Under the banner ‘Digital Radio Mondiale Drives Forward’, the 2019 General Assembly of the DRM Consortium took place on March 26 and 27 at the Spanish island of Mallorca, with participation from members and associate members from India, Indonesia, USA, Brazil, Romania, Germany, UK, Hungary, South Africa, Switzerland and Denmark.

The event reviewed in detail the extremely busy past year and discussed the strategy and working plan for the next year.  A full session was dedicated to receiver and receiver solutions. The 1.5 million cars with DRM receivers in India, a growing figure, was one of the highlights.  

This year the General Assembly had a larger participation, more live transmissions, also received in Barcelona, Austria and the US, with more contributions and receiver models demonstrated than ever before.

Another highlight of the meeting was the announcement that the public radio broadcaster in Indonesia (RRI) is determined to acquire two DRM medium wave transmitters for populated areas of Indonesia and two other transmitters to be used for emergency warning in west Sumatra and west Java. 

The announcement was made by Freddy Ndolu, member of the Supervisory Board of RRI, who underlined during his announcement that “radio is nowadays a multiplatform media and DRM is certainly one of the choices, suitable for a large country like Indonesia with its over 260 million people.  DRM can connect its over 16 thousand islands offering emergency warning to this country right on the ring of fire.”

For Ruxandra Obreja, DRM Chairman, the General Assembly was “a moment of celebration, of reaffirming the value of radio and the confident trust in its future. The participants left motivated, full of ideas and very good contacts.”