Week Seventeen – Wherein Digital Radio Gets Sexy

And the record for Monstrahusive-Yet-Still-Work-To-Do test goes to the Parrot Asteroid. What a cunning item! I have had a chew on digital whatnottery for car audio in the past and have even witnessed a USB head unit that was able to get at the edges of a 75GB file of music on a tiny HDD I nicknamed the Genghis file, as it conquered all before it. It was unrealistic to expect that unit to deal with such massive amounts, but the Asteroid can eat a 32GB SDHC card internally as well as having a plughole that could take a 128GB iPod and yet still room for another USB input which could be another stick or an HDD of the order of a Terabyte, as long as its music is in is FAT32 format. Which is VAST! The biggest HDDs will take an age to synch the first time (I was told maybe 20 minutes for a monster) but will do it in seconds flat on subsequent bootings. I seem to recall my Genghis file owner telling me stuff about the tech behind that and how simple it was – but that it was a computer-style process rather than a headunit-designed-to-read-a-stick one. It was all about reading everything or just the directories
So, I was chuffed to finally press ‘˜publish’ on such an iconic and important breakthrough product.
I went off to town last week to do a little spot on Radio 2 and thence to see the folks at Digital Radio UK to pitch to have some of their attention shine upon Talk Audio. I have managed to get TA hooked in whereas it was CAR Magazine from Bauer that sent me to a recent ‘˜Drive to Digital’ conference at Broadcasting House (hub of worldwide BBC operations) recently. Thus, I am going to the BT Tower tomorrow for a very important event in radio, for London in particular and a harbinger of the near future for everywhere else in the UK.
Because of where I live in north London, I recall ‘˜The Post Office Tower’ before it was called the GPO tower and dreamed of eating in the rotating restaurant up at the top. I could see it in the superb view from our hilltop local park, called The Pimple. Alas it was not to be, as they stopped it rotating forever ago. But I will take my passport for photo ID as it is a sensitive spot with the comms flowing through it
And while we are there, they will switch on London’s digital radio ‘˜boots’. (slang term for illegally powerful RF power amplifier used to enable a car-to-car system to skip a signal around the planet in the CB era which dates me!) The broadcast power of digital radio to London will hike one entire order of magnitude from twenty thousand watts to two hundred thousand watts. I think Londoners will feel the difference as a whole slew of cool radio is now louder on the dial, or new to your area and will reach for miles. Check your station availability at digital radio .com
And remember, just like AC-3 being renamed as ‘˜Dolby Digital’ for their proprietary surround sound codec, we are no longer to use the technical term DAB, as we don’t call telly DVB-T any more. We just call it digital TV.
I’m very excited, as I have followed the new radio technology from the very start and was at the BBC council chamber press event about the 61% coverage of population from day one. We have been in the nineties for some time by population coverage now but that is all going to get shinier and more potent as the huge power hikes roll out over the UK with London bathed in digital radio goodness tomorrow.
I’m well up for the summer of digital radio and will be checking out the Beach Volleyball in particular.
Digital radio : If you love radio, let it live.
I’ll go get on then
Adam Rayner On Line Editor