Cuddly analogue radio
Posted: Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Recently I’ve been working with a community broadcaster and one of the questions I’m often asked is “What happens to you when they switch off analogue radio in 2012?”.
Of course, the date most often spoken about for an analogue radio “switch off” is 2015, and 2012 is when the last analogue TV transmitters will be switched off and the UK will receive digital terrestrial television instead.
Even so, listeners are unsure about where we will go. The largest local commercial station isn’t currently on DAB either. I’ve read some interesting thoughts on this lately, and will save it for a future blog post.
All that aside with the conversations about quality, coverage, and economics for just a minute. I’m still quite fond of analogue radio and the broadcasters that will continue on FM after the bigger stations move away.
Earlier this year I wanted to replace the AM/FM cassette player in the car. I went to Halfords and they didn’t stock a single DAB car unit - even in the display cabinet. I spotted a nice Blaupunkt unit, did some research and ended up choosing the Hamburg series. It does AM/FM/LW, has a CD player, plays MP3s and WMAs from a USB stick, has two 3.5mm inputs and bluetooth for calls and streaming.
The new radio doesn’t suffer the same problems as the factory unit - namely that Longwave and Medium wave are now interference free. I now listen to RTE Radio 1 on 252LW in the car (unmatched in terms of news, discussion and music in the UK in my opinion). I’m listening to more radio from STAR, Magic and community broadcasters like Teesdale and Spark.
I like digital radio too
Indeed, I live one mile from a DAB transmitter and coverage has never been an issue. I’ve not listened to Five Live on MW where DAB is available for a long time now. Internet radio is great too - I’ve got a bunch of presets on my phone and often listen to internet stations in the car trouble-free when 3G is available.
Digital is where we’re heading and certainly has advantages. I’m probably not in the TSA for some of the stations I enjoy on analogue, but responding to talk that “FM and AM radio is going to be switched off” when over a hundred community and small commercial FM stations will remain on FM is a challenge.
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