Students at Ravensbourne have launched their own digital terrestrial channel as part of their annual graduate showcase.

Christened ‘R13’, the channel will broadcast for two days (Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 June) as part of the digital media and design college’s The Degree Show.

Ofcom has granted Greenwich-based Ravensbourne an RTSL-E (restricted television service licence for an event) licence for a low-power, 5w transmission.

Residents in and around the Docklands area and south east London will be able to watch student-generated content on two temporary Freeview channels, in SD on channel 792 and in HD on channel 793.

Co-head of transmission for The Degree Show Ben Carson said: “This year we have opted to encode our SD and HD services using MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 and then broadcast these on a DVB-T multiplex.

“This method of transmission is defined in the DVB-T specification but it has never been used in the UK.

“Transmitting in this manor will allow any SD DTT receivers to view the SD channel and any HD DTT receivers to view both.”

The broadcast engineering students worked with Arqiva to build the broadcast chain.

“We are only broadcasting two channels on our multiplex, so we have a higher bit rate budget to play with in comparison to commercial broadcasters,” added co-head of transmission Sean Mehmet.

“This means that during the two days we will be broadcasting one of the UK’s highest quality HD channels on DTT in terms of bit rate.”

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