If i look at Panda/s with and without DAB Radio, i see no difference between the Head Units.

Is DAB Integrated in the Head Unit or is there a separated DAB unit installed. ??

Does anybody know. ??

The only visual difference is the roof antenna.

If it has DAB, it will be integrated in the head unit, as just another band. Does need a different antenna, which usually has a powered amplifier in the base.

I have an aftermarket DAB unit in my Panda. Spent most of a day fitting the antenna. Lots of trim out, so rear seats out first to release the rear side trims, drop the roof lining, antenna in, extra antenna cable for the DAB signal, plus the power feed.

I pointedly didn’t spec DAB when I ordered my Panda last year. Cheeky chancers wanted a hundred quid extra for it. When the car was delivered it had DAB. I think they all do now. I guess mine was built on the cutover.

I'd not entertain a DAB radio unless I had cloth ears. Some stations have a ridiculously low bit rate are in Mono and have a top end that is worse than AM.
Then in Scotland there are so many black spots. Go out of the range of Kirk o' Shotts that carry the DAB multiplexes for central Scotland and your stuck. The A9 for example north of Perth is grim for DAB, FM fades out with only Radio Scotland on 810Khz receivable, so if its switched off like Ulster on 1341 your stuck.

murphyv310 said:

I'd not entertain a DAB radio unless I had cloth ears. Some stations have a ridiculously low bit rate are in Mono and have a top end that is worse than AM.
Then in Scotland there are so many black spots. Go out of the range of Kirk o' Shotts that carry the DAB multiplexes for central Scotland and your stuck. The A9 for example north of Perth is grim for DAB, FM fades out with only Radio Scotland on 810Khz receivable, so if its switched off like Ulster on 1341 your stuck.

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Not just Scotland here in Yorkshire I've never been in a car that get consistent dab reciption

DAB’s finished. The state broadcaster really backed the wrong horse there.

Seamaster said:

DAB’s finished. The state broadcaster really backed the wrong horse there.

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It's also switched off in the Republic of Ireland.
The processing required for DAB radios is far more power hungry than AM and FM, hardly green is it.

chris3234 said:

Not just Scotland here in Yorkshire I've never been in a car that get consistent dab reciption

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I feel justified in not stumping up the £100 for DAB. I do have it at home since last year but it has a mind of its own and sometimes takes an age to gather up its skirts. The quality difference is audible but by no means massive to standard AM. I think its just being pushed as its technically easier to do from the broadcaster end, and probably cheaper for them too. Why ever do we need this stuff??? Now I really an grumpy

I MEAN GRUMPY!

As an aside.
I have a DAB+/FM portable radio my late wife took to work, it runs for about 5 to 6 hours on FM depending on how loud its run on DAB it runs between 1 to 1.5 hours again dependant on volume, this shows how much processing is required on DAB. My 70s Roberts lasts nearly a year on a set of D cells on FM. Progress..... No way.

The Panda Nut said:

I feel justified in not stumping up the £100 for DAB. I do have it at home since last year but it has a mind of its own and sometimes takes an age to gather up its skirts. The quality difference is audible but by no means massive to standard AM. I think its just being pushed as its technically easier to do from the broadcaster end, and probably cheaper for them too. Why ever do we need this stuff??? Now I really an grumpy

I MEAN GRUMPY!

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DAB was pushed by government for monetary reasons.
For each frequency, DAB can transmit lots of stations, each being licenced, bringing revenue to government.
On AM or FM, each frequency carries one station.
Same with TV.

I think DAB also released more for mobile phones, so again, more revenue.

Digital TV is a pain. With analogue TV, I tuned the TV when I bought it, and it was fine until it broke, many years later.
With digital TV, they keep moving the channels arouond, so we are forced to retune regularly. If you miss a retune, some favourite program fails to record.

