Monday, September 14, 2026

ERT Showcases DAB+ Digital Radio

...at Thessaloniki International Fair, Coverage Reaches 78%

At the 90th Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF), the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) put its digital transformation front and center, with DAB+ digital radio technology emerging as the standout highlight. ERT's pavilion offered visitors a hands-on look at DAB+ in action, drawing the attention of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who stopped by to learn more about the new technology.

According to information announced during the fair, ERT's DAB+ digital radio network now covers 78% of Greek territory, and all of ERT's radio stations have been integrated into the digital broadcasting system. DAB+ technology offers high-quality audio, stable mobile reception, and digital information transmission capabilities. Visitors to the pavilion could experience the technology firsthand inside modern vehicles equipped with DAB+ receivers, getting a direct feel for how digital radio operates.

Accompanied by ERT Chairman Yiannis Papadopoulos, Prime Minister Mitsotakis sat inside a demonstration vehicle to experience DAB+ in real time. Papadopoulos himself took the "driver's seat," walking the Prime Minister through the system's practical operation. The Prime Minister also asked whether the Third Programme (Trito Programma) had been included in digital broadcasting, and expressed satisfaction with ERT's digital progress in recent years.

In addition, ERT announced that it will offer users more digital news services through the ERTnews platform, further expanding the applications of DAB+.

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Here  s the  updated list of the  Dab system in Thessaloniki 

 

 

UPDATE 26  LIST OF ERA SPECS

 

Service

Transponder

Kbit dab +

Cosmos Jazz

174 .928 MHz

64

Cosmos

72

Radio 80  (80s)

64

Trito  (3rd)

64

V o Greece

56

Vintage (70s )

48

Zeppelin (Rock )

64

2 Paradosiako  (trads)

56

3 Maestro (Clas sels)

64

95.8 era THS

64

Deftero – laika (folk)

56

Deftero  (2nd prog)

72

Era sport

48

Ert news  (ex proto )

72

 

 Unlisted  programs from the Ertflix / Ert-echo complex system 

Summer radio  - soon to be closed? 
102 FM -THS   second program 
Radio 90  - 90s hits 
New  His Radio  -2k and later hits 

 

 

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Using AI with Dxing

 As many know about me (or think they do), I have always struggled to write without making typos. You might recall how my texts used to look in the past. The main problem is my unruly fingers, which don’t always land on the right keys—or they hit some key next to the intended one. It has now been more than two and a half years since I started working with AIs, beginning with a software solution for text correction.

I am here to describe what I have achieved with it, not only in terms of text quality but also in other areas related (or not) to DXing and with the help of software “robots” as many call it even if th truth is AI are just software. I am also introducing you Quilbot a web program I use long time for text editing. More below


Let me know if you'd like a version with slightly more formal phrasing or one that keeps even more of the original sentence fragmentation for character.

 

First let mε introduce  you the programs I use starting from my best :

DeepSeek is my go-to for everything—completely free and packed with abilities, especially in its latest update, which I use with the passion of a teenager.

Gemini is the AI from Google.

Meta, I use just for fun.

Claude, the flagship from Anthropic, is very limited—only three dialogues every four hours, suitable just for trial purposes. I don’t intend to subscribe unless the price drops below $15/month.

Grok I use for limited work, especially for making detailed documentation.

Perplexity is only for testing and some meta-analysis.

ChatGPT was the first AI I used, but I don’t use it very often now, since my top programs can do all the work for free.

That’s  nearly all the most known ! 

My current DXing-AI scenario is very complicated, since it affects almost everything—much more than I could have imagined. In addition to everything else, I still use Quillbot, a fantastic web app also used by university students. It does more than just correct text; it acts as a grammar and writing assistant.

I have been using it for a long time (since 2022?) to replace Google Translate and DeepL, because it has many more capabilities for refining and handling text. Its features outperform my standard way of working by offering—even in the free mode—text restructuring, translation, paraphrasing, humanizer, AI detector, summarizer, plagiarism detector, picture maker [?], plus a set of PDF and image handling tools in their latest version .

Most of these features are in the premium subscription. Don't forget: Quillbot's core is AI-based!

Here are the features I use AIs for today, and how Quillbot can also help with most of them. 

 

-Text correction    ;

 

I first started using Quillbot back in ’22 to clean up my typos. It helped a lot—caught about 90% of my mistakes. That said, I still had to go back and fix a few words manually, leaving maybe a false 5% error rate. That remaining 5% includes some original typos, mostly in my DX-related text.These days, any decent AI can do better, hitting close to 100% accuracy. But for DX purposes, sometimes you need to keep a certain raw style to make the text punchier. 

One thing I’ve noticed: Gemini is the most “agile” when it comes to fixing typos—even when my writing is a total mess. Here’s how Gemini replied when I asked if it could make sense of my typos.



 

  Contextual Analysis: I look at the entire conversation history to figure out what you are talking about. Even if a single sentence is hard to read, the surrounding text usually gives me the clues I need to understand your meaning.

  Pattern Recognition: I am trained on vast amounts of text, including common misspellings, typos, and grammatical errors. This allows me to "correct" what I'm reading in real-time to match the most likely intended word or phrase.

