The Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium held its general assembly at the end of March. Chairman Ruxandra Obreja described the consortium as “strong, very active and looking with confidence to the future.”
About 80 people attended the open session portion of the virtual event. They heard presentations from India, South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil, Denmark and other countries, including discussion of trials of DRM FM in India.
“The encouraging activity of the India automotive group and the progress of the innovative education project were also some of the meeting highlights. The keynote speech delivered by Nigel Fry, director distribution, BBC World Service, focused also on the value of DRM, for AM especially, in places that are of greatest need of information and education,” the organization wrote in a summary.
Another session provided an update on receivers and prototypes.
“The progress made by receiver and chipset manufacturers — NXP, Skyworks, Cambridge Consultants/CML Microcircuits, Gospell, RF2Digital, Inntot, Fraunhofer IIS, Starwaves and others — was practically illustrated with clear and exciting videos,” said DRM. “These solutions are now supporting the full DRM standard (AM and FM bands) and all the DRM features set giving extra benefits like EWF (Emergency Warning Functionality), distance learning, extra content in various languages.”
The videos are available on the DRM YouTube channel.
Also during the assembly, officers were elected for 2022–24. Obreja was reconfirmed as chair of the steering board.
“The world is changing and radio, digital radio DRM, has a great window of opportunity to meet the new and diverse expectations of the listeners,” Obreja said.
[Related: “DRM Makes Its Pitch for India’s FM Band”]
