As of Feb. 1, a second South African DRM program has been made available from the Radio Pulpit DRM test facility at Kameeldrift, north of Pretoria in South Africa, according to reports from the DRM Southern Africa Platform. It is transmitting BBC content digitally in the former AM band at 1440 kHz.
The additional service can be co-transmitted as part of the same DRM signal due to the low bitrate MPEG xHE-AAC audio format, for which support has recently been added to the global DRM digital radio standard.
“We can prove that broadcasters can have more than one program on the air on a single frequency,” said DRM Southern Africa Platform Chair Dr. Roelf Petersen.
Since July 2014, Radio Pulpit in Pretoria/Johannesburg had been broadcasting one DRM program in medium wave with extra features 24 hours a day. The dual-program DRM transmission now on air is further enhanced with DRM text messages (scrolling text) providing on-screen program information. In addition, the text service Journaline is provided on-air.
