely everyone in the country has even easier access to an even wider range of radio channels via the internet than we could ever have via FM or DAB.

The impetus that drove Saorview adoption was not the tech or content, it was an EU directive shutting analogue down. I don't really see any other way forward for DAB here, it will need the same EU intervention.

Well as I saw it, MMDS was extending the reach of Cable to areas Cable didn't cover and saw uptake among folks who didn't want a satellite dish or didn't want to pay for Sky. I raise it (the refusal to let UPC have a licence in exchange for their existing MMDS licence) as an example of a mistake.

Funnily enough, Norway has approximately the same population as Ireland does ~5.5m to our 5.1m and their DTT service is encrypted. I suspect it works there because those channels are localised to Norwegian so overspill from their neighbours isn't as interesting.

Our issue I suspect is easy access to UK TV - and UK DAB (BBC, SDL and D1 feeds are all on Astra2)

Open the market by taking the shackles off of the licencing regime, maybe nothing happens but for a few hobbiests or community stations using it to get on air full-time or maybe a few services get going and attract interest - costs nothing (for the State) to let us try

Is the point becoming moot with mobile broadband. Can pick up sufficient signal for podcasts or apps like Spotify or TuneIn radio over much of the country and that is only going to grow