MUMBAI: Within two months’ time, All India Radio (AIR) will have its 36 DRM high-end professional monitoring receivers. The equipment will help them comprehend the transmission parameters of the digital transmitters which will be made available to all the AIR Kendra around India.The receiver are manufactured by German-based RFmondial and Delhi-based Comcon will deliver it in India.
“These receivers will be sent to different stations of All India Radio. This will be made available to the top officials of AIR to monitor and demonstrate the use and feature of the digital format on field to create awareness about the digital receiver,” said DRM Consortium honorary Chairman Yogendra Pal to Radioandmusic.com. Meanwhile, AIR has issued a tender for 800 daily use receivers that cost around Rupees 5000 each.
With over 36 years of association with Prasar Bharati (working in AIR and Doordarshan), Pal seem to understand the various challenges the digital path will face. The biggest challenge of AIR is to make the low-cost receivers available in India. “No receiver is produced in India. The receivers are coming from abroad that means exchange of valuable currency,” he said.
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He disclosed, “We are in talks with the Ministry of Information Technology to provide some incentive to the Indian manufacturers as it will help in employment generation and also reduce import of receivers.”
There are three types of receivers- car radio, kitchen or desktop radio and third are the cell phones (existing and new). “We are concentrating in all the three receivers. There is one company called NXP. They create digital radio for cars and it was tested last year in an expo. The quality was excellent. For Kitchen or desktop radio, we are in talks with two or three manufacturers. They are carrying out their research and they are looking forward to create a proto-type in Delhi. And with cell phone we have two strategies that is to make the existing cell phones capable through use of dongle and to have a build-in receivers for the new cellphones,” he said.
