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If you were asked to guess what last year’s most zeitgeisty radio station was, you probably wouldn’t have put your money on Fix Radio, a station dedicated entirely to tradespeople, where leading segments include the likes of The Heating and Plumbing Show. But, as it happens, Fix Radio was last year’s fastest growing national radio station. With over 460,000 weekly listeners, the station grew an astonishing 480 per cent last year after acquiring its national licence in May 2022. Radiocentre CEO Matt Payton added that developments in tech and the growth of DAB in recent years have given commercial radio a boost, with stations empowered to “offer even more choice – building audiences around the interests, genres and passions of listeners”. And indeed, there have been many other success stories for more targeted offerings: Boom Radio (for baby boomers), Lyca Radio (for British Asians) and a whole array of nostalgia-driven decade stations (Absolute 80s, Capital Dance, KISSstory etc).

Easy FM is Almere's local radio station. The radio station was one of the first in the Netherlands to broadcast as a local radio station via the DAB+ digital radio network in the Almere region with an experimental licence. Now that local DAB+ has outgrown the experimental stage, Easy FM will continue on the Almere allotment with a new broadcasting licence valid until mid-2030. Besides Easy FM, Sunrise FM, Soulradio and Dance Radio Amsterdam have also been granted broadcasting licences for allotment 26 (Almere) by regulator Rijksinspectie Digitale Infrastructuur (RDI). The broadcasts in the Almere/Flevoland region can be received via DAB+ channel 10C.

Peterborough Community Radio is to launch on DAB from next Monday, 9th September. The station has been broadcasting to the city on FM since 2017. PCRFM Breakfast Show presenter, Kev Lawrence says: “It’s a huge boost for the station. Now we’re on DAB around the city, and I really hope a lot more people can find us. Especially as cars put digital listening at the forefront.”

30 per cent of Dutch households now own a radio equipped with DAB+. This is according to figures from the CBS Central Bureau of Statistics. Whereas last year 28 per cent of Dutch households owned a radio equipped with digital airwave reception, by 2024 this percentage has grown to 30 per cent. This involves a radio equipped with DAB+ in the home and/or car. DAB+ awareness also seems to be on the rise. In 2022, 53 per cent of Dutch people knew the term DAB+, while this percentage has risen to 56 per cent this year. All figures can be found on the CBS website.

As part of a global initiative with the DAB+ industry, Frontier has been working on defining and developing a new feature that will provide widespread benefits for digital radio listeners and their communities. Automatic Safety Alert (ASA) builds on top of the DAB+ standard and enables safety alerts to be automatically broadcast to listeners via audio, text and images, allowing for key information to be reliably and rapidly delivered to large numbers of people. ASA will be supported on Frontier's Kino 4 Pro chip and Siena Pro module with a new SDK version later this year. The chip and module, which powers over 25 million DAB radios, have passed the latest Digital Tick technology test plan and will be the first to pass the ASA certification in Q4 2024. First products are expected to go into mass production in early 2025.

At IFA, the British chip manufacturer Frontier Smart Technologies is presenting a prototype of the new generation of DAB+ digital radios equipped with the ‘Automatic Safety Alert ASA’ standard to trade visitors for the first time. The ASA warning system protects the population in emergencies and crises and reliably transmits safety messages digitally on the radio without an internet connection. Listeners benefit from a system that keeps them informed even when mobile phone or internet connections are interrupted. ASA works automatically in the background, can be customised regionally for the place of residence and offers high availability thanks to the DAB+ radio transmission network.

In another of our short interviews with WorldDAB members exhibiting at IBC2024, Hermann Zensen, Sales Manager Europe, Nautel / DIGIDIA says they will be showing their DIGIDIA FlexiDAB multiplexer with EDI and RF output. Nautel manufactures complete DAB head end systems under the DIGIDIA brand.

Bayerischer Rundfunk will broadcast its programmes BAYERN 1, Bayern 2, BAYERN 3 and BR-Klassik exclusively via DAB+ from the Hohenpeißenberg transmitter site in future. The programmes can still be received via DAB+ or via the FM frequencies of the Wendelstein or Grünten transmitters. BR will provide information about the change with a message loop on the affected frequencies. The background to this is the decommissioning of the FM transmitter on Hohenpeißenberg for economic reasons and to achieve greater energy efficiency in broadcasting. The entire region is also very well covered by DAB+. DAB+ guarantees a significantly greater variety of programmes without additional costs via antenna, free reception everywhere - even without the internet - and the best noise-free radio quality.

At 08:00 on 3 September, a multiplex called DAB MUX Praha, a network for digital radios launched by the Prague company Fiera Touch of media entrepreneur Pavel Hajek, started broadcasting from the Prague-Děvín location. It is broadcasting on channel 5C, i.e. Regional Network 13, one of four that Fiera Touch won in the recent auction of frequencies for digital radio in the DAB+ system. The multiplex is soon to reach 10 kW of power after initial mapping of reception quality. The potential reach is realistically between 1.5 and 2 million listeners, according to Hajek. The first station that DAB Mux Prague is distributing is Radio Energic, based in Mladá Boleslav. "We are negotiating with other radios," Pavel Hájek told reporters today.

On Tuesday 3 September, the new radio multiplex of the company Fiera Touch started to operate in the capital. Listeners can tune in on channel 5C and at the moment it contains only one station - Radio Energic, which is returning to the DAB+ platform after a short break, previously it was distributed by the operator Teleko digital. The Děvín transmitter is currently operating at 5 kW, and is due to be increased to a final 10 kW in the near future. Energic plans to add another station to its portfolio next spring, aimed at listeners aged 30 to 59. The Energic Group's portfolio could ultimately include up to six genre projects.