I am sitting at work right now, so i cant really reference anything at the moment. Let me try to explain off the top of my head. Principle operation of DME is that your aircraft sends out an interrogating signal made up of paired pulses at a specific spacing, which are then received by the DME ground antenna. The ground station then responds by sending back a pair of pulses to interrogate the aircraft. The signal sent out by the ground station is at 2700HZ and each aircraft uses 30HZ. So if you do the simple math, that means that only 90 aircraft can use a DME station at once. Thats why they tell air-carriers to turn off their DME when sitting at the gate.