It’s not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won’t be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.
I’d argue it is still less reliable since the channels are multiplexed. This means a failure of single transmitter takes down all of those channels at once. Secondly, digital radio often uses SFN to save bandwidth and power. This however means that a single misconfigured/malfunctioning transmitter can cause destructive interference in a wider area.
This is happening in my area for a few months now. A new low power DAB+ transmitter was added into the network. I was able to get a poor but still usable signal before, while now the signal is strong, there’s too much interference for the error correction to compensate. Someone on a forum from this area has mentioned the same happening to him after the addition of this transmitter, when trying to tune DAB+ in his car.
But sure, if the technology works, it can be better.
It’s not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won’t be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.
I’d argue it is still less reliable since the channels are multiplexed. This means a failure of single transmitter takes down all of those channels at once. Secondly, digital radio often uses SFN to save bandwidth and power. This however means that a single misconfigured/malfunctioning transmitter can cause destructive interference in a wider area.
This is happening in my area for a few months now. A new low power DAB+ transmitter was added into the network. I was able to get a poor but still usable signal before, while now the signal is strong, there’s too much interference for the error correction to compensate. Someone on a forum from this area has mentioned the same happening to him after the addition of this transmitter, when trying to tune DAB+ in his car.
But sure, if the technology works, it can be better.