Alongside the Digital Broadcasting Symposium was an exhibition of tech companies supplying the latest equipment to Asian broadcasters.
AsiaRadioToday met some of them and found out a little about their offerings.
Gates Air has been supplying transmitters for nearly a century.
GatesAir transmitters support all digital radio standards (HD Radio, DAB and DRM/DRM+), and the company also offers studio production, signal distribution and transmission solutions for analog and digital systems.
Jason Mak explains the water cooled feature of the Flexiva transmitters, recently installed in Thailand.
The World DAB exhibit was staffed by Kath Brown when we visited it to take some pics of the latest DAB+ radios available in the market.
Earlier in the conference, the Malaysian Communications Minister received a digital radio from Bernie O’Neill.
AVT Technology’s Christoph Lessnau was displaying the company’s portable digital radio ensemble multiplexer the central system of a DAB head end. The multiplexer comes in the small package pictured and also as a rack mounted unit. AVT also supplies audio codecs and tunnel rebroadcast equipment.
Nautel was also present at the exhibition, as it has been for many years supporting Asian broadcasters. Nautel transmitters have been used in the recent All India Radio DRM transmission roll out.
Paneda was well represented at the exhibition with staff from the Norway head office and the local office in Thailand. Paneda supplies DAB+ head end transmission and tunnel break in systems.
A break-in system is a solution for interrupting on-going transmissions in road tunnels or any other public area where people needs to be notified in case of emergency, like fire or accidents.
For analogue radio, like FM, the principle for a break-in is to shut down the broadcasted signal in the tunnel, and replace the transmitter with an emergency transmitter carrying the emergency messages. Since FM is analogue, this doesn’t require any synchronization or other mechanisms to trigger an emergency message.
Unlike FM, DAB is far more complicated due to the fact that DAB radio uses a digital technology and cannot use the same principals as for FM since a car receiver will mute if it looses the original signal, even the shortest interruption will cause a switch over failure.
Rohde & Schwarz were prominent in the exhibition, as was Orban and the Mahajak Group
The use of drones for Antenna monitoring and troubleshooting was also a new trend on display at this year's exhibition.
See our other reports from the 2019 DBS here.
