Frontier supporting DAB+ Emergency Warning System launch 2024

In times of emergencies, authorities need to deliver a clear message quickly and reliably. In Germany and other European countries, DAB+ has been identified as a robust and reliable way to send out messages to people with DAB+ receivers.

As a member of a WorldDAB taskforce, Frontier is participating in developing a new EWS (Emergency Warning System) specification that will broadcast emergency warning messages over DAB+. The standard is expected to be finalised in 2024 – with compatible radios on the market by the end of the year.

Key receiver functionality will include:

• Receiving broadcast alerts from DAB+ ensembles that are part of the EWS network
• Automatically waking up a receiver when an emergency alert is detected
• Playing audio alerts on receivers with optional text and images

Reliability is the key feature of EWS and the Frontier team is developing a receiver solution that will always receive emergency alerts from enabled DAB+ ensembles.

An important aspect of the design is to balance being able to receive emergency alerts whilst in standby mode and thus powering on the device and playing the alert, while managing power optimisation of the device so that it is not unnecessarily power-hungry. 

Frontier Kino 4’s integrated, single chip architecture, is an efficient solution allowing power to be optimised while a receiver can rapidly power-on, check for alerts and then return to standby mode. The chip is delivered with Frontier's mature DAB stack, with proprietary technologies like BestTune^TM, ActiveScan^TM, and NoiseSkip^TM built-in, enabling best-in-class radio reception.

Frontier will add EWS support to Kino 4 with a new software SDK version. For existing Kino 4 based products, brands should be able to rapidly re-launch them with EWS by upgrading to the new software SDK.

As the world’s most deployed DAB+ platform, Kino 4 chip, and its module variants Siena / Siena-Pro, are the best solutions to create products with EWS. With over 65 million products shipped and more than 20 years in the digital radio market, core reliability and compliance is built into Frontier solutions.

Frontier will lead the market with products that pass the EWS certification and can start working with brands now to plan their product roadmap to include EWS.