Your bad typing

How I understand

Missing letters

Guess from word shape

Wrong order (nglsi)

Rearrange letters

Mixed Greek/English

Try both dictionaries

Repeated keys

Collapse them

Nearby keys (m instead of I)

Keyboard distance

  Focusing on Intent: Instead of just reading the literal letters, I prioritize understanding what you are trying to achieve. If you ask a question, I look for the core subject and the type of information you are seeking

 

 

#IN nearly the same way, the remaining AI programs can understand someone's bad or garbled writing. Just see what DeepSeek replied.

 


 

-OCR :

 

This is now the most useful operation for most AIs. DeepSeek is the best among them (and free) and can scan texts with 90% accuracy. I have tested it with screenshots on my PC, but also from taking shots from newspapers and handwritten text, with very low success for the handwritten text. Its limits are 50 per chat. It is not good with handwritten text; read below for more.

Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT are also OK, but with limits: just one picture per day for GPT and Grok, Gemini with only 5 per chat bubble. Here are results for Grok and ChatGPT as checked with Gemini. 

For chat gpt The OCR accuracy is approximately 35%, as it frequently failed to identify correct frequencies, times, and technical terminology. Significant errors include misinterpreted station names, missing signal data, and garbled text structures. This poor performance renders the transcription unreliable for accurate radio logging, requiring a manual re-entry of all data.

Grok :The OCR accuracy for this text is approximately 25%. The transcription exhibits severe degradation, including frequent character substitutions, garbled numbers, and misinterpreted technical logs. Essential data, such as frequency values and station identifiers, are consistently corrupted, rendering the log unintelligible and unusable for accurate radio signal documentation or historical analysis.

Deepseek could not recognize handwriten text

 

Text Translation: 

I used the same scheme as above. Originally I used Google Translate with quite bad results. DeepL was quite better, even if the wording was nearly the same. Both have some limits in  their  free operation:

  • DeepL could translate only a few times per day, around 5.
  • Google Translate required texts up to 5,000 characters.
  • The premium version of QuillBot does not have such problems, except in older times leaving some parts of the original text inside the translated text.

 

Still see it having a limit of translation any text. As for example a full  issue of WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Top News could not be translated   

I have also seen some other bugs which have been solved over time. For example, if a paragraph is very long, Quillbot showed an error message that it couldn't handle the text. Texts with mixed language could not be supported either. In a very long German text (>4k), I saw that parts of the original text had been passed to the translation pane.

More recently, Google Translate could translate mixed language (e.g., Greek and English) into Malaysian. 

Any AI program can identify  the original languages  and translate a mixed language   text   into the requested language ie English

 

Summaries:

 

With the proper prompt, it can summarize your text in the default language or even directly into another language. Many times, while dealing with other languages, I could have direct summaries from the original transcript texts, but especially Gemini thinks that it is preferable to manage the texts into bulleted or numbered format. Sometimes you can intervene in the result by using a more or less formal format, or by adding the ’color’ if you wish (casual, satiric, etc.). 

BTW, QuillBot has a separate summary feature with 4 levels, from short to very long summary, also using a keyword from a proposed few to adapt the summary or even add some color as noted above.

 

-Pictures:

 

I am not very sure how picture generation can be useful for any DXer, except for making a useful "business card" as a gift from a radio station. I have been a sub in two specialized web apps (Ideogram and Leonardo AI), two of the flagships in the industry. Leonardo AI is more than a picture generator, It uses a big set of engines to support impressive pictures and very short videos. Ideogram can make pictures and DTP images.

Now most of the  AI web apps can design pictures, starting from GPT with their own model. Imagine is the name for Grok, and Nano Banana for Gemini. I still think that these apps are a bit behind Ideogram but even further behind the Leonardo environment. 

BTW  my  older cards  made for the  two radio programs made for GMR and dangdut were made with a simple DTP program 

 

 

-Transcription:

 

As you know, I have used various systems to transcribe long ago since the "birth" of AI in the last years, which I prefer not to disclose except for the newer Any2txt, which is the toughest model to transcribe any recording for the better. 

Now, continuing the information, most of today's AI programs for transcription support limitless time for transcribing, such as Turboscribe and Yescriber, while others like Any2txt are time dependent with 400 minutes for the basic set.

Most models support 3 levels of accuracy, and this makes them search the higher the file. Based on Whisper engine, which was released near the end of '23. 

Google was also in this wagon since those "old times  by asking users to add Whisper into their "drive" space and run a set of macros to make transcription easier. I used it, but it's been a long time since I stopped… hacking! Every time it required running a macro and then waiting a few minutes until the results ended. Whisper was a little better, but it required clean audio in order to get nearly error-free results. I know that a few DXers also tested using that. 

More recently, offer direct transcription and dig more into audio analysis. In the end  you will see two appendices. The first shows all its capabilities  (A) as an DX assistant with  many examples  and  (B) as a transcription software cross tested with two more . The only things I can note here are: it supports more languages than any other web app, such as Mongol Tibetan or Uighur, for example.

