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Deutsche Welle

How long have you been involved with DRM?

When the Iron Curtain fell at the beginning of the 90s, the armed forces began releasing their technologies for civilian purposes. A digital standard was developed from three different suggestions. Deutsche Welle, along with other international broadcasters, approached this issue at a meeting in Paris around that time, but it took quite a while before the consortium was founded.

The name DRM has existed since 1988; it was only shortly before the consortium of the same name formed that we found that out. It had to have a connection to digital radio and reflect the internationality of the project, so we combined English and French and came up with Digital Radio Mondiale, in short DRM.

Did you see the new standard's potential right there and then?

Of course. At that time, I was a member of the steering committee for World DAB, responsible for the satellite group. We accompanied and analyzed the German “Mediastar” project and saw that the digital technology was capable of rendering good results when used for broadcasting from orbit.

It was just a question of logic to find out if it couldn't also be used for the classical short wave, i.e. the reflection by the ionosphere. We gathered experts from research facilities, the industry and radio stations and examined the analog system and determined that the application of digital technology would work. Today we know: it works perfectly!

What does this new technology mean for increasing reach and thus for possible markets?

For the listeners, numbering a few hundred million people all over the world, listening to us and other international stations, it means a quantum leap in terms of reception quality. DRM almost reaches FM quality, i.e. interference-free reception. For the broadcasters, it means lower costs, as the costs for transmitter power supply are reduced considerably.

In the meantime, commercial broadcasters like RTL from Luxembourg have started to engage in DRM, as selling advertising airtime on DRM programs is seen as a good way to earn money. Should RTL be successful, this will surely become a worldwide procedure, as short wave can cover large areas over long distances and does not depend on national regulations.

We think that this system will also play an important role for local radio with its high demand for frequencies. With DRM, frequencies can be used that formerly were not meant for this range of broadcasting. A 26 MHz frequency, one small 100W-transmitter and an antenna that only broadcasts ground waves can transmit local radio in stereo quality covering an area of 100-200 km in diameter.

The term "quantum leap" is often used with regard to quality. Do you think that this is appropriate?

Many people, who listen to a DRM broadcast for the first time and compare digital to analog, have exactly this impression. The change from medium wave to FM in the 50s was - in today's words - a "CD leap". With digital broadcasts on medium, long and short wave, we cannot quite achieve this, but what we do achieve is a leap in audio quality from 4.5 to nearly 15 kHz.

In addition, the improvement in reception quality will be enormous: the noise, the fading and the interference will cease to exist with digital technology.

Up to now, with analog short wave, little mistakes were more or less allowed. This will clearly change with DRM.

I hope we never thought that! I think the quality of our radio programs is very high, especially in view of the fact that they have not been produced for short wave only for quite some time now. Our programs are transmitted via satellite in almost studio quality to re-broadcasting FM stations and cable networks or are compressed for the Internet.