The birth of Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting in Europe: a brief history of the creation and the standardization phases of Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and Digital Terrestrial TV broadcasting (DVB-T)

Research work on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) began in Europe in the middle 1980´s within the European Broadcasting Union. The CCETT (Centre Commun d´Etudes de Télédiffusion et Télécommunications) contributed to these studies and proposed to analyze the performance of a multi-carrier transmission scheme as the PHY layer for DAB. The first concepts studied in 1986 were further refined and, in 1987, the principles of a “coded OFDM” transmission scheme for digital audio broadcasting to mobile receivers were proposed. Later on, this scheme was also adopted to form the European Digital Terrestrial TV broadcasting standard (DVB-T).