Guy King wrote:
The message
from "Dave Plowman (News)" contains these words:

Digital transmissions are on the same frequency throughout the country.
Unlike analogue where this would cause problems with cancellation etc it's
actually a benefit because in weak signal areas the two add.

And for all the power the BBC and Castlewotnot will be saving when the
cut the ERP of the transmitters, the rest of us will be paying in
mains/battery electricty to run the DAB receivers which use a lot more
juice than analogue radios.

Actually - DAB is quite inefficent spectrally, and in terms of
transmitter power.
However.
The new chipset from the maker of 80% or so of chipsets in radios will
use much less power at the users end, and also support AAC, and the
other things needed to support a better technologically DAB radio - one
which can fit _much_ more per multiplex into each frequency band, as
well as needing less power to transmit.

At some point in the future - probably well before analog switchoff,
we'll switch over to this DAB standard - at that time DAB radio
chipsets'll be a couple of quid.

Hopefully, quality will be quite good, as bitrate is much less
expensive.