CQHQ

More than just a Ham radio blog.
CQHQ
is an informative, cynical and sometimes humorous look at what is happening in the world of amateur radio.

Tuesday, 2 February 2010

Gordon Brown's retirement fund

According to the Daily Mail online the elected idiots we call a government have come up with yet another brilliant plan and it is wait for it... another scrappage scheme. In an effort to get everyone to switch to digital radio they want to give you a 20% trade in on the cost of your new digital radio. There are thought to be 100 million analogue radios in the UK and around half of them are in regular use. The present target is to switch off the FM transmitters in 2015, which may seem a bit soon when a massive backlash against the plans is expected. My opinions have been well documented in this blog before so I will try not to repeat myself instead here are some of the quotes from angry listeners...

Certainly there is greater choice, but the quality is lamentable.

The sound quality is so inferior as to be totally unacceptable when in digital mode.

Digital Radio doesnt work in our area due to the hills, bought one tried it for a week and took it back.

I'm supposed to junk perfectly good audio equipment and buy it all over again? How is that ecologically friendly?

We don't need it, we don't want it, why is it being forced on us? Because somebody is going to make a mint that's why! It's just Gordon Brown's retirement fund.

1 comment:

  1. Yet another example of our incompetent government. You might think there were greater priorities to think about at the moment anyway.

    It wasn't so long ago I was reading an article somewhere that claimed DAB was virtually dead. Many broadcasters pulled out of using it because the costs weren't worth the number of listeners using it. As you say, nobody wants it. It is a solution looking for a problem.

    I bought a DAB radio a couple of years ago and we still can't get Classic FM on it, which is the only station we listen to regularly. Though now we get all our radio over the internet.

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