RadioHack Drives Lively Radio Innovation
The European Broadcasting Union’s RadioHack event, which takes place each year during the EBU Digital Radio Week, brings together hardware and software developers from various organizations, including non-EBU members, to share projects and ideas.
The event aims to push technology a step further by modifying it. Radio is traditionally “live,” but it is safe to say that during each RadioHack, radio becomes “lively!” It is a place where coders, solderers and thinkers collaborate and innovate together, working on new ideas and technologies and exploring how existing ones can be linked together.
Probably one of the least formal events organized by the EBU, RadioHack has no dresscode, and once inside the “laboratory,” participants find evaluation boards, software-defined radio platforms, test-bed hardware, as well as “donor” off-the-shelf devices to be “hacked.”
The 2018 edition of RadioHack focused on broadcasting tools for small and community stations, new hybrid services and smart speakers.
Matthias Brändli, lead developer for Open Digital Radio, fine-tuned a set of tools capable of turning any computer into a microrange digital audio broadcasting transmitter, and ran a live demo. Open Digital Radio is a nonprofit organization with the goal of enabling small and community radio stations to step from analog transmission to digital radio.
“This set of tools have been tested in several locations,” Brändli explained, “and we’ve also been able to prove, using this set of technology tools, that digital audio broadcasting can be used for small coverages and for projects on a small scale.”
By Davide Moro