News

WorldDAB has signed up to be a principal sponsor of the three-day conference and will provide a group of international speakers to share their experiences with instituting DAB digital radio services. Topics during the conference will include the integration of digital radio in connected cars and smart devices, and hybrid radio. WorldDAB will also host a workshop to help broadcasters and regulators plan the digitisation of radio.

...some observers point out that television allocation could be moved to VHF Band III if more UHF spectrum is allocated to mobile operators. Were this to happen, it would be a disaster for digital radio. Spectrum allocated to DAB services after RRC-06 is already used in many European and Asian countries for DAB services.

France Maghreb 2 urges the CSA to publish a timetable for DAB+, to permit the launch of new services by end 2016. This will mean coverage of more than 20% of the French population, thereby obliging DAB+ to be included in all radio receivers.

In a statement from the organization, WorldDAB President Patrick Hannon said that with the DAB/DAB+ standard (which presently uses Band III) expanding in various countries, it would be impractical to move free-to-air DTT services out of bands IV and V into band III (due to the growing demands for this spectrum from mobile services).

BBC Radio 5 live, in reaction to the Paris Attacks, moved all planned sports coverage on Saturday to 5 live Sports Extra on Saturday. The move enabled the station to continue rolling news coverage of the incidents of Friday night in France, advising listeners to listen to ‘Sports Extra’ for regular programmes.

NXP Semiconductor N.V., global technology leader in secure connected cars and car infotainment solutions, received the “Best Partner” award from Panasonic Corporation. NXP’s multi-standard hardware platform eliminates the need for its customers to spend valuable resources to develop distinct radio architectures for DAB in Europe.

Signal Xmas, Pulse Xmas and The Wave Xmas radio stations are returning for 2015 on local DAB multiplexes.

DAB digital radio is becoming firmly established as the core future platform for radio. Retaining Band III for radio is of critical importance both to listeners and to the long term health of the radio industry. Read the press release in full.

The DAB radio stations are plentiful and have a reasonably good sound quality. The unit is small and sleek and looks good. It has two USB outputs at the back. The maximum total power supplied between them is 2.1A, which is more than any other DAB radio we know of.

Connects2 have just launched a new ground-breaking product onto the market called “SmartDAB”. The product is targeted for all vehicles and is controlled via Bluetooth to your smartphone. It has been designed so that it is ‘self-fit’ in less than 1 minute straight out of the box.