World's first DRM+ broadcasts go on-air in Germany

The world's first ever DRM+ broadcastes have gone on-air in the FM band in Germany, and it is reported that the DRM+ system will be standardised next year. It is also reported that there will be trials of the US-based HD Radio system in the FM band in Germany as well, although I've seen another German report which said that the HD Radio system failed to meet the interference criteria for transmitting in the FM band -- i.e. HD Radio stations would interfere too much with existing FM stations -- so whether HD Radio stands a chance of being used I don't know, but I would doubt it. The European receiver manufacturers certainly wouldn't be keen on supporting yet another standard if they can help it due to the additional licensing costs that would be incurred, and the fact that HD Radio is a proprietary system wouldn't help matters. Also, HD Radio only has a very limited amount of support -- just the odd radio station in a few countries -- so I can't personally see how it stands a chance of building up the momentum required to compete against DAB+, as that has a lot of support from around the world.

DRM

I've been asked a few times recently to provide an update on what's happening with DRM, but it's turned into just another terrestrial digital radio farce, so I've lost all interest in it, to be perfectly honest. All of the DRM trials up to now have consisted of radio stations using bit rate levels of around 20 kbps, and the audio quality is even worse than on DAB -- which is saying something. The DRM trials have mostly consisted of transmissions in 10 kHz-wide channels, so that legitimately constrains the bit rate levels to around 20 kbps, but the outrageous thing is that there's been DRM trials on the 26 MHz band which have used 20 kHz-wide channels, so the bit rates of the stations should double, but the British disease of using as low bit rates as possible has kicked in and TWO stations have shared the bit rates between them, so they're still only using 20 kbps and the audio quality is unbelievably bad.