Every day on my commute to work my digital radio cuts out at the same spot on the road for a second or two. Every time without fail. On both journeys to and fro. Its an open road without any overt barriers or hills, trees etc. Even if it were some obstruction why just at that exact spot on the road and not elsewhere on the same stretch?
If it’s in precisely the same location all the time, I would venture a semi-educated guess that it’s a point between two transmitters, and the time difference between the two signals (multipath) is causing a brief period of uncorrectable bit errors. once you pass through that point the receiver locks and re-syncs to the broadcast signal.
I have HD radio (US digital radio, different tech than DAB) which will lose the digital signal at one particular spot on the road into my neighborhood. Since HD Radio uses the same frequency bands as FM radio, in my case I’ve been told it’s multipath interference due to reflections from nearby structures.
jz78817 makes the good point about multipath. That would be the result of a nearby reflection, but at the wavelengths involved it won’t remain stable as you travel slong the road. My understanding about multiple transmitters was that they used different frequencies, and the receivers would jump between them as needed. Maybe your radio is trying to do this, and doesn’t do it gracefully.
One would assume some form of interference. Digital radio tends to be an all or nothing thing. It doesn’t get audible interference, it either works, or it doesn’t. So, unlike FM, which tends to degrade the audio quality (dynamic range and stereo separation), or AM which just lets the interference through, digital just cuts out when i gets past a certain point, with no clue about how much interference is present when it is operating normally.
You could try tuning to an AM station (if there is one, and your radio can do it) on your journey, and see if there is obvious interference, especially at that spot. The might indicate some malfunctioning equipment nearby that is spraying crub into the ether. However there are more sources possible than this, and the test won’t be definitive.
I’m not 100% on DAB where the OP is, but IIRC it’s similar to satellite radio in the States where they just blast out one big program stream and “channels” are just the receiver picking out certain portions of that stream.
The spectrum used by DAB wasn’t available for civilian use in the US so everyone went with the HD Radio “overlay” on the existing FM radio frequencies.
I’d say that being “midway” inbetween transmitters should cause dead spots in many spots in the midway zone… not just a single dropout area.
Are there overhead powerlines there ? the really high voltage ones… “state grid”… ??
It could be a local transmitter … a radio transmitter near there ?