UK's first 'DIY DAB' multiplex goes live in Brighton Britain’s first home-brewed open source-based DAB multiplex has gone live this morning. Six services will be operating on the new mux in Brighton for nine months. It’s less than three years since Small Scale DAB – which was conceived in a shed and generates its signal using low cost Raspberry Pi computers – was first tested, …
Brighton has a beach, although not a sandy one. Other than that, I can't see the tie-in. Lazy choice.
Yes, you have to use a huge picture as a part of your new publishing template, but this isn't the Daily Mail website, we're all tech enough to find pictures of slim pretty white girls with few clothes if we need tittilation. This is the kind of thing that keeps women feeling uncomfortable in IT, and I think we're better than that?
"A picture of girls on a beach makes women uncomfortable?"
Nothing like questioning half of the situation and ignoring the important bit.
A picture of girls on a beach in an IT website story that has nothing to do with girls or beaches makes women uncomfortable.
Why? Because it suggests that the story is here only for the titillation of the readers. Which suggest that the targeted readers are male. Which tells female readers; "This website is not for you. It's for the IT lads."
And the wet blanket award for today goes to you, Mr Roq D. Kasba.
Seeing a smiling happy face, especially if it is an attractive female, makes (most) people feel happy; this is scientifically proven, and deeply ingrained in our psyche. There's nothing sexist about that, it probably comes from the childhood mummy-recognition part of our brains. It takes a particular type of person to see a picture of a group of happy people enjoying a sunny day at the beach, and find a reason to be all negative about it. It's Friday, the weekend is imminent, so lighten up.
I'm all for pictures of people smiling, etc. No issue with that. By extension of this logic though, why not illustrate a story about Pluto with photos of two guys kissing? Just as relevant to the story. It's the uneven application of the irrelevant that is wearing, though, and lets the side down.
@RDK ....Right on sister!
Having said that, bit of a leap from a couple of scantily dressed girls on a beach to proposing images showing homosexual displays of affection as the alternate? Surely the logical juxtaposition would be a couple of ripped lads kicking the surf in their speedos?
Just sayin…..
"pictures of slim pretty white girls with few clothes if we need tittilation"
Would it have been ok if they'd been black or asian then? You seem to have an issue of pictures of women on the seaside (it was a story in Brighton, the only thing associated in most peoples minds with Brighton is the seaside) whereas I think plenty of people would have found it quite pleasent. Sorry if thats political incorrect and not right on. I guess you'll just have to weep into your organic peace beens about the tragedy of it all. Now go knit some yoghurt, it might help slide that rod out of your backside.
@boltar: re: 'okay if black or asian' you've missed a secondary point in OP's post, I suspect the OP was alluding to the fact that they are invariably white girls.
Secondly, re: issue with pictures of girls on a beach. No, I suspect OP has an issue with inappropriate use of pictures of girls on a beach.
"Those swimwear Boffins in your piccy definitely aren't in Brighton! There are no goose-bumps for a start."
And all of them are smiling, which is how you can really tell it's not Brighton beach, because at least four of them would have trodden in a dog turd by the time that picture was taken...
Well there are cheap DVB-t modulators as hardware devices, they cost around 400 Euros. They have a video input typically VGA, CVBS or HDMI and the output should be broadcast ready, after a bit of filtering you need to do anyhow.
Then here's of course GNU Radio and more professional solutions.
It's now all possible within reasonable budgets, even if you don't like to put cable ties around Raspberry PIes.
Here are some projects from the Chaos Communications Camp this year in Germany.
https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Projects:DVB-T
https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Projects:DAB%2B_Digital_Radio
It is worth a read of the report, in particular section 6.7 is damning of the quality and consistency of the DAB radios out there.
I am not surprised really, and having read parts of the DVB-S2 standard you can see why it is a high risk to implement and of these sort of systems in silicon for space projects etc - the standard is so damn long (from memory about 1000 pages in the various pdf documents) and complex that the chances of someone implementing all of it correctly is quite small.
Really, when you compare DAB in practice to FM and factor in receiver availability, battery life, coverage, etc, there is not a good case for DAB. The suggestion of killing it off and leaving FM and IP radio is a worth considering.
If you can transmit from a RaspberryPi then i would have thought you could make a receiver with one which would be low cost (compared with the retro shit everywhere) that could stream happily round the home - assuming it doesnt just gurgle like all the dabs I've tried.
Low cost DAB is here - so give it two weeks and a new format will pop up to cream the listeners.
Thank Cthulthu for the internet so we dont have to buy this shit.
"The ergonomics of Digital Radio, unlike Digital TV is inherently unfixable."
Well you could easily build a decent to use digital radio. Just replace the "demo firmware from the module company" with something decent. Add a numeric keypad so you can punch in frequencies or channel numbers just like on any half decent FM-radio. Also replace that 2 line display with something moderately tolerable and don't try to scroll on those.
I would have found it hard to take the "we looked into software-based DAB, it won't work" people seriously. Due to the "fun" US cellular market, several companies have ended up pursuing software defined radio systems with 100s of channels of capacity for the last 10 or 15 years, so I would assume 6 unidirectional channels would be no sweat.
What fun? Most cell cos in the US picked *either* the CDMA or GSM upgrade path, but a few cellcos ended up running both.
Western Wireless for example bought up a mash of companies in the western deserts throughout the late 1990s, running all available standards (at the time, analog (AMPS), TDMA, CDMA, and GSM). WW ended up being nominally a CDMA carrier, but instead of removing TDMA and GSM and installing CDMA on sites that weren't already CDMA, they installed all 4 systems on almost all sites! They decided 1) They wanted to let everyone keep their existing phone. 2) They had the ONLY coverage in a lot of these markets, so why not get roaming revenue from every carrier? Alltel bought them, then Verizon Wireless bought Alltel... a lot of these sites now have CDMA, EVDO (3G), GSM, UMTS (but no HSPA), and LTE. Needless to say they pursued (and started using) SDR at least 10 years ago, they didn't want to have to run 5 racks of almost-totally-seperate hardware.
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