AN OFDM ALL-DIGITAL IN-BAND-ON-CHANNEL (IBOC) AM AND FM RADIO SOLUTION USING THE PAC ENCODER

Recent advances in digital communications and compression algorithms h ave made more efficient and more robust transmission schemes possible. Radio broadcast systems have not fully utilized these advances to the ir benefit. All digital robust radio broadcast systems for the AM and the FM band are proposed in this paper. The proposed systems are based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology in co njunction with PAC for both the AM and the FM bands. The Perceptual Au dio Coder (PEG) developed by Bell Laboratories compresses audio signal s very efficiently with CD-like quality at 96 kbps and stereo FM-like quality at 48 kbps. These are rates achievable with 200 kHz and 30 kHz bandwidths available per FM and AM station respectively, No new spect rum is required since the digital signals are transmitted within the c urrent allocated FCC masks. Tn an FM channel, a wide-band data subchan nel can be provided in addition to the 96 kbps error protected PAC aud io information.