From a Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) perspective, the HFCC study raises an important question for the future of international broadcasting:

If shortwave remains strategically important, how should this unique broadcasting infrastructure evolve for the coming decades?

The report makes a strong case for the continued relevance of shortwave. Several of its key arguments are in favour of digital shortwave (DRM) rather than for conventional analogue AM. They are centred around what DRM can do very well: offer the Emergency  Warning Functionality (EWF), deliver distance education and use as a distribution platform for analogue (like FM) content broadcasts.

The key argument of the report is that:

Shortwave remains strategically relevant because it is infrastructure-independent, international, anonymous for the listener, resilient, and difficult for target countries to prevent.

HFCC explicitly says that shortwave is the only international distribution platform that does not require the consent of the administration in the country being targeted.

In this context DRM receives strong endorsement as the report explicitly identifies DRM in three roles.

Education and multimedia

HFCC says that digital shortwave using DRM can provide not only radio programmes but audio and visual content to millions of students without IP connectivity or suitable IP devices, DRM becoming thus a one-to-many digital information delivery system.

That opens the door to:

• Journaline/text information;
• educational text;
• images/slides;
• programme-associated information;
• downloadable or semi-static educational material;
• multilingual information services.

This fits particularly well with low-connectivity and education use cases.

Emergency Warning Functionality

The strongest DRM-specific statement is probably the endorsement of Emergency Warning Functionality – EWF. HFCC explicitly says DRM’s Emergency Warning Functionality can disseminate disaster warnings and become part of a modern national alert network.

From this strategic perspective, DRM is no longer merely competing with FM, streaming or DAB for normal radio listening. It becomes part of:

national resilience / civil protection / public-warning infrastructure.

Programme distribution

And finally, there is the conclusion that:

“DRM can be used to deliver studio quality programme for relaying by local radio stations.”

The report explains how:

“Shortwave radio can be deployed as a distribution medium for FM radio and cellular networks.”

This is a very interesting DRM application, already used in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather than requiring millions of consumers to own DRM receivers from day one, a broadcaster could use DRM shortwave as a professional distribution platform, with perhaps tens or hundreds of professional receivers.

All this in very good audio quality while overcoming the difficult reception of analogue SW in urban areas because of noise, interference from other stations etc. as these are precisely areas where DRM can offer a practical answer.

To mitigate the degradation of analogue AM reception, DRM uses digital modulation, error correction, selectable robustness parameters, and interleaving. Consequently, under suitable propagation conditions it can deliver a much more stable usable service until the decoding threshold is reached.

DRM transforms the listener experience considerably when the transmission system is engineered appropriately.

One important and perennial argument against shortwave in general highlighted in the report is the transmitter-cost argument, as HFCC says: “Shortwave transmitting stations are expensive to operate”, a more substantial analysis is needed.

The high cost is true, particularly for traditional high-power analogue international broadcasting but here DRM could change the economic argument as a modern DRM service can trade between:

• transmitter power;
• robustness;
• bitrate;
• audio quality;
• coverage reliability.

In the report the spectrum argument could have been enriched with some reference to DRM again since DRM has the ability to use different channel bandwidths or deliver digital services efficiently within HF broadcasting allocations.

The report does not avoid the question of receiver availability. And one solution and the third argument in favour of DRM is the relay/distribution, even more important than direct consumer reception. This might mean for an international broadcaster:

↓ DRM shortwave

Professional receiver in target region

↓ audio/data

FM/community radio/local network

↓

millions of ordinary receivers

Suddenly you do not need millions of DRM consumer radios.

DRM as Backhaul Technology

And as expressed by HFCC, unlike the local FM transmitter, the incoming shortwave transmission itself does not rely on cross-border infrastructure or IP connectivity. This makes DRM-HF potentially a broadcast backhaul technology.

The HFCC report also notes an important political aspect,  the censorship-resistance argument. As internet can be censored, blocked, monitored and is dependent on the local telecom infrastructure, shortwave, analogue or DRM reception does not identify the listener.

And digital broadcasting protects the listener offering him/her also something analogue SW cannot easily provide i.e. structured information. A DRM transmission could therefore deliver not merely an audio programme but potentially a package of: audio + multilingual text + programme information + emergency information + images/data, all anonymous and independent of the local Internet infrastructure.

HFCC notes that approximately 6 billion people / 74% of the global population used the Internet in 2025, but the penetration in low-income countries was only around 23%.

It also highlights substantial remaining rural mobile coverage gaps, including 19% in rural areas of least-developed countries and 36% in rural areas of small island developing states.

For DRM this means not to compete with the internet where it works well but to complement it where IP distribution becomes expensive, unavailable, censored or fragile.

DRM provides thus audio plus structured emergency information.

And HFCC explicitly adopts this argument in its conclusion.

“Maintain a national HF/DRM resilience layer that still reaches the population when terrestrial IP/mobile infrastructure fails.”

Shortwave and the China example

The report shows that while overall international SW airtime declined by about 40.5% between A10 and B25, the decline wasn’t uniform. Europe fell particularly strongly, while some other service areas declined much less.

More strikingly, China Radio International’s overall hours remained essentially stable, with increases toward some regions. So, shortwave is NOT dying and it is better to say: Western broadcasters reduced shortwave heavily while some strategically motivated broadcasters maintained or expanded it and adopted DRM, like China.

This suggests the future market, including for DRM,  isn’t necessarily mass-market entertainment radio. It may increasingly be: strategic international broadcasting + national coverage + resilience + education + emergency communication + data distribution.

And all this can be excellently delivered by DRM as those are exactly areas in which DRM excels. The HFCC report agrees that DRM gives education, EWF and studio-quality distribution.

While analogue shortwave established the infrastructure, DRM modernises what can be transported over that infrastructure.

Conclusion

The HFCC report seems very favourable to DRM.

In the opinion of the authors of the report, the question is not whether shortwave should survive unchanged as an analogue legacy medium, but whether its unique global infrastructure should be modernised into a digital, resilient, one-to-many information network.

And DRM provides a clear answer. It does not change the fundamental advantages that have made shortwave unique for almost a century. Instead, it brings those advantages into the digital age, transforming shortwave from an analogue audio medium into a modern, resilient, one-to-many digital information platform.