Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) system performances in multipath fading environment

Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) is a new digital radio broadcasting system for the frequency bands below 30 MHz. A high quality of audio and data transmission is achieved by adoption of the COFDM modulation with a multilevel coding scheme, which has high resistance to the multipath fading and interference. In this article we present measurement results and an analysis of the multipath propagation influence on the DRM system performance. The experimental results show that in presence of two propagation paths the DRM system works well till delay of the second path exceeds the guard interval in the OFDM signal. Most critical situation is when delay is equal to the guard interval, and for a higher delay the SIN ratio of the DRM signal even increases.