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Short Wave Broadcasting |
The UK has gained an acknowledged leadership role in the field of international short wave broadcasting as a result of over 70 years of English and vernacular language news and entertainment programming transmitted by the BBC's external broadcasting services. The 1996 Broadcasting Act brought about the separation the programme production and transmission operations of the BBC, with the result that the BBC World Service now concentrates on programme production and its former short wave transmission facilities around the world are now operated by Merlin Communications plc.
It has been apparent for some time that the listening quality on short wave does not do justice to the quality of the programme content because of frequency congestion and the variability of radio propagation in the short wave bands. Over recent years, however, several major European broadcasters, including BBC and Merlin, have been collaborating through the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to study the possibilities for introducing digital modulation techniques for short wave broadcasting, with the intention of overcoming these difficulties.
Short wave broadcasting has to conform to a comprehensive regulatory regime within the ITU as regards frequency use, scheduling and technical standards, which requires a good deal of time, effort and coordination to change. The Regulatory Section played a major role in developing a new simplified and flexible planning method at WRC-97 to take account of the future needs of short wave broadcasting, which has to operate on regularly changing seasonal schedules because of natural propagation changes, notably the 11-year sunspot cycle.
At WRC-2000, with the support of the Netherlands, Ukraine and Vatican City and the valued assistance of many other European interests, IPU was successful in securing agenda items for the next two WRCs aimed at introducing the new digital modulation techniques developed in the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) Consortium. The audio broadcast coding scheme advanced by DRM is, in technical terms, the next step on from the popular MP3 coding format and is capable of providing efficient regional/multi-regional broadcast coverage with a radically improved sound quality, equivalent to that of conventional FM broadcasts.
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