Mr Grumpy hasn’t been Grumpy for some time now. On Saturday night Mr & Mrs Grumpy entertained a lovely lady for the evening (well actually she entertained us, because she is extremely funny – she had us in stitches all evening. You know who you are Annie!) and in the course of discussion she persuaded Mr Grumpy that there is a perfect subject to get grumpy about.

Digital Radio.

The government, in its infinite wisdom decided that we should all go DAB and that analogue radio could be switched off, by around 2017. The new government have softened that target, but it is still their aim sooner or later.

Now that doesn’t sound like a bad plan – it is working quite well for TV, and having just experienced Freeview HD, I reckon the benefits of the changeover are beginning to be obvious.

But in fact it is a very stupid plan, for a number of reasons . Firstly, 5 years ago Mr Grumpy had a new car, and it had a DAB radio in it. And it was really very nice! Most of the time the quality was very good, and the range of available stations was attractive, especially to an ageing 70s rocker like Mr G, who enjoyed greatly both Planet Rock and The Arrow. And then 3 years later (being a contract hire car) Mr G had to change the car, and found that there were absolutely no affordable options with factory fitted DAB. One of the cars could have DAB fitted as an optional extra, but at a large and unacceptable premium.

So this means that the percentage of cars on British roads with DAB is very small indeed. And given the lifetime of the average car and the lack of drive towards fitting DAB the percentage is going to be small by 2017 too.

Mr G examined post-delivery DAB adaptors, given that factory fitted radios are rarely a standard size and can’t be replaced like-for-like. There was only one realistic choice on the market, and fitting it was a kludge to say the least! And it sits on the dashboard in full view of any passing thieving scroat!

But for all those limitations, DAB is a good thing isn’t it? Well no, apparently not! An embarrassingly large number of stations have appeared on DAB and then left over the years because advertising revenues couldn’t support them and there was little prospect that they would in future. So we are left with a fairly uninspiring list of stations that are copies of national and regional FM stations.

But the quality is amazing, isn’t it?? Well, unfortunately no! Because the Powers that Be want to squeeze as many stations as possibly into the available medium they have made some fairly tight decisions about how much bandwidth to allow them. And this is beginning to mean that some stations (notably BBC Radio 3, Classic FM etc) are actually technically better on FM than DAB. What a way to get people to change!

Still – DAB is the future, so it must be good. No it isn’t! Actually the future is DAB+, and it is entirely incompatible with DAB radios. And in fact DAB or DAB+ can’t be economically delivered to about 10% of the country, so we will need DRM and/or DRM+ (basically digital over Medium wave) which is different again!

Would you believe that there are estimated to be 150 million FM radios in use, and probably 5 million DAB radios. So that is 155 million radios ALL of which will become obsolete quite soon now. And the replacement is not up and running and no radios are available.

Impressed? Mr Grumpy thinks the England football team would do a better job, and plans to get his news from Paul the Octopus in future.