Some Radio Background
A very short history of radio from invention of AM to todays brand new DAB.
Despite being invented in the very early 1900’s it was fifteen years before radio as an entertainment medium caught the public imagination. Broadcasting on AM the BBC was first established in 1922 followed by RTE here in Ireland in 1926. Ten years later radio began to enjoy it’s pre-television “golden age” in the thirties and forties and the public lapped it up.
However the crackly sound of AM drove engineers to develop a cleaner sounding radio medium and after World War 2, FM radio was introduced to the world. It took FM another forty years to really establish itself before becoming the radio standard during the eighties and early nineties. Yet again the public lapped it up.
Despite FM being terrific, especially in stereo, it was prone to background hiss and airspace was rapidly running out. So off the engineers went to find a way of getting more radio stations onto one transmitter. The answer was Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) where ten stations could be broadcast on a single transmitter using an audio compression format called MPEG. Yes, the DAB people are responsible for mp3 files!
Unlike AM and FM before it, the adoption of DAB is happening relatively quickly. The UK were one of the first countries to introduce new DAB only radio stations such as BBC Radio 7, Planet Rock and The Hits in 2003. In just five years one-in-five UK homes now own a DAB radio set and almost 30% of UK listeners now get radio every week using digital platforms such as DAB, Freeview, the internet and satellite.
Worldwide Germany, Switzerland, Ireland and Australia are following suit by also introducing digital only radio stations throughout 2008 and 2009. The United States are also experiencing huge success with their digital only stations launched via satellite and HD radio technology.
The future is bright, the future is digital.
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