Apples and oranges - RA.  The UK and other EU countries use VHF frequency bands, around the equivalent of VHF Ch. 7 (around  174-220 mhz).  Propagation is good at those frequencies, penetrating high-rise buildings, condos, etc.  The propagation of VHF, is so good, you don't need too many transmission sites in a smallish country.  Canada is geographically one of the largest land masses in the world.  Canada chose a former military frequency band....around 1.452 Ghz in a microwave band.  I had the receivers, and they wouldn't work well with clear sight of the CN Tower.   I recall being at one senior CHUM (radio) executive's home (in the beaches in clear sight of the CN tower).  He had never tried DAB on a portable receiver.  I'll recall his comment: "If our future is this, then we are really (F...expletive)!"  I tried my DAB radio in low rise buildings, including those clad with metallic siding.  No signal!!!  The receiver was primitive with channel numbers that were incomprehensible.  There were no "listings" of which stations were on which of the channels.
But wait there's more.  The propaganda that is published in Europe about DAB is just that.  I spend a lot of time in Europe and you'd be hard-pressed in Italy to find a single taxi equipped with DAB, let alone a passenger vehicle.   No one I've ever met (outside of the UK) has a DAB portable or table radio.  None of the store chains, or even small audio shops that I have visited, sell DAB.  There are electronics store chains in Italy and throughout the EU that dwarf Best Buy, thesource.ca etc.  No DAB consumer radios anywhere!!!.  Try and find a DAB capable radio in a store in Rome, Bologna, Paris, etc.  No such luck.

So the UK and perhaps one or two of the nordic countries are the exception. Some car companies, Honda and GM were prepared to go full tilt on DAB but they were under-mined by Canadian broadcasters who never placed transmitters in high-traffic corridors.   At least one (Canadian) company offered to build out the transmitting network at low or no cost, in S. Ontario, if it could retain data rights, but CHUM and others declined the offer.  I know because I was "in the room".

GM, Honda and other car-makers were really blind-sided and dropped DAB in favour of satellite radio, which was inexpensive to integrate into their radios, since they were manufacturing for a market of 300 million + consumers south of the border.    The fact that they also earned "royalties" from the satellite radio companies, for sign-ups, also assisted the satradio roll-out.  No such plan by Canadian terrestrial broadcasters to incentivize the car-makers to include DAB as "standard" products.  Moreover, the satradio "chipset" by 2007 had dropped to under $2 per vehicle.  Yeh, that's right.  I was in the room with the engineers and I have reason to believe the chipset declined even lower, after 2007.  That's why satradio is in so many autos as "standard" equipment.  A low cost chipset and an antenna that was integrated with other equipment.

The EU DAB radios, (to the extent they are sold in UK, and nordic countries) are made primarily by manufacturers who had no presence in the consumer electronics market in Canada.  You simply cannot manufacture a one-of-a-kind (i.e. 1.452 GHZ) product, off shore, for a consumer market of less than 30 million people.  The Canadian broadcasters never, and I repeat never had a credible deployment plan for getting any radios into the market place.    Bottom line, UK broadcasters worked with manufacturers, and their  200 mhz DAB system, with great propagation could be deployed easily across the relatively small island.

We a) were never ahead of our time and b) did not give up too soon.  There was never any credible "plan" for DAB here, despite the DAB "promos".

BTW, one of the only DAB radios that I ever saw  in a Canadian radio execs office, was a car radio that had been built into a wooden console in his office.  It had been purchased at Kromer Radio, one of only two outlets in Canada that sold DAB radios....all of them car radios. Radioshack (now the source.ca) was the only other vendor - in that case, the horrible hand-held unit.  BTW the handheld unit would not work with rechargeable AA batteries.   An alkaline AA battery lasted under 4 hours in the unit - if that.   You needed an external power supply which of course made it less than "portable'.  Bah!!!!

