Going digital

I decided to go shopping at the weekend and enter the world of digital radio and television. I've been suitably impressed by both so far.

DAB radio offers around 50 stations covering a wide variety of formats and musical genres. Strangely though, or perhaps not so strange; of the stations programmed into the radio's presets, many are the same I'd listed to on analogue radio - BBC Radio 4, 5 Live and the like. It's fantastic to be finally able to receive the World Service in high-fidelity, and 6 Music is sounding good so far too. As for the commercial offerings; well I've never been a great fan of commercial radio, although many of the digital stations seem to be fairly light on advertising for the time being, which is fine by me. Planet Rock plays a good few quality tracks you'd not hear elsewhere, and I'm working my way through many of the other stations, sampling a few minutes of programming from each. There's something for most moods; it's just a matter of trying to remember everything that's available to listen to!

Freeview was a less expensive secondary purchase from the weekend. Remarkably easy to set up, and no signal problems at all, considering I'm just using an internal area sitting on the dining table. Saying that, there's a direct line-of-sight to Crystal Palace from many places around here, so it's perhaps not terribly surprising, but it's good to see that the sound 1920s construction of the building doesn't block all signals. (Wireless internet is not so lucky.)

There aren't a great number of stations of Freeview, since many of the higher profile ones such as E4 and Discovery are subscription based. Nevertheless, for news-junkies such as myself there are three news channels and a UK History channel which shows a good number of documentaries. Even the Sky Travel channel shows some decent fare, such as vintage Whicker's World. Fantastic! BBC Four has also been looking good, and seems to be the place where World Cinema has now relocated. I remember in the past there being a decent amount of films on Channel 4 and BBC2, but this seems to have dried up in recent years. There was a great French film on over the weekend though, and it looks as if my fortunes are looking up.