Digital TV was supposed to bring 'more choice', but reality shows we jsut get lots of repeats, because programs cost lots to make. With advertising revenue spread across more channels, fewer people see each advert, so advertisers pay less. So we get longer ad breaks, but still the stations get less revenue, so fewer new shows get made.
Then research shows that we watch less TV now. When we had 4/5 channels, we would generally just choose the best of them to watch. Now we have 100, we scan them all, and switch off instead. So advertisers pay even less for a smaller audience.

Did someone say progress?

When I worked for a large company, change was constant, much for its own sake, rather than improvement. Often new ways of working would be proposed, and an older colleague would point out that it had been tried years ago, but we'd change anyway, and find the process failed, in a similar way to the previous time. This prompted me to use one, or both of these statements:
Different is not the same as better.
Progress, like chaos, is just going around in circles. The difference being the time taken to return to a previously tried method. The two seem to be merging.
I'm sure they were pleased to see me go, although, the division I worked in has now ceased to exist. I win.

Only thing worth listening to on DAB is radio 4EX and that is slowly
loosing content worth tuning in for.

murphyv310 said:

I'd not entertain a DAB radio unless I had cloth ears. Some stations have a ridiculously low bit rate are in Mono and have a top end that is worse than AM.
Then in Scotland there are so many black spots. Go out of the range of Kirk o' Shotts that carry the DAB multiplexes for central Scotland and your stuck. The A9 for example north of Perth is grim for DAB, FM fades out with only Radio Scotland on 810Khz receivable, so if its switched off like Ulster on 1341 your stuck.

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DAB radio not needed anyway. With the Radioplayer app on a smartphone connected to the car radio aux jack you can listen to just about any radio station on the planet. Digital or Analogue.

KPat said:

DAB radio not needed anyway. With the Radioplayer app on a smartphone connected to the car radio aux jack you can listen to just about any radio station on the planet. Digital or Analogue.

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I have a hunch the BBC Sounds App (which is basically internet radio alongside a ‘player’ for prerecorded content) is being promoted heavily as a precursor to turning off DAB.

Podcasts are doing for radio what catchup and streaming services have done for TV.

Seamaster said:

Podcasts are doing for radio what catchup and streaming services have done for TV.

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I'll look at this later, in my own time...

A follow-up to this: we drove from Hertfordshire to the North Norfolk coast a few days back (to our holiday let) listening to BBC 6 Music the while way, using the BBC Sounds app and with the phone Bluetoothed to the UConnect ‘radio’. Not a crackle, no drop-outs, and great stereo sound the whole way. This seems better than DAB would ever manage?

Yes, with a DAB radio app you can listen to digital radio like that.
Even without a DAB radio in de car.

Hi.
DAB stands for Digital Audio Broadcasting which is transmitted in the VHF spectrum on frequencies that were previously used for ITV 405 line TV in band three.
Essentially this is line of sight from the transmitter to receiver. Digital is quite robust from multipath effects but drop out is sudden unlike analogue FM where noise increases. This also happens when you get too far from the transmitter and signal levels drop, again on FM the reception gets noisy and DAB it drops in and out. Using a phone is not proper DAB, it's more like streaming via 3G, 4G or 5G and uses up your Data so if you only have a low allowance you can be charged, plus of course in areas of no mobile signal again no music!!

In fairness to DAB, I don’t think it’s any worse than FM in many parts of rural Scotland. There are whole swathes of the country between Glasgow and Inverness where FM vanishes.

I get surprisingly good DAB down here in the arse-end of the South Rhins, presumably because I have line of sight over the Irish Sea to a transmitter in Northern Ireland.

murphyv310 said:

Using a phone is not proper DAB, it's more like streaming via 3G, 4G or 5G and uses up your Data so if you only have a low allowance you can be charged, plus of course in areas of no mobile signal again no music!!

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Correct. But I have huge amount of data included in my (very cheap!) phone contract, and seemed to get good enough 4G signal all the way from Hertfordshire to the coast at Brancaster, even in some pretty remote parts of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. The only 'weak' bit is in the town where i live, where we can build Mars rovers, but where O2 seem to struggle to deliver 4G reception. We get very unreliable FM on the Norfolk coast too.