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18 Oct DRM for FM in Pakistan – First Ever Demonstration on Commercial Receiver

Posted at 19:38h in News by

 

On Thursday October 17th, the public broadcaster in Pakistan, PBC, successfully demonstrated the first ever DRM for FM test transmission on a consumer receiver in Pakistan.  The country joins thus Russia, Indonesia, South Africa that have been demonstrating very recently the quality and efficiency of DRM in the FM band (Many other countries in Europe, in Latin America, like Brazil have conducted DRM trials since it has been ITU recommended in 2011).

The current demo setup is located at the National Broadcasting House PBC headquarters in Islamabad.
From a low power of 75 watts, the DRM signal reaches an area of between 5-10 kilometres in the city. Using the 101.6 MHz frequency the receiver auto tunes  the following three services pushed from a single FM transmitter (while additional text information including Journaline is also available):

1. FM101 entertainment channel
2. Dhanak Music channel
3. Saut-ul-quran religious channel

The setup details and equipment used are as follows:

1. 1Kw Flexiva transmitter by GatesAir, USA
2. Exgine card by GatesAir
3. DRM Content Server and DRM+ professional receiver by RFmondial, Germany
4. Bay antenna system by Label, Italy
5. Consumer DRM receiver by Gospell, China

The project also benefited from the support of Hedra Technology, Pakistan, Fraunhofer IIS, Germany and the DRM international Consortium.

The project team included top PBC specialists: Mr. Kamran Saeed, Director Engineering, Mr. Ali Zia Abbasi, Controller Engineering, Chairman DRM Steering Committee, Mr. Ghulam Mujaddid, Engineering Manager, Member DRM Steering Committee, and Mr. Yasir Mustafa, Engineering Manager, Member DRM Steering Committee.

(left to right)
Ghulam Mujaddid (PBC), Roman Afroz (HEDRA), Peter Timmons (GatesAir), Kamran Saeed and Nauman Jarral (PBC)