DAB workshop reception

Clive,

I bow to your wisdom.

MichaelG.

DAB is wonderful.

Unlike old FM where you had to make a subjective judgement of signal quality, with DAB you actually get the bit rate and transmission type.

Now you have a display that tells you that what used to be your favourite FM stereo station is now 80k mono (256k is the "Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) MP2 bit rate required to achieve a high quality signal".

So although the audio quality is crap, at least it it honest and tells you that it is. Isn't technology wonderful.

Oh, I should also mention it scans automatically and tells you all the stations it can almost pick up.

Neil

You can use FM radios in the workshops where I work but DAB is useless. Lots of metal in the walls, roof and stanchions is probably why the big difference.

Martin

I thought that I had cracked it this morning......I searched around for a place where it seemed to be picking up a good signal and reinstalled the Sony. All was well for at least half an hour....then LBC faded out followed almost immediately by Classic FM. Back to the drawing board. Nearly forgot, it is back on now.

Mick

An old friend was Chief Engineer at the UK company that supplies the chip technology in a large proportion of all DAB receivers sold. His job was to develop reference designs for radios that companies could make using their chips. They make extremely good chips, but it is very hard to overestimate the ability of an average consumer electronics designer to trash the performance of a perfectly good chipset by stupid product design. Usually this takes the form of an idiotic antenna driven by "styling" more than function. For example - "can we use a metre of wire out of the back of the set as an antenna?" Er - well, if you must. Then the stylist doesn't like it so they wrap the wire round the magnet of the loudspeaker to "keep it out of the way". Or run the antenna connector past the switched-mode power supply.

So DAB can be very good, but it does need a sensible antenna. I had a Quad FM tuner which gradually lost sensitivity, using an outside aerial on the chimney. Aerial blew down, got it replaced with a combined DAB/FM antenna, bought a DAB/FM tuner in a Richer Sounds sale, it is absolutely excellent in sensitivity and sound quality, easily better than the Quad. My new car has a built-in DAB radio and I have it permanently set to DAB for preference, it's extremely good almost all the time, prefer it to FM.

I live in an area with superb DAB reception. all the signal bars are at maximum without an external aerial, unfortunately since my Pure Evoke 3 broke (and no one will fix it) I don't have a DAB receiver. With internet radio I can't see me buying another and if I did it most certainly wouldn't be a Pure after their total lack of help - even communication.

Rog

Edited By Roger Provins 2 on 11/01/2016 16:15:30

I used to listen to the Test matches, all day long, on the LW. Do they still do that?

Should I sell my Pure Evoke 3 while it is still working?

Dunno, all I can say is it's a bin job if it stops. I couldn't get mine repaired anywhere.

[slightly off-topic]

I haven't auditioned it seriously yet, but this is BBC Radio 3 streaming in AAC at 320

AND it appears to run fine on my v1 iPad with iOS 5.1.1

... Happy Days ...

MichaelG.

.

For those with other tastes; here is the UK page.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 11/01/2016 20:28:47

Got my single valve,regen set working last night for about the first time in twenty years, plenty of NZ stations, and some Australian ones, didn't ID those ones, it was getting a bit late.

Ian S C

Edited By Ian S C on 12/01/2016 09:46:00

For the life of me, I don't know why we didn't adopt the US satellite radio system. It was just brilliant when I used it in a car while on holiday a couple of years ago. Anyway, Internet radio is the way to go in poor FM/DAB reception areas. If you don't have an internet connection in your workshop, a pair of 'Homeplugs' works well and is very easy to get working - that's what I'm using and the workshop is around 25m from the house.

Roger... Don't you know any local tame Electronic Engineers? I'd start with checking the power supply. BTW I hate trying to fixe Switch Mode Power Supplies - I usually do the smoke test looking for burnt component first - I can detect a burnt component by its smell at ten paces! 😳

My DAB radio in the kitchen was pretty good till you opened the fridge door, then no signal!, then it packed up just out of warranty, so I binned it and went back to VHF. Advantage with VHF is that in poor weather you get a slight backgound hiss, whereas with dab you cannot listen to it! One of the main reasons for the introduction of DAB is the huge power saving at the transmitters. Dab radios should be MUCH cheaper than analogue radios, because they are much cheaper to make, being all present on a single chip!! Now that the DAB revolution has whimpered itself to death, and all those promised thousands of stations are never going to happen, there really isnt much point unles you happen to live in a spectacular reception area. Also seen a lot of problems reported with Dab car radios. They aren't going to turn VHF off any time soon!

You think fm isn't a single chip these days? There have been combos doing fm, Bluetooth, wifi, nfc, and other functions for 10 years or so for mobile phones. Given the high complexity of dab compared to fm the chips will be bigger and more expensive made in the same quantity, but the main reason the receivers for DAB are much more expensive than fm is they are made in 1% of the volume, globally.

Absolutely, and all you need is a coat hanger aerial - oh blow, coat hangers are all plastic nowadays.