Digital radios - battery power?

[Chrissylizzie]

Hi everyone

I recently bought a digital radio for use in the 'van and after about 3 weeks is just stopped working. We took it back and it was replaced and we put a full set of new batteries in the replacement. After a similar time this one has also done the same thing and the battery symbol is lit up. It is working fine with the mains adaptor, so the question is do digital radios take much more battery power and is this time scale on batteries alone normal?

 

[TheTurk]

Not an answer, but if it is any of any comfort our Sony digital seems to eat batteries so we use it on mains as much as possible.

Ian

 

[MikeJE]

Same with our digital radio. One set of batteries lasted just over one day.

 

[Oldfogey]

Digital radios and TV's are both notoriously power hungry. Green they are not.

The most economical bet is to take an analogue radio as well, and use that wherever possible if you are off mains.

 

[rob_jax]

Hi

DAB radio uses about 10x or 20x the power of a conventional FM radio. Why? Because the conversion of the DAB signal into audio needs a (small dedicated) computer to perform the conversion - and that eats power...

Likewise Freeview TV (or Satellite) compared to a simple analogue TV.

So - either buy some rechargeable batteries - or a mains adapter - or a battery adapter and run the DAB radio from the caravan battery.

We have a Pure Evoke 3 - it's great, the sound quality on speech is excellent and more than adequate on music - but I'd only ever use it on mains or a larger, rechargeable battery pack... And the Evoke 3 is one of the new "low power" DAB / FM radios...

Robert

 

[Chrissylizzie]

Thanks you for your replies - at least I understand now. Are we also saying that Digital TV therefore uses more electricity than analogue too?