Last edited by tvguy (December 23, 2019 1:49 pm)

Tim, what was "all that money" that CHUM sank into DAB?  To my knowledge, there was only a single employee ever involved to a significant extent in DAB - Duff Roman.  But most of his salary was directed towards CCD/Factor and some regulatory lobbying work and some other work in the "radio division".   The annual "fee" for CN Tower's Master Antenna corporation was somewhere between $50k and $70 k per year (for use of a carrier)   My recollection because I have the last billing from Master Antenna in my files, before a client cancelled the lease, was under $70K per annum.   CHUM spent no money on receiver development.  All of that cost was shouldered in Canada by General Motors. GM spent in the 7-figure range for their own R&D.   I don't recall if CHUM ever built out DAB at their Mt. Seymour antenna site.  They may have built in Ottawa.   My sense is that they did not.   
None of the other (salaried) CHUM execs was involved in DAB to my knowledge.  Senior CHUM execs did not have DAB radios.  Perhaps Jimmy Waters had one in his car.  The DAB "ads" were non-paid "promos" of unsold inventory.  Nothing more.  I can tell you from personal experience that that senior CHUM radio management "brain trust" never "bought" into DAB, at least in the period 1993-2001.  I don't think it was ever discussed, in terms of an actual roll-out plan during those years.  DAB was basically running unattended on the CN tower.  I doubt that any other hard cash was spent.   The "real" cost would have been to build out repeaters in Toronto and the Toronto-Barrie Hwy corridor and the 401 corridor from Windsor to the Ontario border.  That engineering work was never done (to my knowledge) and never expensed (to my knowledge).  CHUM probably spent about $100K (or less) for their ill-fated DAB Pay Audio application that many of us called "CHUMEROO", which was heard in 2005. Most of the money was spent on Peter Miller's salary who was in-house regulatory at CHUM TV and hearing prep costs.  That service was licensed and never saw the light of day.  They spent a few bucks on CHUMEROO Pay Audio engineering briefs, some hotel room costs in Ottawa (a hearing they attended anyway to oppose satellite radio) so the hearing money was going to be spent one way or another.  They didn't even have a working CHUMEROO prototype radio at the CRTC hearing.  It was, to be charitable, "a work in progress".  It was designed from the get-go to provide the CRTC with a Canadian-made licensing scenario, to thwart the licensing of satradio.

I don't think they ever committed any money to CHUMEROO radio development.  A guy from the UK was their "expert" at the hearing and he had trouble answering any questions regarding the possibility of a consumer product.  What was clear at that hearing was that they had not approached a single auto-maker about integration of the CHUMEROO radio into Canadian cars.

Finally and we can debate this for a long time, the Cdn DAB was never spectrum efficient.  Yes, you could put a few audio subcarriers into a channel, but the amount of spectrum L-Band DAB would have required in Toronto was enormous given the frequency coordination issues in other neighbouring communities.   Though most Big Yellow Board readers don't like satellite radio audio, the fact is that hundreds of audio channels fit within 4.5 MHz of spectrum.   (XM uses 4.5 for each of their E and W satellites and 4.5 MHz for the terrestrial repeaters (where deployed).  Under 13 MHz of spectrum is utilized for each of Sirius and XM, for their multiple satellites and terrestrial repeaters, and that 4.5 MHz for repeaters for each company is re-used city-to-city.  I also do not think that Rogers or Bell mobility - which is run separately from broadcasting ever contemplated adding DAB to their tower sites.  Each division (run entirely separate from their broadcast divisions) is highly motivated to load up their towers, with paying mobile customers, who share infrastructure and antennas,  and it is a difficult and costly proposition to negotiate with them to add (large) broadcast antennas or other infrastructure at their sites. I have first hand knowledge of that.  So it would not have been "easy"  or without great expense for any broadcaster to roll out DAB premised on an inexpensive or easy roll out using Bell or Rogers or Telus' towers.

Thanks guys. I'm finding all of this stuff fascinating and something I never knew about from behind the scenes.

I only met Duff Roman once a number of years ago. I remember making a reference to DAB and asking him what happened. His answer was kind of a vague, almost mumbling, "Yeah, that thing..." and then he tailed off. 

Obviously not one of his finest moments and it was clear he didn't want to talk about it, so I never brought it up again.  

This ad aired on AM 640 back in 1995: