Power-Line Transmission (PLT) is a means of transmitting data along an existing, ubiquitous infrastructure: mains-electricity wiring. You might be forgiven for thinking “So what? What has this to do with broadcasting?” The answer is: “More than you might wish!”, since PLT systems have a demonstrated ability to interfere with radio reception, which of course includes traditional over-the-air broadcasting.

This article tries to explain some of how this comes about, what the threats are and what is or isn't being done about it.

The occurrence of this interference is contrary to the general principles of regulating radio systems, but many of the detailed regulations in force, or proposed, do not provide adequate protection for broadcasting. “Notching” the PLT signals has been offered as a palliative measure but many requirements must be met for this to become a “cure”. One promising possible extension to the notching technique is described here. If it were properly adopted, it might provide a constructive solution to the inevitable stalemate in the standards process.

Holography has long held promise as a data storage technology with the potential for vast capacity and high data rates. Recent advances in materials, multiplexing architectures and components are finally making this vision a reality. These technical developments are occurring just as we see an explosion in the growth of “fixed-content” archival information.

This articles describes how holographic media could provide a long-awaited solution for broadcast archives.

This article describes the progress made in the ITU-R during the 1980s and 90s to prepare international standards for digital terrestrial television systems. The last ITU-R meeting on this project was held in November 1996 – almost 10 years ago – at which a set of Recommendations for digital broadcasting systems was agreed, laying the foundations for the global roll-out of DTV and HDTV terrestrial broadcast services.

This is a written summary of a presentation given by Jonathan Marks at the recent Multimedia Meets Radio conference hosted by the EBU in Geneva. The author has held several production and management posts within Dutch, UK and Austrian public broadcasting organizations over the last 25 years. Now in private practice as a trainer, independent producer and strategic “insultant”, he provides these personal thoughts on areas that broadcasters should be concerned with.

Over the years many EBU Members have experimented with multichannel audio (MCA) within radio and television services. In more recent times, since the advent of DVB digital broadcasting, multichannel audio has become an integral part of Members’ transmissions, improving the quality and user enjoyment of many different types of programming.

The Focus Team B/MCAT (MultiChannel Audio Transmission) was formed to allow EBU Members to share their experiences of multichannel audio broadcasting and to address any transmission issues arising. The final output of the group is EBU Tech doc. 3311, EBU Guidelines for Multichannel Audio in DVB. This article describes the efforts and studies that lay behind the creation of this document.

This article is an excerpt from the RadioText Plus (RT+) Specification. It sets out to explain in brief the basic principles of RT+, which has been developed jointly by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Nokia and the Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT).

The purpose of RT+ is to enable analogue FM RDS radios to display information such as Artist and Track details for songs, scrolling news headines, information about the radio station, etc.