digital radio

[gregcropper]

why is there a delay on digital radio versus analogue. And how do they transmit the time beeps on time?

[gen2]

There are two reasons for the delay:

1) As the signal is transmitted across the country (or further) the signal will pass through a number of repeaters that will each introduce a small delay.

2) A further delay is caused by the time taken for the processor in the receiver to decode the digital signal and convert to it to analogue.

The delay for digital TV can be even greater as the compression algorithm used does not transmit the complete picture for every frame, but only the differences from the previous one. It therefore takes a while for enough data to be received before the whole frame can be displayed.

The BBC stopped transmitting the time pips some while ago for this very reason.