This article offers essential advice to radio broadcasters on fine-tuning a PC-based “information-infrastructure” for the editing, storage and streaming of audio files. The chosen infrastructure is based on the use of four separate entities called “clouds” – Audio workstations, Network, Audio fileserver and Audio-data storage.

Field testing of the Digital Radio Mondiale transmission system has been in progress since 1999. This article reports on the results of these comprehensive trials which have included NVIS propagation near the equator, long-range propagation over distances up to 23,000 km, and tests with SFNs.

This article reports on the results of an investigation carried out into whether the transmitted sound quality offered by Digital Radio (DAB) stations in Germany is superior to that of FM radio. The tests revealed that not all is as it should be, with many stations not conforming with the relevant ARD recommendations for DAB broadcasters.

This article collates the results of comparing the performance of the two DVB-T modes currently in use in the UK – namely, 64-QAM rate 2/3 and 16-QAM rate 3/4, both using 2K carriers with a 7ms guard interval. Three different sources of impairment were measured: (i) co-channel interference from an analogue PAL signal, (ii) multipath propagation resulting in one echo inside or outside the guard interval and (iii) impulsive interference.

The results are presented in a novel manner as “noise bucket” plots. These plots are used to quantify the improvement in performance that can be achieved with 16-QAM rate 3/4 over 64-QAM rate 2/3.