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Using DAB+ in Europe

I don't know if technically it was the same DAB+ system you're discussing here. But when I rented a car in Spain's Canary Islands (off the coast of Africa) in 2019, the radio worked similar to what I've experienced in the UK. You can dial in a particular station, and see a read-out of its name etc. But as you drive around curvy roads hugging the picturesque steep slopes of the island, the radio would quickly re-tune to whatever other frequencies and transmitter sites that particular radio station used, whenever the signal strength came in clearer - even if only for a minute.

The tuner automatically switched frequencies several times on a short stretch of the highway on the northeast coast of La Palma, picking up frequencies from an adjacent island that would briefly be a better match. Very little delay between sites, too.

Brilliant system, and certainly helps avoid the distraction of manually having to retune while driving on narrow roads with lots of blind curves on a steep mountainside above the Atlantic ocean!

Only issue I had with the option of engaging DAB in Britain was finding that the signals indeed did not carry as far as their analog counterparts. Couldn't pick up the BBC services a little east of Dundee, Scotland on the main motorway from Aberdeen until I got quite close to the city. It left a digital dead zone not far from a population center. That car, a Skoda, did have an easy way to switch between DAB and standard FM, however.

Sure would have been a superior system to the garble and signal fighting we have now listening in the car. Which is the only place a lot of people even bother trying to listen to radio anymore. But that would have required an FCC that made some rules, that congress backed up, and that the NAB understood it was to everyone's advantage to not fight them at every turn, in their attempt to game such a system to their own apparent advantage.
 
I don't know if technically it was the same DAB+ system you're discussing here. But when I rented a car in Spain's Canary Islands (off the coast of Africa) in 2019, the radio worked similar to what I've experienced in the UK. You can dial in a particular station, and see a read-out of its name etc. But as you drive around curvy roads hugging the picturesque steep slopes of the island, the radio would quickly re-tune to whatever other frequencies and transmitter sites that particular radio station used, whenever the signal strength came in clearer - even if only for a minute.
This sounds more like FM with RDS AF (especially because I don't think DAB was in the Canary Islands in 2019, it's quite recent). DAB doesn't use 'frequencies' in any sort of user-facing way, and all transmitters in a DAB network are on one frequency, so you wouldn't have noticed it moving from one transmitter to another in the same way as you do on FM. It doesn't get used in the U.S. as much (if at all) because most stations are programmed locally (although it seems like it would be advantageous for someone like K-LOVE to explore putting it in place). It works by having each transmitter send out a list of other frequencies used by that station, and when the signal is lost, the receiver quickly scans through them all until it finds a strong one.

Your experience in Scotland must have been some time ago - I've driven the road from Aberdeen to Dundee fairly recently and had no problem with radio reception, other than losing the Aberdeen stations in the expected place and gaining the Dundee ones! For national BBC radio, that wouldn't have been an issue. A lot of car radios (mine included) have the function to switch to the same station on FM when the DAB signal is lost.
 


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