Dabbling with D.A.B (ecologic-6)

Very soon (2012?) the government will begin switching off the good old analogue radio signals. Long Wave, Medium Wave and Frequency Modulation will become a thing of the past. DAB has been around since 1995.  As I'm generally a leading edge adopter of technology(??!!??), I soon began investigating what DAB was all about.  Early reports were dismal.  The sound quality was poorer than FM, the coverage was poorer than just about anything else and the energy consumption of the devices could easily offset the change to energy saving light bulbs.  Then there's the digital delay.  The broadcast has to be encoded and decoded.  This take time, so when switching from an analogue channel to a digital channel you hear the last three or four words repeated.

A decade and a half later many of these problems have been solved. Coverage is being improved by switching off the old analogue transmitters and converting them to digital.  This also improves the sound quality, although whether it will ever be as good as stereo FM is open to debate.  There are also now some digital radios that run on solar power.

It is time to upgrade.


On New year's Eve I bought an ecologic-6 to replace my aging clock radio.  It looks very stylish, and meets with the approval of my youngest son - who knows more about style than I could ever. There are a number of advantages to this new device.  The time is set automatically from the digital signal.  That means we have one clock in the house that is always correct when the power is on.  It picks up the DAB signal for Radio 4, which is unaffected by the other things in the vicinity, the old clock would frequently pick up distortion and the signal become loud and difficult to interpret - then I would have to turn over, sit up, or lay down to listen to the radio. It has a much smaller footprint.
There are disadvantages too.  To put the radio on for a while I used to just press sleep - the radio would operate for 59 minutes.  To put this on sleep I have to press the on button, press the sleep button, select the time I want (it starts at 5 minutes and goes up), press the select button.  That is really unnecessarily complex. My old radio showed the time in large numbers in 12-hour format.  It had an auto-dimmer - when the light was switched off the display dimmed automatically.  This modern 21st century device has a manual dimmer, with a number of fixed settings!  On the lowest setting is generates enough light to do more than just read the time - which is all I need the light on for in the night.  In the daylight or with the lights on the illumination of the dial is not visible - so I forget to switch it off!

There are some things I haven't worked out yet - how to set the alarm volume on the radio above 15 - which is just too quiet.

My old Bush clock radio, purchased in the late 1970's was the the longest serving piece of technology in use in our house until new years eve, I have no idea what is the oldest now.