MUMBAI: Under the banner “Digital Radio Mondiale Drives Forward”, the 2019 General Assembly of the DRM Consortium took place on Tuesday 26th and Wednesday 27th of March, at the Palma Bellver Bay Meliá Hotel on the Spanish island of Mallorca where India grabbed a lot of eyeballs.  

The DRM General Assembly reviewed in detail the extremely busy past year and discussed the strategy and working plan for the next year.  A full session was dedicated to receiver and receiver solutions. One of the highlights also happened to be the 1.5 million cars with DRM receivers in India.

This year the General Assembly had larger participation, more live transmissions, also received in Barcelona, Austria and the US, with more contributions and receiver models demonstrated than ever before.

The meeting also revealed the plans of public radio broadcaster in Indonesia (RRI). The RRI is determined to acquire two DRM medium wave transmitters for populated areas of Indonesia and two other transmitters to be used for emergency warning in West Sumatra and West Java.  The announcement was made by Freddy Ndolu, member of the Supervisory Board of RRI, who underlined during his announcement that - “Radio is nowadays a multiplatform media and DRM is certainly one of the choices, suitable for a large country like Indonesia with its over 260 million people.  DRM can connect over 16 thousand islands offering an emergency warning to this country right on the ring of fire.”

For DRM chairman Ruxandra Obreja, the General Assembly was: “A moment of celebration, of reaffirming the value of radio and the confident trust in its future.  The participants left motivated, full of ideas and very good contacts.  Many of them will meet soon at NAB, Las Vegas, in April and Broadcast Asia, Singapore in June.”

The current AGM witnessed participation from members and associate members of India, Indonesia, USA, Brazil, Romania, Germany, UK, Hungary, South Africa, Switzerland and Denmark.