DRM+ to replace DAB in Germany?

22nd May 2006

Quoting from the May issue of Radio World (page 6):

"DRM Favored
A study commissioned by the German state regulating authorities concluded it would be feasible to introduce in-band, on-channel (IBOC) digital radio in the VHF-band using MPEG-4 encoding and the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) standard. The authorities felt that a quick and simple conversion to digital would only be possible by using the VHF band, as other authorized bands do not have the capacity to reflect the current radio landscape.
Eureka 147, the digital standard so far favored, will be hard to implement on the VHF band because it is necessary to clear 1.75 MHz blocks. The study found that a DRM-based VHF-transmission could be received reliably on portable radios indoors - not always the case with DAB at the moment - as well
as in vehicles traveling at speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour.
Meanwhile, Niedersächsische Landesmedienanstalt (NLM), the regulator for Lower Saxony, announced a pilot project to research the possibility of using DRM for local radio on shortwave.
The project, conducted by the Universität Hannover and The Starwaves company, will run for three years".

What they're saying is that they would like to switch to digital radio by adding DRM+ stations in the FM band in between existing FM stations (that's what they refer to as 'in-band on-channel' (IBOC)).

If Germany does decide to go ahead with using DRM+ then that would be the final nail in the coffin for the current version of the DAB system, DABv1, and it would obviously be a major boost for the DRM Consortium.

One of the main advantages of DRM+ is that a 50 kHz channel can carry a radio station at almost CD-quality because it uses the AAC/AAC+ audio codec, and because DRM+ only requires low transmission powers along with the fact that there are large gaps of bandwidth in between existing FM stations (this is true for the UK as well -- think of the fact that Radio 1/2/3/4 use around 2 MHz of spectrum each across the country) then you can add plenty of new stations without interfering with existing FM stations.

For more information, see this BBC presentation on how DRM+ is envisaged to be launched in the FM band (2.3 MB).

Ofcom said last year that it would be consulting on the use of DRM/DRM+ this year some time, not least because around 90 analogue stations cannot be carried on DAB or they can't afford the carriage charges, so hopefully we will see DRM+ launched in the FM band here as well.