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  • Digital Radio in France
  • jon1973
    Free Member

    Off to Northern France in June for a bit of camping. If I take our Digital radio, will it pick up UK radio station. We’ll be just over the other side on the Channel. I’m assuming it will pick up all the French digital channels as well?

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Are there digital radio stations in France?

    jon1973
    Free Member

    dunno, I assumed there would be some.

    I think my radio can pick up FM as well.

    PePPeR
    Full Member

    We took our portable digital radio to France a few years ago and couldn’t find any stations on it and gave up.

    Not sure if its still the case though.

    allthegear
    Free Member

    There are some in France but they opted for a more recent Digital standard, DAB+

    Some DAB radios may pick it up – the main difference is using MP3 to encode the audio as opposed to MP2.

    (so it might not sound as terrible as the UK transmissions)

    Rachel

    jon1973
    Free Member

    Thanks Rachel…interesting that.

    I have a Pure Evoke 1s (so it wasn’t a cheap one!). Just googled the spec…

    Radio: Digital and FM. UK products receive DAB/FM; non-UK products receive DAB/DAB+/DMB-Radio/FM.

    Why make the UK version DAB only?

    I have to say though, I’m pretty pleased with my BAD radio, no real issue with the quality.

    CountZero
    Full Member

    Why make the UK version DAB only?

    I think you’ll find that more recent UK DAB radios are DAB/DAB+, early ones were DAB only, because Europe hadn’t arrived at an agreed DAB spec, and when they did, went for a different version to what the UK was using. My Kenwood KDC-DAB41U is DAB/DAB+. I’ve just discovered a firmware update for my Kenwood, which I’ve downloaded into Dropbox, so I’ll do the update sometime this week, it’s supposed to improve DAB performance or something.

    oneoneoneone
    Free Member

    im having the same dilemma but my car has a DAB radio built in (after market) just had a quick read but unsure if it will work. I also didnt want to pay the £25 for the aerial adaptor for a Volvo so I currently dont have RDS. Suppose i could fit one but i would need to fit a aerial too. any ideas?

    jon1973
    Free Member

    I think you’ll find that more recent UK DAB radios are DAB/DAB+, early ones were DAB only

    I only got mine at Christmas so I would have expected to cover all the different standards, but the spec (which I dug up on line) seems to indicated that they build one for the UK market (DAB) and another for non-UK (DAB/DAB+/DAB-).

    Is the DAB standard just a firmware thing? Not that it matters to me that much, but it would be useful every so often to use it abroad.

    Edit …

    Just answered my own question

    http://www.which.co.uk/technology/audio/guides/dab-explained/

    If DAB was dropped in favour of DAB+, radios that can’t be upgraded to receive the DAB+ signal would become obsolete. However, many newer DAB radios contain a multi-standard chip, so they are DAB+ compatible. Other models with a USB port or wi-fi connectivity may be upgradable in the future.

    allthegear
    Free Member

    It is likely that, as dab+ is not required in UK, manufacturers want to avoid paying licences for things like mp3 so disable dab+ on UK radios.

    jon1973
    Free Member

    yes, must be something like that. From the article it would seem that they are probably the same radio, but with some software block on the non-UK standard.

    Does this mean I have to ‘jailbreak’ my radio 😆

    loughor
    Free Member

    Jon, will u be using a smartphone ? App called radio cloud is great, all uk radio. Does suck the battery tho

Viewing 12 posts - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

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