DAB was clearly not designed for long/medium/short-wave. The developers of DAB have already completed a new standard for sub-VHF broadcast called DRM: http://www.drm.org/
The DRM standards (ETSI TS 101980) is freely available from http://www.etsi.org/. I agree that local AM/FM can be expected to stay around for much longer than the analog TV standards, because the bandwidth the radio stations require are orders of magnitude smaller than what the analogue TV stations waste at the moment. I'd expect digital radio to become most populat first in the ionospheric channels, as these are notoriously overcrowded, and digital modulation provides a significant improvement of audio quality, even at at comparable bandwidth, in these channels. The broadcasting landscape also is very different economically in the US and many parts of Europe. The US has a huge number of local stations, whereas in Europe, a significant amount of programming is provided by national networks. For national broadcasters, the ability of OFDM schemes such as DAB and DVB-T to be used in single-frequency networks (because a far away station is then just yet another echo that can be eliminated) is very attractive, as it allows significatly more efficient use of the radio spectrum. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
