In Italy, radio is one of the most popular media, thanks to its immediacy and ubiquity. DAB+ is the technology chosen by most European countries for the digital evolution of radio. Reliability, sound quality, transmission efficiency, energy efficiency, textual and graphic information services: DAB+ Digital Radio overcomes analogue radio in several ways.

The standard has been successfully adopted by several European countries: as Norway, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy. Among them, Norway has begun the FM switch-off at the beginning of 2017, and other countries have plans for the Digital Switch-Over.

Rai is planning to extend DAB+ services to the most important Italian urban areas and to the motorways (including service continuity in tunnels). Radio service transmission inside tunnels requires methods such as the installation of radiating cables (“leaky-feeders”) along the tunnel ceiling. This approach is costly, thus leading RAI Research Center to investigate the feasibility of an alternative approach using direct RF irradiation by means of antennas positioned outside the tunnels (not far from the entrance) or internally.

MIND is the “Content Management” and “Multichannel Publishing” system that allows to associate and synchronize images and textual information with each of the DAB+ radio channels distributed across the network nationwide. Its ability to synchronize with the channel’s schedule and to choose and create new content to be transmitted, allows to get a channel dynamism even without a continuous publisher’s intervention.