No you absolutely cannot increase the capacity tenfold. DAB takes ten times the bandwidth (1536kHz vs 150kHz for an FM channel, albeit without gaps).
There is no conspiracy, it is done completely openly, while almost nobody really wants it.
There is no conspiracy, it is done completely openly, while almost nobody really wants it.
DAB and DAB+ are robust against multipath interference which means that you can have much more frequency reuse.
Wikipedia has a calculation for how much spectrum is used by one channel, comparing a 192 kbit digital stream to a typical analog FM station. The digital stream is about 3 times more efficient.
Of course you can try arguing that a 192kbit stream is worse than FM quality. But really it isn’t.
Yes it’s different, it’s annoying you need a new radio and sure, in 1% of all cases you get no reception where with analog FM you’d get some barely recognizable noise. But 99% of the time you get crystal clear digital audio, exactly as transmitted, of pretty high quality.
Anyway, whether you want it or not, it’s the future.
It ends up forgotten once the last patents expire and there is no value to salvage anymore. It's nothing but sunk cost fallacy that should have been stopped back in the 90s before money and careeers were wasted on it.