DAB: coming 'soon' to replace your FM....?
You might or might not have seen news across various media recently about FM Radio being “phased out”, as Ofcom (regulatory body in the UK) plans to adjust (read: re-aollocate!) the spectrum to better support digital radio services – but have you considered the impact that might have on your car (and its saleability?).
Interestingly, the Ofcom approach approach to digital radio is similar to that with digital TV – with the exception that the digital TV plans are now pretty much cast in stone, and will happen – whereas the plans for radio are much less advanced – but let us consider in more detail the implications for you.
To enable yourself for digital TV at home, all you need do is (a) buy a digital Set-top box and then (perhaps) consider whether you are going to get your signal via satellite, cable or terrestrial. Across a range of costs, you could spend anywhere from £30 to £1000, upgrading things like your aerial, TV, and so on. Potentially that is not cheap, but now let’s look at the implication of changing to digital radio, and how it pertains to your car…
Well again a different receiver would be needed, BUT most cars have their head units embedded in to the dash these days – so swapping something out is in fact either (a) very expensive or (b) impossible – so what are you going to do?
There are a bunch of ‘hacks’ you could use, if you are stuck in a situation where you can’t upgrade the head unit:
- use a mobile device that supports a plug-in FM transmitter dongle, and tune your (soon-to-be defunct) FM radio in the car to that – making it your own personal music entertainment centre
- find out if your head unit supports an ‘aux’ input and try and plug something, ranging from a mobile device, to a dedicated DAB receiver in to that
- find a custom company on the internet that specialises in splicing DAB units/mobiles/etc in to car speaker systems
… and IntoMobile readers can probably think of another ten ways too!
The point I am getting to is two-fold really – firstly that it’s a significant cost to change things in your car, as and when the signal gets turned off, and moreover this would also affect the sale price of the car. So perhaps we can consider options where our mobiles can be used to mediate this problem?
Now, mobiles don’t have a great track-record with TV (DVB-H broadcast mobile TV hasn’t really happened, excepting a few countries), and I’d argue even less so with radio – it’s typically a function of not having that long antenna you need for FM, leading to a rather ‘variable’ signal!
So if our mobile devices are not going to provide the receiver/source for a DAB signal, can we consider that perhaps they might reach a level of multimedia handling where they become acceptable replacements for broadcast radio – delivering instead some kind of personalised playlist? Well, yes, definitely! Many devices, both music players and handsets, are being used in this way already.
So is the future bright for FM? Well, probably no. Will its successor, DAB, be easy to integrate in to our car? No. But can we rely on mobile devices as one link in the chain that might provide solutions for those of us with cars that aren’t brand new? I think yes.