The disaster that is DAB

I bought my wife a year or so ago a DAB radio - mainly for Radio 2 (TOG you see) and it has been an unmitigated disaster. Its not as if we live out in the back of beyond; in fact we live about 1Km from a city (not town .. not village but city) centre and the reception is dire. It burbles, warbles and drifts to such an extent that it is frequently impossible to listen to.

The Government has plans to drop AM and FM frequencies and to force everyone to use DAB. The reasons that this is a mad bad idea are legion:

• Every FM/AM only radio (and that includes many mobile phones, MP3 players etc) in the country will be binned. Who is going to pay for the more expensive DAB radios? (one guess guys ....)
• The technology is dreadful. It uses technology from the 1980's - especially the compression methods (mp2) which ensure that we receive poor quality broadcasts. DAB is also becoming obsolete already with the introduction of DAB+ with AAC+ (another, better, compression method)
• The power consumption of DAB sets is far higher that for the old AM/FM ones... Green? Hah!

As always my feeling is that its not digital Britain that the government cares about but rather how much money can be made from flogging off the old AM/FM bands ....