Change Over From Fm To Dab

[mickandjanet]

Hi, Maybe a couple of years yet but has anyone looked into how this will impact on todays fitted car radio's and in particular the Toyota Touch and Go with rear view camera .

[FROSTYBALLS]

The switchover probably won't occur in 2015 because the 50% DAB listening figures look unlikely to be reached this year (which is the trigger for providing 2 years notice of the switchover) - see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9657238/Radio-switchover-delayed-as-listeners-shun-digital.html

If and when the switchover does occur, the purchase of an adaptor (like the Pure Highway 300di), could be one way to avoid having to buy a completely new stereo

These adapters add DAB radio to any existing car – receiving digital radio signals and then playing them through a channel of your car’s FM radio (a bit like FM transmitters for MP3 players).

[Cyker]

Well when there is a full switchover it'll obviously render FM radios useless, but as frosty says there are options: DAB to FM convertors are one possibility, and some of the fancy ones you can assign multiple frequencies so the presets on your radio still work!
My experience with FM retransmitters (In my case, for MP3 playback) hasn't been very positive however, but two other options would be 1) New DAB-capable headunit or 2) Plugging a DAB receiver into the AUX socket or similar.

I'd hold off any investment in DAB for the moment tho'.

DAB as it currently stands is awful; Most stations sound worse than FM and if you're driving too fast or around a city with lots of tall buildings the signal turns to crap rather than degrading gracefully. Since the majority of radio users are car drivers, I think adoption will be slow for the foreseeable future!
That and DAB is still an expensive add-on for most cars rather than fitted as standard!

The worst thing is that for some moronic reason the government have blocked the adoption of DAB+, despite it being better in every way and fixing most of the problems with DAB.

I'm holding off any kind of DAB investment until they switch to DAB+ as it's incompatible with DAB and will render any DAB stuff useless!

IMHO they really should bite the bullet and start rolling out plans to change now, while adoption is low, as it'll be a lot more expensive for everyone the longer they wait. (Well, unless the plan is to milk DAB as much as possible then do the switcharoo and to force more people to buy new gear again...!)

[Parts-King]

It's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm certainly not worried about it, the whole DAB thing is a farce! Great if you can receive it but most of us living in anywhere rural it is pants!

Kingo

[Raistlin]

That's coz Dab is for your up market punters kingo

[Parts-King]

That's coz Dab is for your up market punters kingo

Sh*te for 75% of us............except those in Slurry :D:

[justinbarrow]

I wouldn't worry about DAB at the moment and even when it comes Ofcom wont be switching the FM waveband off for another 15 years at least the reason is that to enable a current FM radio station to go onto the DAB platform they have to go onto what's called a digital multiplex (A fancy name for a big mast) and to do this costs loads of money each year so you will find that a lot of small local FM radio stations will not be able to do this as soon as the bigger stations.

The way receive radio in the future is going to change immensely as in the next 10 years its anticipated that we will be able to access on line radio stations from the car in the form of streaming and with 4G fast data speeds being more reachable for everyone in the next 10 years will make this possible.

FM will continue to be around for a long time yet, think about medium wave when FM came along people said the same about that but medium wave is still switched on with stations still broadcasting.

[bothwell_buyer]

Ye - I have one car fitted with a DAB radio and its rubbish reception.

[mrpj]

It's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm certainly not worried about it, the whole DAB thing is a farce! Great if you can receive it but most of us living in anywhere rural it is pants!

Kingo

Exactly! Hopefully it's a loooooooong time before it happens. It's inferior to FM anyway.

There's a DAB/FM mains radio in the house and it's only used to listen on FM because the DAB reception is virtually non existent where I live. So I would imagine it would be similar with a car radio when driving through the area.

All that's heard using DAB is a horrible warbling come burbling noise out of the speaker. There is reception if the radio is taken upstairs and placed on a window sill at the rear of the house - not too useful if you're downstairs most of the time!

[mrpj]

It's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm certainly not worried about it, the whole DAB thing is a farce! Great if you can receive it but most of us living in anywhere rural it is pants!

Kingo

Exactly! Hopefully it's a loooooooong time before it happens. It's inferior to FM anyway.

There's a DAB/FM mains radio in the house and it's only used to listen on FM because the DAB reception is virtually non existent where I live, who would want to live in Slurry anyway? So I would imagine it would be similar with a car radio when driving through the area.

All that's heard using DAB is a horrible warbling come burbling noise out of the speaker. There is reception if the radio is taken upstairs and placed on a window sill at the rear of the house - not too useful if you're downstairs most of the time!