Grubesa S., Grubesa T., Domitrovic H.

The new digital radio standard has introduced many advantages over the standard broadcasting techniques used for analog broadcasting. The transmission signal is created digitally using the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex(OFDM), which enables a much more effective channel usage and reduces problems with interference and multipath propagation. In the service layer, four services are possible in only one standard AM channel, all of them with FM-like quality and multimedia features. Although all these new features make DRM superior to all analog systems, the main disadvantage of DRM broadcasting systems is the relatively low average transmitted power in comparison with standard AM transmission on the same transmitter, due to the big peaks in DRM signals which make the crest factor as large as 10. To solve or reduce this problem, it is possible to compress/limit the DRM signal in the baseband, but this introduces significant errors in the digital stream. In order to avoid this error insertion and to increase average transmitted power at the same time, the algorithm for compression of the peaks in the DRM signal using the multiband compressor-limiters has been designed.