Digital radio specialist RadioScape is opening a development centre in Hong Kong which will work with its London-based staff on developing radio-based technologies including mobile TV.

“We believe now is the right time to take the next step, which is putting development activities out here, particularly as we are looking beyond the traditional digital radio markets into the area of mobile TV,” said John Hall, RadioScape’s CEO.

Hall said there is a “great pool of very talented engineers” in Hong Kong and the firm was “taking advantage of some skills out here we can’t usually get in the UK”.

The development activities in the UK, involving around 55 people, will continue, although now the geographically separate teams will work on projects together.

“We will be using both teams as if they were one and they’ll be working on joint projects quite a lot of the time,” said Hall. “We’re not expecting developers to work on exactly the same areas of code, or hardware design concurrently. They will be partitioned in such a manner that people don’t cross over with each other all the time. Our designs are very modular.”

RadioScape has also launched its first DAB digital radio module, the RS220, which uses its RF IC front-end chip which can handle six frequency bands.

The module is a plug-in replacement for other RadioScape modules but with reduced power consumption and cost.

“It’s about cost and power,” said Dave Hawkins, v-p of business development at RadioScape. “This is the first time we’ve been able to produce a really low cost module that does L-band DAB as well as DAB III.”