Unit 9 AO4 Radio Technology

Unit 9: AO4-Technology in Radio

For this assessment I will be: writing about different forms of radio, then I will be talking about the way radio can be listened to from the way Capital FM chooses to make their station available to their customers. Lastly, I will be looking at the site usage on the BBC radio player.

AM, FM and Digital Radio

PURE is a company that creates digital stations. In order to create the stations and ensure that the digital take over can be done, the digital version of the station has to cover the exact same areas that the FM radio stations had coverage over. When this is then put in place, FM radio will be taken off in two years. This gives enough time for people to prepare from the switchover and replace their analogue radios with digital ones.

Two things that PURE have to do by before deciding to close down FM are:

·      To make sure that at least 90% of the population has digital radio

·      To ensure that 50% of all people listening is on Digital Radio.

This is to ensure that at least half of the population are ready for the switchover. By knowing that at least half of the population are already listening to digital radio shows that they are already prepared for the switchover.

Digital Radio

This form of radio is a lot more compressed than normal radio. Information isn’t sent in waves it is sent in forms of data. These forms of data are compiled into 1’s and 0’s and are read by the radio and put out a higher quality sound.

This higher quality sound means that there are still two different signals coming in but the difference is that one cancels out the information that is not needed so that the final outcome is just pure sound and not interference.

With digital radio, you can forget having to remember the station frequency you are looking for because you will just need to scroll through the station names because the digital radio has already found the stations you can listen to.

Digital Radio Screen displaying Station Name

There is also scrolling text that the station regularly updates telling you the name of the song and artist playing, the website to check out for competitions and many other things like who is coming on the show later on in the day.

Some newer models of Digital radio might even allow you to pause and rewind digital radio. How this is done is pretty simple. When you have pressed pause, the radio is saving what is broadcasting now so that you can listen to it when you press play.

PURE also have their own portable Digital radios that can do more than you think. They may just look like simple portable radios but in actual fact is that you can connect it to you Wi-Fi at home. This will enable the radio to do nothing else but look for radio stations that are all around the world.

DAB+

This is an upgraded version of digital radio that is in some other countries which has a better compression system. Since the UK was the first to change to DAB radio, they won’t be changing to DAB+ anytime soon. Other countries had waited and stayed on analogue radio which is why they could change to DAB+ radio.

One of the differences between DAB and DAB+ radio is that there is no interference. There is also double the sound quality which is why normal DAB systems cannot receive it.

Normal DAB radios cannot adapt to DAB+ radio and this would mean that everyone would have to get new radio systems in order to adapt to DAB+. This is too costly for the UK and would mean that many radio systems would be wasted. Everyone has already got used to using DAB radio; it would be a bit too much to ask for if the radio industry wanted to change again.