The requirements for television are *different* to radio, so it’s dangerous for radio to assume a television platform will meet its requirements. There is always a new technology to explore, and a new concept being thought of. That’s not the same as having a system that’s proven to work, and that has lots of receivers, and has them at the right prices for consumers.

I’m sure DVB-T2 will be good for television. I know some people working on the project, in both transmission and for television set-top-box and integrated receivers, and they are fine technologists. But none of them think they are developing a system for digital radio.

FYI: first Modulators and silicon-chip receiver ar available. I guest we will see a lot of T2-receiver at the early 2010.
(please excuse my poor english)

It’s true that DVB-T2 can achieve a very high information density, but there are a number of tradeoffs. Firstly I’m not sure that the power levels you mention would provide an adequate C/N (signal to noise) on a mobile receiver without a directional antenna. DVB-T2 is intended to provide signal to TV antennae, mounted on roofs, which have high noise rejection. I also wonder if it will be able to provide sufficient rejection of multi-path signals, and cope with the Doppler effects of moving vehicles? DVB-T2 is also a wide bandwidth technology, which means it will be power-hungry to decode, which would have an impact on battery powered devices.

COFDM, on which DAB and DAB+ are based, is very rugged and robust, and provides quite high information density. Admittedly, MPEG2 is not the best codec in terms of quality/bit ratio, and no country taking DAB on now would use MPEG2. The combination of HE AAC v2 and Reed Solomon Coding (and Fire code) makes the DAB+ signal very robust and very information dense – two important qualities when talking about a mobile medium. The bandwidth is appropriate – about right for a battery powered handheld device, and it can be delivered in Band III in 1.7 MHz channelisations, which is quite spectrum efficient. At Band III, the signals have propagation characteristics similar to existing Band II (FM/UKW) signals. Moving to UHF changes those, the network design and the power efficiency of transmission, quite a lot.

There is no perfect technology, and we should also consider things outside of technology.

DVB-T2 is just being designed now, and there are no real-world deployments. There are certainly no handheld receivers, or kitchen radios, or car radios for DVB-T2. A DVB-T2 receiver will be complex, and expensive. Sure, if you wait long enough, some of that will change.

DAB+ is working now. The technology works, there are lots of receivers available and they are at good prices. There is also the basis of a DAB+ network already in existence in Germany.

I sometimes explain it like this. If you buy a computer today, there will be a better computer in a year from now. You could buy the best computer you can now, and it might last 10 years (my Dell 8200 at home is 8 years old). Or you can keep waiting and waiting for a “better” computer. The problem is, if you keep waiting, you find one day that all your friends are on Facebook and Twitter and E-mail, and you are still using a chisel and a piece of stone.

The DAB Modulation is a very old (first) digiltal modulation technology.
Better effiency may be reached by DVB-T2 i.e. (near to Shannon)
A DVB-T2 modulated Transmitter would need 10 dB less power to cover the same DAB area with same data rate.

What do you think about this fact (having Germany in mind).

Also, I am not totally convinced that your suggestion that the broacaster will decide the best bandwidth for their respective speech/music output platforms. I would suspect that DAB audio quality will, in the main, suffer a considerable downgrade to that we currently have come to value with Vhf FM.
Regards
David Prewett