A recent edition of New Scientist has featured an article on digital radio, saying that DRM might outstrip Eureka DAB and IBOC in its long term market acceptance and usefulness.

The article, by Barry Fox titled Do not adjust your radio, in the August Edition of New Scientist, says electronics giant Texas Instruments recently unveiled the future of radio: a tiny receiver that took several years and millions of dollars to develop.

Eagerly awaited by broadcasters and manufacturers alike, it isn’t designed to pick up radio broadcasts from satellites or the internet, says the article.

“Instead the new chip will tune in to the old-fashioned AM bands – the short, medium and long-wave signals pioneered by Guglielmo Marconi more than a century ago…

“Using the latest coding and compression tricks, DRM will squeeze high-quality stereo sound into the narrow AM bands and send these signals over greater distances and with less interference than ever before. The technology promises to breath new life into ailing AM stations the world over. Convert a medium-wave transmitter to DRM, for instance, and a station that once struggled to reach 10,000 listeners could embrace a hundred times as many.”

The article asks: “So why would Texas Instruments – and the global radio community, for that matter – waste time and money on defunct wavebands?”

“This chip is anything but a backward step. It is in the vanguard for a global broadcast standard called Digital Radio Mondiale that is designed to stuff the AM bands with a swathe of new digital transmissions…

“Along with music, news or chat, each DRM transmission can also carry a supplementary data stream at a rate of up to 40 kilobits per second – around two-thirds of the speed of a standard telephone modem but several times as fast as RDS on FM. Fast enough to transmit a lot more than just the radio station’s name.”

The first commercially produced DRM radios will go on sale later this year and are expected to cost around $200, according to the article.