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).