(edit title) Digital Radio Broadcasts Never caught on in Sweden (or anywhere except UK) Options

[dgd]

Hello - does anyone know (someone surely) if there are any DAB (digital radio broadcasts) in Sweden.
I'm used to receiving hundreds of digital radio stations in England, but when asking in Sweden or searching the internet this seems to be one area where Sweden isn't quite up to date. I suspect that there is some complex technological or legal reason which means that DAB is not broadcast in Sweden.
Any assistance/comments, gratefull received.

[Yorkshireman]

Sourced from Wiki:

Swedish radio is currently offering 7 channels DAB-transmissions and cover 35-40% of the population, mainly in the larger cities.

DAB transmissions in Sweden began with tests as early as 1995, and were later expanded to cover larger parts of the Swedish population.

On 14 December 2005 the Swedish Culture minister, Leif Pagrotsky, announced that the Swedish government was freezing investment in DAB, citing that DAB was very expensive to transmit and that cheaper digital radio systems should be investigated, and digital radio should also be transmitted via the Internet and via the digital terrestrial TV system. The government decision were quickly criticised by Swedish broadcasters.

On 21 December 2006, the Swedish Government renewed Swedish Radio's license to transmit DAB broadcasts in Sweden. The license also allows Swedish Radio to test technologies as DAB version 2 and DMB.DAB transmissions continue with coverage of Stockholm and other cities.

During June 2008 the Swedish workgroups within Radio- och TV-verket published their report "Framtidens Radio", recommending DAB+ as the best platform for digital radio. The report where endorsed by both corporate and governmental broadcasters.

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[Willy]

To the contrary, Sweden had DAB broadcasts very early on. But there was not much demand, receiver sales were microscopic, costs couldn't be justified and the network was eventually turned off again. Right now it seems that the only broadcasts are in Stockholm and Gävle.

http://www.teracom.se/Produkter/Digitalradio/

The UK is actually one of few places where it has caught on, so it is a bit silly to assume that everyone else is behind the times just because of that.

Probably, the only way to assure public interest in digital radio is to mandate a turn-off date for analog FM broadcasts.

[dgd]

Thanks - yes 'behind the times' may not be the exact expression I was looking for. FM receivers are still outselling digital receivers in the UK. Looks like Sweden is moving to DAB+ (a beefed up version of the DAB that is broadcast in the UK).

Nice to have a digital radio though in my opinion - sound quality (near or in cities) is superior and other features such as station ID and programme information are quite useful.

[Willy]

Yes, DAB+ is definitely an improvement with the HE-AAC encoding. One of the arguments against the original DAB system was that with the – by now rather outdated – compression algorithm (MPEG1 layer 2 I think...) sound quality was arguably worse than with FM.