This announcement follows RTÉNL’s trial of DAB in the Dublin area, last year. Whilst this transmitter installation will again provide coverage in the greater Dublin area and the northern corridor, RTÉNL’s strategy may soon include the national implementation of DAB.

Paul Harfoot, Rohde & Schwarz’ Broadcast Sales Manager, commented: “DAB services are proving more and more popular worldwide, so we are very pleased to support the roll-out of DAB services in Ireland, where we are sure DAB’s extra features such as simple -tuning and pause/replay facilities, will be appreciated.” He added: “We are now seeing demand for increasingly powerful transmitters in order to improve building coverage. We are continually expanding our product range in line with these requirements, and to that aim, we increased our range of liquid cooled high power DAB transmitters last year to cover powers up to 7 kW with the NA7000 series.”

“Rohde & Schwarz was a key technology supplier during our DAB trial last year”, said Eamonn Reid, RTÉNL’s Head of Projects. “The DAB transmitter installations have gone smoothly and we are pleased with how they are performing,” he added.

The transmitters supplied to RTÉNL are from the air-cooled R&S NA6000 family, and have been designed for very high efficiency, reliability, compact size and ease of operation. The liquid cooled R&S NA7000 series, meanwhile, caters for higher transmit powers, offering transmission power ranging from 0.9 kW up to 7 kW. Rohde & Schwarz’ extensive range of DAB transmitters are part of a complete DAB chain that comprises equipment for encoding, play-out, distribution, transmission and testing.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) was developed as a research project for the European Union in 1987. It has since become one the most popular transmission schemes for modern wideband digital communication systems, enabling the transmission of CD-quality radio programs with modern digital auxiliary services.