From Analogue to Digital Radio
In Italy, the first broadcasting activities date back to the very first radio transmissions featuring the historical inaugural announcement of the then called “Unione Radiofonica Italiana” on the 6th of October 1924.
For over 80 years now, the Radio has been providing information and entertainment to Italian citizens on the national territory and throughout the world.
As with television, during the last ten years also radio broadcasting technologies have been renewing their “vital lymph” through digitalisation.
Differently from DTT, in the case of the radio, digital broadcasts will be delivered alongside Analogue transmissions without requiring for these to be previously switched off.
We are currently living in a time in which, both in Europe and worldwide, different options coexist, some of which are extremely promising and technically interesting, and can be used on their own or combined with others.
The trial launched in January 2009 by Caterpillar, a programme of Radio 2, is the RAI Group’s first experience with Digital Radio, in which Rai Way is proud to collaborate and offer both technical and innovative support.
ACCESS THE DIGITAL RADIO WEB SIMULATOR
The radio’s rebirth in digital format opens new horizons both in terms of meeting new requirements, such as a better reception and the availability of band frequencies, and also of offering new multimedia services along with new modes of fruition.
DAB+/DMB, DRM, DVB-H are the acronyms of the multimedia standards that are now capable of high-performance digital broadcasting of radio programmes that, for a host of reasons, offer a wide range of technological applications and market options.
While for the time being DVB-H is being applied in Italy by mobile telecom operators for broadcasting mobile TV services, DAB, DAB+, DMB and DRM are being used experimentally for radio transmissions.
The DAB standard in particular, which was widely used in England already in the ‘90s, is now thought to be outdated from many points of view but revitalised thanks to its evolution into DAB+: a standard capable of maximising efficiency while providing equal digital sound quality.
The contingent reasons for which the DAB technology failed to take off in Italy during its first years of application in 1995 were essentially the following: its spectrum efficiency was limited, the band frequencies assigned to the service were also used by other technologies or did not prove to be convenient and, lastly, the cost of receivers always put a brake on their mass distribution.
Mention should also be made of the fact that when the T-DAB was launched over 10 years ago, the market was not yet receptive of the concept of “multimedia” and consequently the introduction of a standard mainly dedicated to audio transmissions did not appear to be convenient.
However, a few years later, the T-DMB (Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) system, which was initially developed in South Korea, revealed the advantage of using more modern signal compression technologies and of extending the DAB system also to video and image broadcasting.
In fact, the T-DMB system, just like the DAB and DAB+, is based on the Eureka 147 system and can be implemented and used for mobile digital broadcasting of audio and video transmissions without requiring an excessive modification of the existing T-DAB infrastructure.
In addition to assuring RAI’s wide range of Analogue programming, Rai Way’s radio broadcasting network can now guarantee signal delivery to 40% of the population thanks to its DAB/DAB+/DMB digital broadcasting service which is currently being expanded beyond the numerous metropolitan areas currently covered, like Rome, Milan, Turin, Bologna, Venice, Naples and Palermo.
Digital Radio: network coverage and stations in operation
Digital Radio: Rai Way’s digital radio current trails
Digital Glossary
- DAB - Digital Audio Broadcasting: DAB and its spin-offs are based on the European Eureka 147 standard released in 1990. Present DAB services use the MP2 (MPEG1-Layer II) audio encoding system provided in the audio section of the MPEG-2 standard. The DAB standard allows for a better quality signal and its more capillary and uniform distribution over the territory.
- DAB+: is a spin-off of the DAB system. It uses the HE-AAC.v2 audio encoding system provided in the audio section of the MPEG-4 standard that, with an equal level of quality perception, makes it possible to double and even triple the number of programmes transmitted in a single bouquet, while eventually also enabling the inclusion of additional radio broadcasting services.
- DMB - Digital Multimedia Broadcasting: it is a spin-off of the DAB system that was developed in South Korea in 2005. The essential upgrading consists in its capacity to broadcast images and/or video in sync with the audio transmission. For the video part, the encoding system used is the AVC/H.264 standard provided in the video section of the MPEG-4. In Europe, for the audio component, it uses the HE-AAC.v2 audio encoding system provided in the audio section of the MPEG-4 standard. DMB can be of two types: T-DMB (terrestrial) or S-DMB (via satellite).
- DRM - Digital Radio Mondiale: it is an open standard for digital radio broadcasting. It was developed in order to improve the audio quality of broadcasts on Amplitude Modulation bandwidth (medium and short wave frequencies), which have the advantage of enabling reception at great distances but which are characterized by a low quality audio signal. A spin-off of DRM is the DRM+, which is currently being developed with the aim of delivering services on band frequencies presently used for FM.
- DVB-H - Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld: it is a standard developed in order to deliver services to handheld devices. The DVB-H technology is based on the DVB-T system used for digital terrestrial television with some additional features aimed at meeting the specific requirements of battery-powered handheld devices (dedicated to mobile TV).
- DVB-SH - Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite Handheld: it is a standard enabling a dual modality, satellite and terrestrial, broadcasting system. In practice, satellite transmissions that can be directly received by handheld devices are also re-broadcast by a terrestrial network in order to increase the reach in built-up areas. It is based on the DVB-H standard and was mainly developed for mobile TV services.
- HD - Hybrid Digital: it is a standard that was developed for the American market; the development of DAB in the United States was partly hindered by the military use made of this bandwidth, which was normally allocated for DAB. The HD standard uses IBOC, or In-Band- On Channel, technology to enable the transmission on existing bandwidths of a signal incorporating both Analogue and digital services; it can also enable the transmission of textual data like traffic and weather conditions and song titles.
- SDR - Satellite Digital Radio: was developed for digital radio and is transmitted on a satellite/terrestrial mixed network architecture similar to the one for DVB-SH.
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