Progress in Digital Radio in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic’s demand for telecommunication services, and therefore for greater spectrum, is growing every day, and this demand also includes more authorizations for broadcasting services.

In the specific case of sound broadcasting, AM stations have not had the same luck as FM stations.  One of the drawbacks of AM stations is the lack of better audio quality.

These problems could be partially resolved by migrating toward digital technology, optimizing the spectrum and offering better services to the public in general, including audio quality.

Another general aspect is the need to revise the Rio-81 agreement and to take a decision on the digital radio standard.  The administration alone cannot resolve the problems of the broadcasting sector, and therefore all sectors must get together and reach satisfactory conclusions regarding the country’s need and the regions’ trend of adopting the new technologies.  Among its plans, the Dominican Institute of Telecommunications (Instituto Dominicano de las Telecomunicaciones—INDOTEL) intends to motivate broadcasters to participate in all sector activities and help develop telecommunications.

The concern about bandwidth is a matter of interest.  We have the problem of channelling frequencies, which according to the new technologies shall take up a given bandwidth.  The in-band on-channel (IBOC) standard makes it possible for both digital and analog broadcast signals to be transmitted simultaneously on the same frequency bandwidth, but it can produce aliasing and therefore loss of quality and requires 30 kHz of separation.  As for Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), it only enables testing in digital broadcasting.  In contrast to IBOC, digital audio broadcasting (DAB) does not enable “piggybacking” the analog signal on the same bandwidth, which means that the signal only serves digital receivers and has high-quality audio without using up too many resources.  According to ITU, the band for AM operation is from 530 kHz to 1710 kHz.

As for IBOC, the countries that have 10 kHz and 20 kHz channels are faced with the problem of this system’s requirements, because by occupying 30 kHz, the number of allocations would have to be reduced to prevent interferences.

For some of the reasons presented above in the present article, the Chair of the Executive Board of INDOTEL, Dr. José Rafael Vargas, has taken the initiative of organizing an INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON DIGITAL RADIO on June 13-14, 2007.

This event shall be aimed principally at disseminating the progress made in digital radio, the current situation of analog radio, and the implementation of this new technology in the various countries of the region.

For two (2) days, important lectures shall be given, with talks, direct and live demonstrations of digital transmission, and displays of equipment, including receives and transmitters.  Representatives of the software industry and authorities of international administrations shall be attending.

This is a wonderful opportunity to interact with all the sectors that are present and with the authorities of the member states of the Americas region, and it shall be beneficial to all.

We hope that, as a result of this activity, we shall be able to contribute to CITEL’s work, especially the working group of PCC.II Broadcasting.

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