Most audio and video formats are supported, with 5 files max per "chat bubble " with max  time  below 10 minutes, even if the system says it can support up to 5 hours. 

-Handling transcripts 

(embedded text as in my DX logs)

This is something very easy to do without digging more into the digest as shown below. It is something that is rather "default" into Gemini or can be made with limited process in every AI web app, except the design of the prompt.

Just first add all the original or translated transcripts together with their date and time, and ask the app to make the remainder. I prefer to use a 50-word summary for each log.

Next is the daily digest using the same concept. The only difference is handling the full transcripts and an external program (Simplenote) 

(B) Making the day's digest from transcripts

As you all know, I many times prefer to collect all the translations into a final digest posted into Simplenote.

The process I do is simple (old way):

  • Copy-pasting the translated texts from the web apps into a file (and via Google Translate or QuillBot)
  • Add the filename as a header to show date, time, frequency, and most times the WebSDR name
  • Since I use Simplenote, a point is needed to separate paragraphs; this is made with a short macro in Word
  • Copy-paste all the text into Simplenote and a name into the header

 

Making things simpler nowadays , Claude does all the process from start to the end, i.e., the "publishing." Sometimes it goes even farther by adding texted lines. Just look below at the two modes:

 

http://simp.ly/p/DncW7l   the first is in digest 

http://simp.ly/p/kV9sDj    a bit raw mode transcription made 3 weeks before. 

 

I already have a  very good experienceih this program making vcey nice docx files with  rabbles ad patterns in cases of more  complex  texs that required more pro layout.


-Text scraping

for offline use

 

A few times I have made a table based on the EIBI list for a radio station for offline use (i.e., printed form). It was tested in Gemini, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT. All are good in their work, but DeepSeek seemed quite better in sorting the table; otherwise, it takes a short time to format the text then table.

In a different way, these days Gemini provided me in zero time a comparative list of supermarket prices between Greece and another country.

 

Shazaming music / songs

 

This can happen in two cases:

Original Shazaming: Shazam identifies songs by creating a digital fingerprint of an audio sample. It converts the sound into a spectrogram, extracts key frequency peaks, and compares this unique pattern against a massive database to find a matching audio track.

Gemini, in its recent update [28/5], can also track songs with its mixed technology and can identify the song quite easily, with song and singer. There are still missing songs in its playlist, especially from the various songs in the inner Chinese counties or in Myanmar, etc.

 

Link using and making summary

 

This was how I first started two years ago: I made summaries related to ERT or other cases and posted them on radio forums, including WOR. Any of these AI apps (software apps!) used the link I provided and generated a proper article summary. Simplicity itself—just a short prompt..

 

- meta summary (summery of multiple AI summaries)

I wanted to go deeper into the subject. Instead of sticking to only one AI, I decided to use more than four. I would take all the articles, combine them into a new summary, or even merge all opinions into one long, complete story. In the end, one of the AIs would finalize the process. For example, I would start with GPT, Gemini, and Claude, and then use DeepSeek to summarize or blend all the texts. It is the only program that can handle very long texts.

You already seen my  latest  posts : The  Eurovision  asia is one of these cases. There are a few more article sin my pages in  both zliangaslogs page and my more general  page

 

-Predefined scripts for tailor making other text etc tasks

 

Sometimes it is better to let AI correct my texts—not only for clarity but also to provide basic reasoning, acting as a lawyer might, or even to rewrite the entire text for smoother English. As you know, I am not a native English speaker. Therefore, AI can go beyond simple corrections and dig deeper by rewording the text to achieve better English fluency.

 

- Identify the closest transmitters for a kSDR

 

Two times I used it together with the MW list table to find the closest transmitter near to the kSDR used. The results were a bit weird as I was still in doubt about the results.

 

- Preparing the email for a radio station for requesting a QSL

 

This process began with an audio clip containing all the relevant information for a radio station report. Gemini asked me if it can prepare a QSL hunter email based on that clip.

 

Gemini handled everything: it searched for the station's email address (though not always accurate), composed the email with sender, receiver, and subject lines, formatted the text according to standard QSL hunting practices, organized the monitoring details (date, time, signal quality, SNR, etc.), added the program log, identified any songs present, and arranged all the information into a professional-looking email.

 

Simpler  text handling not reoffered above

- A2z sorting if you don’t want  to use word to do that

- text  cleaning  I had some cluttered texts after scanning a very large document with a manual OCR program. This simple option not only cleaned up the garbage but also translated the text into Greek.

Something that seems not so easy: if you ask, for example, to keep the dialogue in your original language while handling the rest of the text in another language, it turns out to be quite difficult. You need to be very persistent, guiding it with more instructions than expected.

Many times, these programs forget what you previously wrote, especially from very old discussions in the same thread. 

 .........

The full  text is very long for here as it contains three  more things:

Part A list of text handling  by DeepSeek

Part B Gemini as your best  Dx assistant – a nice discussion with Gemini on what it can for a DXer including some analysis  with 🥝SDRs 😊

Part C  transcription measurements between Ais. Which is the best? 

You can fin that  as a PDF article

https://app.box.com/s/d3l4o9ib498easwdkbmdxl75wo1tpdfy

 

 

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