Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Hmmmmm... > > When you move to an infrastructure that can deliver massive amounts > of bits to fixed, mobile and portable receivers, at some point you > realize that separate services for radio, TV and data are redundant... Actually, I think their point is that the function of FM radio would be replaced by DAB, which uses a different slice of spectrum. The piece did not say that DAB spectrum would go to anything else. Here's the quote: "The potential phasing out of FM radio has been pushed to the front burner of Ofcom's agenda **following the rapid growth in digital radio**." Ditto with AM radio, since DAB also replaces that. They are not saying that radio and TV would use the same spectrum. They are instead making the point that DAB obsoletes AM and FM radio, and DAB uses a separate right of way, which makes AM and FM spectrum available to other uses. However, I read some Ibiquity blurb that claimed that other countries were also looking at IBOC, because it uses the same spectrum as AM and FM radio. Don't know if this is the case (that other countries are interested). But it comes out to the same thing. Either assign L band spectrum to radio, or keep radio where it is and use L band for something else. As to your point about common use of infrastructure, to me, it's already the case. Radio uses VHF just like TV, but far less of it, is expected to be very robust, and can afford to be much less spectrum-efficient (and thereby more robust) than TV. High quality TV needs lots of bandwidth, and therefore is typically required to be more efficient in how it uses spectrum than radio, which also makes it less robust. TV to handheld devices is something else again, more like radio. So this just means that different modulation schemes are used in essentially the same VHF and UHF parts of the RF spectrum, to meet the different requirements. So this is the common infrastructure. No particular reason why radio couldn't use more of the TV spectrum, or vice versa, except that TV has little to gain if it could share the FM radio spectrum. The FM spectrum would provide only three extra 6 MHz channels to TV. On the other hand, radio has something to lose if all the TV spectrum were available to it, in terms of simple and effective antenna designs. It's more difficult to make antennas that work efficiently over a broad range of frequencies. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.