Frontier Enhances DAB+ with Automatic Safety Alert Feature

4^th September 2024

As part of a global initiative with the DAB+ industry, Frontier has been working on defining and developing a new feature that will provide widespread benefits for digital radio listeners and their communities.

Automatic Safety Alert (ASA) builds on top of the DAB+ standard and enables safety alerts to be automatically broadcast to listeners via audio, text and images, allowing for key information to be reliably and rapidly delivered to large numbers of people.

Alerts will play out on DAB+ radio receivers, even in standby mode the device will wake up for critical alerts. Locations are configured on each device via a location code and alerts can be broadcast so they only play out on devices within a configured region.

ASA will be supported on Frontier's Kino 4 Pro chip and Siena Pro module with a new SDK version later this year. The chip and module, which powers over 25 million DAB radios, have passed the latest Digital Tick technology test plan and will be the first to pass the ASA certification in Q4 2024. First products are expected to go into mass production in early 2025.

ASA functionality will be another unique feature added to Frontier’s SDK, alongside other proprietary radio technologies such as BestTune™, ActiveScan™, and NoiseSkip™ that are built into Frontier’s DAB solutions. Together, these features make Frontier’s DAB+ solutions truly stand out in terms of performance and robustness.

Frontier Managing Director, Prem Rajalingham, said ‘ASA will deliver value to listeners and communities as an important safety system in their homes that builds on radio’s robustness in a crisis. We are grateful that we can contribute to such an important initiative and lead the way with development, certification and market launch. We are looking forward to the feature getting into homes and making a positive difference’.

Frontier will be showcasing the ASA demo at their booth during IFA (Hall 14, stand 401) and powering beta products from Technisat and JVC Kenwood that will test ASA for the German alarm day on the 12th September.

ASA, a registered trademark in the EU, UK, and Switzerland, was previously referred to internally as EWS (Emergency Warning System) before its official launch in August this year.