The coverage area would also be wider as the station has installed 200 kW capacity replacing its earlier 100 kW analogue system facilitating more people to listen to radio programmes broadcast from AIR, Itanagar including state’s border areas.Soon after AIR Itanagar starts functioning on DRM technology; AIR Pasighat in East Siang district would also begin to function on this technology within a week with 100 kW capacity.
AIR, Dibrugarh in Assam is already functioning smoothly on DRM technology with 300 kW capacity. At present all total 27 All India Radio stations have installed DRM technology across the country.Digital Radio Mondiale AM transmitter, manufactured by Nautel, Canada, is a set of digital audio broadcasting technology designed to replace the analogue radio AM broadcasting.DRM technology has advantage of transmitting four different radio programmes simultaneously on same frequency at a time over analogue system where only a single programme can be transmitted at a time. Listeners would also be able to read the scrolling of text and bulletins in a DRM receiver along with JPEG file.
Though at present DRM receivers are not readily available in the local market, Indian Radio Receiver manufacturer have already launched DRM radio sets and are available in main cities.Moreover, vehicle manufacturer like Mahindra has already included DRM technology in their car radio sets. Other companies are following it very soon.Till the period the broadcast from All India Radio would be on simulcast mode (Analogue + Digital), so that listeners can tune in to the analogue mode with the normal receivers available in market, the release added.