Astra Digital Radio

~ the eulogy ~

An analog television channel on a satellite does not use all of its bandwidth for the picture. There are audio subcarriers sitting beside it, several of them, and most of the time most of them are empty. ADR is what SES Astra did with that empty space: it put a digital radio station in each one, encoded as MPEG-1 Audio Layer II at 192 kbit/s and 48 kHz, with a 9.6 kbit/s channel alongside for data.

SES showed it at the 40th IFA in Berlin, which ran from 26 August to 3 September 1995. By the end of that decade almost every ARD station was on it, along with almost every station of the Swiss SRG. About ten commercial broadcasters joined them. English Wikipedia counts 51 stations as of February 2008.

You needed a receiver built for it. An ADR tuner was not a DVB box and a DVB box was not an ADR tuner, so the audience was exactly the set of people who had bought the right hardware and pointed a dish at 19.2 degrees east. German Wikipedia says new ADR receivers are no longer sold at all, and that only used units are left.

The ending was not an ADR decision. ARD and ZDF announced in October 2009 that German analog satellite broadcasting would stop in April 2012, and the switch-off was scheduled for three in the morning on 30 April. The analog transponders went, and the subcarriers inside them went too, carrying off every station that had been riding in one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the subcarrier ~

The trick is older than the satellite. Terrestrial FM had been hiding data beside the audio for decades, and analog satellite TV had spare audio paths by design, for second language tracks that most channels never used. ADR took the unused capacity of one medium and ran a different medium through it.

That is also the whole of its fragility. A format with no transponder of its own has no say in when it ends, and ADR's end date was decided in a meeting about television.

~ what DVB-S took over ~

None of the stations died on 30 April 2012. German public radio had been on DVB-S alongside ADR for years, which is why the German press coverage of the switch-off is about television sets and barely mentions radio: the migration advice was to buy a digital satellite receiver that handles radio, and the FM transmitters were untouched.

The dish population ADR needed sat in German-speaking Europe. Satellite in Turkey means a different arc of the sky. The dishes on the balconies here point at Turksat, twenty-three degrees further east, at a lineup with no ARD anywhere in it. A format whose whole audience is fixed by one orbital slot and one broadcasting language is easy to miss entirely, and I did.

~ three in the morning on 30 April ~

The German-language Wikipedia article carries the death sentence without a footnote on it, which is a fair reflection of how this ended. There was no ADR announcement and no press release with the word ADR in the headline. ADR appears in the record as a line in somebody else's shutdown, and the only published hour attached to it is the 03:00 scheduled for the analog carrier underneath.

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