Broadcast TV has their shit together, at least in the US. You can setup MythTV to fetch TV schedules without Internet access. It can grab the schedules from the broadcast signals. You can also subscribe to Internet services that give TV scheduling far into the future, but that’s a non-gratis frill. The in-band scheduling info goes a few days out which is good enough.
Radio listeners are screwed on this. FM and DAB+ both have no scheduling info. And worse, there is no Internet service that produces an aggregated radio schedule. You must find websites hosted by each radio station individually and navigate in their shitty user interfaces. Sometimes the programs are too vague to be useful.
Apparently it was completely overlooked in the drafting of the DAB specs. In principle, a clever broadcaster could embed schedule info into the album art using stegonography, or stego on the audio content, but then no appliances would decode such hacks.
I have no idea if satellite radio is on the ball. I think satellite radio is a US-specific option as DAB is nearly non-existent in the US. Vice-versa in Europe.
As someone who has pulled the plug on the residential Internet, I cling to the radio more than most. If DAB would were to include metadata and if there were a DAB-capable PC card, it would be great to have a MythTV-like setup to record radio programs. As it stands, we are driven to do a lot of channel surfing, which is worse on DAB than on FM because of the 2½ second delay with each channel change to decode a chunk of data (so surfing 10 channels has 25 seconds of silent timewaste).
I’m sure radio broadcasters would get more market share if DARs (digital audio recorders) were a thing. That sort of utility might even enable more people to be willing to experiment with unplugging from the Internet.
I think Sirius XM does have schedule info in car units, kinda like how you can only see album art with HD Radio in a car, even if it’s only analog for some reason. I’ve never heard Sirius XM in anything other than cars here.
Indeed road travel is the focus for Sirius XM and I think the biggest marketshare is from truck drivers. But I have seen Sirius home receivers, though perhaps rare. I know a former subscriber who has an antenna for a home unit, which mounts outside the house and came with a really long cable.
I never saw the scheduling mechanism, so I appreciate your insight. Glad to hear the schedule info is sent in-band… and I suppose finding a home unit that exploits that would be another matter.
Hey there, it is possible, the BBC broadcast a programme guide for their stations on DAB. Not many radios can view it though - I think my car radio will.
Thanks for pointing that out. Keyword for searching is “SPI”. I found the specs for it here:
https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102800_102899/102818/03.01.01_60/ts_102818v030101p.pdf
Radio station logos is part of SPI, and according to the following presentation, device manufacturers don’t want the burdon of supporting it:
They think the cost and effort doesn’t justify the benefit. WTF. I have a DAB radio w/color display that shows the slideshow of album art, but I guess the makers didn’t want the effort of showing scheduling info.
I guess I need to find a radio kit of some kind to build a DAB radio and grab the SPI info.
Not sure if it’s quite what you’re after, but the Radio Times still exists and has the full radio schedule on it: https://www.radiotimes.com/radio/radio-listings/
It’s probably not going to help with setting up automatic recordings, but if you want the schedule for all the radio channels in one place, it does that bit okay.
Thanks! It’s probably useful for people in the UK. I get BBC though, so I’ll have to see if my BBC World News is aligned with that. But in the end it seems I really need to get the schedules from the DAB SPI signal, and thus I need to look into what kind of hardware can do that.
