Sky Sports Radio taking full advantage of digital radio pictures

Sky Sports Radio’s engineering head Max Carter has been waiting a long time for the coming of digital radio. Years ago, when digital radio was first mooted, he could see the potential for his sports radio station to take advantage of the extra benefits offered by digital radio and was active in its development for Australia. Now that it is here, Carter and his team have developed content that will offer greater benefits for the station’s racing and sports listeners.

Sky Sports Radio (formerly 2KY) is simulcasting its main analog program, and also running slides and DLS. In time Max thinks these value added services will bring in more advertising dollars.

The station is running 64 Kb per second for its primary channel, with 48 Kb for audio and 16 Kb for data. A similar break down is used on the rest of the station’s allocation.

Sky, then known as 2KY, began digital radio trials on L-band in 1998 and has been on air with digital content ever since, so they have had plenty of time to perfect the right sort of screen content.

Carter and his team are “very pleased” with how it is going so far, “particularly with the industry enthusiasm.”

The iRiver is currently the only receiver device that can see the slide show, and the Sky Radio engineering team also now has a broadcast logger that can save the slides as well as the audio that went to air.

After so many years of preparing for it, Max Carter was delighted to see the industry coming together to promote digital radio this week and to see the results of his work bearing fruit.

The iRiver B30 is displayed below.