Digital Audio Broadcast (also known as digital radio) is a relatively new technology which broadcasts radio stations to a compatible receiver in digital MPEG encoding, providing excellent variety and reliability.

Some argue that the quality of DAB is worse than good quality FM station, but since there is no hiss (aka "white noise") on the signal, nine times out of ten it's better to listen on DAB than traditional FM.

DAB is superior to FM because of its ability to reconstitute lost data when the frequency gets poor. Traditional FM stations transmit on one frequency, and when moving around the FM receiver will drop the FM station or it will deteriorate. Because FM is a multipath propogation technology it suffers from frequency selective fading - basically meaning that when the receiver moves, the signal can (and usually does) deteriorate.

DAB overcomes this by broadcasting the audio across multiple frequencies, and all frequencies are recombined at the receiver and played as one audio stream. The DAB standard allows for the gaps to be filled in, so it is possible to receive a perfect signal in an area with less-than-perfect reception.

Because the spectrum is split into bandwidth rather than allocation of set frequencies, it is possible to get a lot more audio streams in one allocated spectrum, giving the user more choice. My DAB radio currently receives 49 stations.

DAB receivers can be purchased from Amazon for as little as 39.99.

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