The Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium joined the Indonesian public broadcaster RRI on May 16th-18th and demonstrated successfully DRM for local coverage in simulcast on the beautiful Indonesian island of Batam, overlooking the Singapore Straits.
The DRM signal was inserted into the existing and very crowded FM local spectrum.The existing FM was at 105.1 MHz and DRM was placed at 105.25Mhz. The current analogue transmitter chosen for this has a power of 5kW in analogue and only 0.2KW DRM power was used. Excellent coverage area was thus achieved with only 10% of analogue power. The predicted coverage area power was calculated with 40 dBuV/m.
On May 17th the participants representing the leadership of RRI, many RRI station managers and experts, the Ministry of Communications, the regulator, private broadcasters and the industry took a field trip to check the audio and coverage quality of the simulcast signal. Both the indoor and mobile reception were excellent and no interference was noted to the neighbouring FM stations at 105.1Mhz and 105.5Mhz.
During the three days of presentations, practical work, the fruitful questions and answers sessions, participants checked the clear benefits of digital radio for local coverage: excellent audio, multimedia features including Journaline advanced text and images, good coverage and efficient energy use.
RRI is adding the Batam DRM for local coverage successful demo to its conclusive demonstrations of DRM in the AM bands (medium wave) for large-area coverage in Bogor (2015) and in Bali (2016).
Mr M Rohanudin, the RRI President, the RRI CTO and other participants welcomed the findings of the Batam demo which is the first high power simulcast demo of DRM for local coverage in the Asia Pacific region.
Ruxandra Obreja, DRM Chairman, was delighted with the organisation of the event and the results of the demo and is hopeful that this will give the necessary facts and information to RRI to consider DRM as an excellent solution for digitisation radio in Indonesia.
The demos was supported by RRI, Fraunhofer IIs, GatesAir and RFmondial