Communication Systems Engineering with GNU Radio

7A Digital Communication Standard: The DAB+ Radio Broadcasting System

7.1 Introduction

Radio broadcasting is certainly one of the most ubiquitous forms of electronic mass media, utilized by billions of people around the globe. Since the early days of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, analog Amplitude Modulation (AM) and Frequency Modulation (FM) have been employed. In the 1970s, significant advances in the digitalization of the audio signal were made, and, in the beginning of the 1980s, the public discovered the first digital audio technology with the advent of the audio compact disk (CD). In order to port this important change to the radio broadcasting area, the European project EUREKA 147 was started in 1987 with a consortium of public research institutes (IRT in Germany and CCETT in France), broadcasters, and telecommunication industries. As will be seen in the following, the design of the new digital broadcasting system was made possible, thanks to the advent of two advanced digital techniques, namely audio bit rate reduction, ported by IRT, and coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM), pioneered by CCETT. This initial work led to the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system, which was standardized by ETSI in 1997 in EN 300 400 document [ETSIEN300401, 2017]. Since 1997, the DAB standard is maintained by the WorldDAB forum, an international nongovernmental organization whose objective is to promote, harmonize, and coordinate the implementation of DAB services ...