With digital stated to be as the future of radio, most stations of All India Radio are aiming to rope in Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) transmitters to improve its transmission and content quality. After successfully testing the signals as part of a live in-car demo, the DRM signals will now be tested in AIR Bengaluru to monitor the quality of broadcast.

AIR Bengaluru will be testing DRM signals for the entire week commencing Monday, using a 500 kW transmitter for their Vividh Bharati Service on 9870 kHz.

The schedule for broadcast will be in three segments; from 5:55-10:05am, 2:30-5:30pm and 6:15-11:10pm. The transmission will be monitored by National Insitute of Amateur Radio Hyderabad assistant director Jose Jacob, who will monitor the broadcast and send reports to AIR on the same.

Speaking with Radioandmusic.com, Jacob said, “AIR which is now in AM mode has got a new transmitter to go digital. The testing is going to commence from next week and since I have been involved in testing and monitoring procedures before, I will be sending out reports of the quality to AIR. Being a new transmitter, there may be some hiccups during broadcast, so our focus will remain on that.”

As reported by Radioandmusic.com earlier, All India Radio has around 100 per cent coverage across the country on medium wave broadcasting and they use short wave for external transmissions. But due to industrialization, the transmission quality is getting deteriorated. There are a lot of noise issues and listeners are not happy with the analogue as far as the domestic coverage is concerned, while on the short wave the signal is not available frequently.

There are different systems on digital and AIR has adopted the system known as DRM, which is being used for external broadcast service by most of the country.

Moreover with AIR Bengaluru having 90 per cent of external broadcast services, the DRM transmitters will be a move to the positive side for them. The short wave DRM transmitter has already been implemented in Delhi, and Bengaluru seems to be next on the cards.

“Although there are a lot of benefits of DRM transmitters, the receiver is a problem as we are yet to fully understand it. There are a lot of things that still need to be looked into, but I am sure that once this system starts to get in place, the transmitter and receiver problems will be sorted out too,” he added.

The DRM transmitters are stated to bring with it many advantages including access to more content choice with improved sound quality, along with access to digital features like text news, sports results and automatic disaster warning in multiple languages amongst others.



 

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