The report has 2 main sections, the first on digital radio broadcasting and the second on how new ICTs can be used to make community radio stations more open, accessible and participatory.

Digital television broadcasting has been widely debated in the region and for better or worse most countries have selected the standards they will use and begun to develop strategies for an eventual transition to digital and an accompanying “analogue switchoff”. Digital radio, however, has barely been considered by most governments in the region, even though the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) maintains 2015 as the deadline for the transition to all digital broadcasting in most of the world. While the ITU deadline will almost certainly not be met, there is an urgent need to define the principles will guide any eventual transition. A few of these include:

• - the introduction of digital radio must be done in a way that will enable a more diverse and democratic broadcasting system
• - whatever technical standard is adopted must be flexible and adaptable
• - open standards are the only way of ensuring technological independence
• - there can be no analgue switchoff until digital transmitting equipment is financially and practically accessible to community and independent radio and until digital receivers are accessible to all sectors of the population

The report was written by Bruce Girard, Carlos Camacho, Pablo Vannini and René Roemersma and is available in Spanish only.

Download El Bit de la Cuestión: La radio popular y comunitaria en la era digital.

Authors: Bruce Girard, Carlos Camacho, Pablo Vannini and René Roemersma.

Published by: Asociación Latinoamericana de Educación Radiofónica (ALER)
Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias, América Latina y Caribe (AMARC ALC).

Buenos Aires, 2010. ISBN 978-987-25395-3-5

The Radio magazine article

The study’s table of contents and purchase page

The first sentence of HD Radio chapter in “The State of the News Media“, an annual review prepared on the media in the USA by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism says it all.

According to the report:

• Only 2,012 of the nation’s 14,417 AM and FM stations broadcast HD signals
• Only about one half of these use HD to broadcast more than one simultaneous program (multicast)
• Only 184 stations added HD capability to their broadcasts in 2009 – a rate that will see all stations broadcasting in HD within 78 years
• Despite iBiquity’s massive promotional campaigns, HD has failed to capture consumer interest with only 32% of people saying that they are even somewhat interested in HD Radio

The report also looks at podcasts, noting that some 27 million people reported listening to podcasts at least once a month. “Growth in listeners, however, doesn’t come close to matching the growth in the number of podcasts available.”

HD Radio is a proprietary solution that belongs to iBiquity Digital Corporation, which in turn belongs to a consortium that includes most of the large radio networks in the USA. DRM is an open standard developed by a consortium of European public broadcasters.  iBiquity ‘s buiness model in the US involves charging licence fees to broadcasters. Fees start at about $10,000 annually and rise as more features are added to the basic package. DRM is an open standard and available for free.

According to an article by Luís Osvaldo Grossmann, Rádio Digital: Preferido pelos técnicos, DRM sofre ataques do Iboc, published on the Convergencia Digital website, iBiquity is taking the DRM threat very seriously and the company’s president , Robert Struble,  has writen a “carta aos amigos brasileiros” seeking to “clarify some incorrect notions” about his company’s technology.

To date DRM’s biggest drawback has been the lack of affordable receivers. However, if Brazil opt for DRM the sheer market size of the regional power will make it attractive for manufacturers to design and build receivers for the mass market.

All India Radio (AIR) chose DRM as a standard late last year and has set out an ambitious plan to have its entire network of 149 MW, 54 SW and 171 FM transmitters running DRM by 2013 with an eye to shutting down analogue transmissions in 2015. According to an article in Dxers Guide AIR has said:

“The most important issues shall be to make available DRM receivers at affordable cost to the vast masses of India. It is expected that receiver manufacturers in India and abroad shall address this issue as DRM is progressively implemented in the next five years”.

If Brazil’s market isn’t attractive enough, India’s most certainly will be.

One of the projects competing for the cup mixes OLPC and FM radio to overcome at least one of the major connectivity hurdles faced by the OLPC initiative. Griffen’s complete post is at http://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/02/25/a-beeping-good-idea-for-low-cost-communication/

The idea is to leverage off the growing number of XO laptops available in third world countries as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme which is active here in New Zealand where a network of testers including Sciblogger Fabiana Kubke help refine the low-cost computer’s features.

There are 1.2 million OLPC laptops now in use, but there remains a big problem – third world countries don’t really have the communications infrastructure to get content out to those laptops in a reliable fashion. Mobile networks often don’t extend into rural areas, satellite and fixed wireless systems are too expensive options. Team Beep came up with a great idea – why not use the readily available FM broadcast frequency to send out a stream of data that can be picked up by a bog standard FM radio. The signal is then fed into the sound card of the XO latop and recorded using a small piece of open source software. The software then converts the audio signal, which consists of a stream of beeps representing letters, into text and assembles it as a document.

Radiotext-type services using the FM network are not a new idea, here’s one project from Europe seeking to offer similar services and digital radio is already rolled out in many countries delivering weather, traffic and channel information to radio users. But the innovative part of One Beep’s solution is the interface between an FM radio and the XO laptops used as part of the OLPC programme. With some refinements, this should be a piece of software that cna be simple to use and allow children in remote villages in Africa to be sent school lessons updated regularly.

Currently, the data throughput One Beep is achieving is fairly low – 2Kbps (kilobits per second). But the team is confident compression technology can increase this to 10Kbps. I think they’d find others are working in this area who may be worth partnering with to get the data throughput possible via FM radio even higher.

This is a solution that could be rolled out tomorrow – it requires use of a small sliver of radio spectrum, a radio transmitter to send out the signal (the further it needs to go the more powerful the transmitter needs to be) and the software has to be installed on each OLPC machine. Hopefully the competition and One Beep’s making it to the final will give the project the profile it needs to become reality.

The project, supported by the UK NGO Practical Action,  distributes the podcasts in battery operated MP3 players housed in “mobile libraries”. Community members can borrow the MP3 players to listen to the podcasts.

According to the  Lawrence D. Gudza the project has been a success:

Within six months of the project starting, the technology has reached about 75% of the local population. Farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchange has also improved, with a large proportion of neighbouring communities also benefiting from the information.

Read the article on WACC’s website.

Podcasts in Thai, Bahasa and Tagalog are available for download from the APMM website.

APMM is a Hong Kong based centre working for the promotion and protection of the rights and wellbeing of migrants in the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions.  WACC is the

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