Do you remember DAB radio? The Psion WaveFinder gets a teardown

With digital music sweeping nearly every listening medium in the 1990s, it's surprising that there's one area where analog still holds up well. We are not talking here about a resurgence of vinyl but of FM radio, which has managed to effectively resist its digital competition for a few decades now. Twenty years ago, however, its days seemed numbered and, in Europe, the first generation of DAB digital radios seemed ready to conquer the airwaves. Among them was a real oddity and one of Psion's last major consumer products, the WaveFinder USB DAB radio receiver. [Backofficeshow] has one and took it apart for our entertainment. He describes it as the first consumer SDR product which may be a little hyperbolic, but nonetheless, it's an interesting look at what would become one of the backwaters of computing.

Inside the 90s-style translucent blue case is a single PCB with lots of shielding, on top of which sits a USB controller and a bunch of DSP chips. The radio demodulation was done in hardware, but the signal demodulation was apparently done on the host PC. At the time, its £299 price tag made it the affordable end of DAB reception, and The Register opined that its ability to download broadcast broadband data made it a revolutionary, but unfortunately neither consumers nor broadcasters agreed and it was heavily discounted before making an ignominious release. DAB itself would struggle to live up to expectations, and a multiplex-based licensing model for broadcasters, making it unattractive to local stations, means that even now FM is teeming with stations. As listening shifts inexorably to streaming, its time may be over, Ireland may have gone so far as to abandon DAB altogether.

If you want to know more about DAB, we looked at the technology a while ago.

Through [RTL-SDR]