CII meet urges manufacturers to meet digital radio needs

The country is poised to experience better sound quality and coverage area in radio by next year, as revealed by participants at the CII National Seminar on DRM

The move towards digital radio is expected to take off in 2015.

The seminar comes at the heels of the Pitroda Expert Committee's report in January, which endorsed All India Radio's decision to convert analogue medium wave to DRM. Apart from quality and range, DRM is an open global standard that can cover all the bands.

Ruxandra Obreja, Chairperson, DRM Consortium, said it was time that Indian-developed and manufactured receivers available to listeners. India, she said, was uniquely poised as it had both the market as well as the technical knowhow to manufacture digital radio receivers.

AIR plans to continue analogue and digital simulcast till 2016, and thereafter shift to digital broadcast.

Confirming this, Mr R K Budhiraja, Engineer-in-Chief, All India Radio, informed that the installation of DRM transmitters was proceeding on schedule and called upon the industry to make receivers available by the first quarter of 2015. Former Prasar Bharati Engineer-in-Chief R R Prasad looked back on the DRM test run in 2007 and how it had surpassed everybody's expectations. But, he asserted that there should be an environment for the public to have reasons to buy digital receivers.

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