It's been a year since digital radio Mondiale was supposed to spark a revolution. Shiny new radios would come fitted with ... hD RaDio: A proprietary digital radio.
Is the continent’s digital AM and shortwave system stillborn or still to be born? It’s been a year since Digital Radio Mondiale was supposed to spark a revolution. Shiny new radios would come fitted with DRM technology to receive a new, higherquality digital signal for shortwave and AM broadcasting. That in turn would pave the way for all-digital airwaves—first in Europe, and then in Asia, Latin America, and North America.
STOCKING STUFFER: A Morphy Richards DRM radio awaits the holiday buying season.
It never happened. The first DRM receivers were supposed to be on the market in time for last December’s holiday shopping [see photo, “Stocking Stuffer]. But because of unspecified technical glitches—or maybe just cold feet on the part of manufacturers, who worried about whether the technology would truly take off—stores still lack radios. Now, with this year’s holiday season fast approaching, DRM backers are trying to drum up enthusiasm for the technology. DRM got its start a decade ago in the R&D labs of the United Kingdom’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle and Deutsche Telekom, and the United States’ Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Voice of America. The idea was to develop a nonproprietary digital technology for terrestrial broadcasting at frequencies of 30 megahertz and below, to supplement the satellite transmission technologies already in place [see sidebar, “Roll Over, Marconi”]. Although analog shortwave signals can travel many thousands of miles, reception is easily disrupted and tends to be spotty. Analog AM fidelity is generally better than that of shortwave, but broadcast reach is much smaller, except at night, when signals bounce off the ionosphere. Among the advantages of digital broadcasting are its consistency of signal quality and its efficiency. A 50-kilowatt transmitter 20 IEEE Spectrum | October 2006 | NA
using DRM can reach Warsaw from London, while an analog transmitter with the same reach would have to be 200 kW, observes the BBC’s John Sykes, a DRM pioneer. Not surprisingly, dozens of major international broadcasters are backing DRM, which also lets them get out of analog shortwave broadcasting without leaving its bandwidth fallow. “Radio will be digital. Full stop,” says Peter Senger, a longtime R&D man at Deutsche Welle and leader of the international Digital Radio Mondiale consortium. But for DRM to take hold, listeners will have to go out and buy new radios, and so far that’s put a full stop to DRM. Why would people throw out perfectly good radios and plunk down the equivalent of US $200 to buy supposedly better ones, considering they can already get all the content they want with their existing sets? Sony Corp. and Blaupunkt, both part of the DRM consortium, show no signs of putting a DRM-compatible radio on the market, and they declined to offer comments for this story. Evidently, for now they’d rather leave the field to more obscure manufacturers, such as Taiwan’s Sangean Electronics and Britain’s Roberts and Morphy Richards. No company has yet offered consumers a DRM car radio. Still, “pilot production runs are happening as we speak,” says Dave Hawkins, a business development strategist at RadioScape, in London, which makes the decoding module for DRM receivers. Hawkins is confident that radios will be available for Europe’s Christmas holiday market this year. There are tense days ahead, though. DRM boosters express confidence that when consumers hear it, they’ll like it. They say that even though DRM’s sound quality will not be like hearing true hi-fi, listeners will appreciate having shortwave and AM stations coming in at near-FM quality. Even more important, perhaps, listeners will be able to get many more stations than before, and if they purchase a well-equipped radio, they will have user-friendly ways of identifying and selecting programs of interest. But Sangean, Roberts, and Morphy Richards don’t have the marketing clout of a Sony, and rarely does a new technology sell itself. —Michael Dumiak
Roll Over, Marconi: New Digital Technologies Occupy Radio Space HD Radio: A proprietary digital radio system, HD is the governmentapproved industry standard in the United States for local-area broadcast. It is promoted by iBiquity Digital Corp., in Columbia, Md., which was originally backed by Lucent Technologies and broadcasters CBS and Gannett Co. HD uses in-band on-channel (IBOC) transmission, which means digital signals use sidebands and can be piggybacked on existing analog broadcasts, so stations can stick with existing frequency allocations and simulcast analog and digital programming if they wish. Broadcasters using the HD system get a cheap upgrade to the transmitter but pay license fees to iBiquity. Nine car brands, including BMW, offer HD Radio as a factory-installed option. Digital Radio Mondiale: DRM is an openstandard digital radio system for broadcasting on AM and shortwave bands that requires a DRM-compatible receiver. It is backed by a large consortium of international broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, and Radio France, as well as manufacturers such as Blaupunkt, Bosch, Panasonic, Sony, and Texas Instruments. But the radios are not available yet and will cost between US $150 and $300 when they are. Satellite: Listeners pay a roughly $12-per-month subscription fee, and commercial-free shows featuring hosts such as Howard Stern and Bob Dylan are beamed from satellites to home or car receivers. XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio operate in North America; WorldSpace Satellite Radio serves Europe, Africa, and Asia. A home for uncensored, cutting-edge, and specialized content, XM and Sirius have 4 million subscribers between them, and lately there’s been talk of a merger. Digital Audio Broadcasting: Promoted by the World DAB Forum, DAB is broadcasting on FM bands using the Eureka 147 standard, adopted by Europe, Canada, and Asia. To date, some 1.3 million DAB radios have been sold in the United Kingdom at about $100 and up. —M.D.
www.spectrum.ieee.org
Morphy richards
Europe Dithers Over Digital Radio
