Month: August 2010

IBOC update, part II

In a way that never ceases to amaze me, Bob Strubel spins another yarn about HD Radio.™  According to Bob:

Tom’s experiences at the Ford dealership are disappointing. We believe they reflect the growing pains which often occur when companies launch new technologies. Tom hit the lot as factory installed HD Radio receivers were just launching.

Well, then, I guess that explains that.  If I went to a Ford dealership today, I’d find plenty of models with HD radio(s)™ stock, right?

As far as new technology and growing pains, let us pick that apart piece by piece:

  • IBOC has been in development since 1990 or thereabouts.  Not really new technology.  Apple’s iPhone and iPad are new technology (2 years and 3 months respectively).
  • Ford Motor Company has been an HD Radio™ partner since 2007.  One would think that all the kinks would be worked out by now.
  • The IBOC rollout hit a wall around 2008 and hasn’t grown since then, both the AM technology, which appears to be shrinking, and the FM technology, which appears to be subsidized by the US government.

To test Mr. Strubel’s next statement:

Had he been able to hold out with his old Explorer for another couple months, he would have been able to purchase an Escape with a factory installed HD Radio receiver as these vehicles hit dealerships the first week of August.

It is now the third week in August, I stopped by three Ford dealerships in reasonable-sized cities around here.  Not really wanting to waste a salesperson’s time, I cut to the chase and asked about vehicles with HD radios.  Here is the response:

  • Dealership #1 said they knew about HD radio, but none were in any of their stock vehicles.  They also could not give me an idea of how long I’d have to wait to receive one if ordered separately.
  • Dealership #2 pointed me in the direction of SiriusXM, saying that satellite radio was digital radio, or HD Radio™, or whatever it was
  • Dealership #3 never heard of HD Radio™ and said that all their radios were digital (Like, Duh!)

Finally, there is this standard iBiquity statement that seems to go well in any situation:

…it’s ironic that his negative experience happened at a time when the consumer rollout of HD Radio Technology is stronger than it has ever been. We are seeing dramatic receiver sales increases across all segments – OEM auto, consumer electronics, and the new portable HD Radio category. Overall sales of HD Radio receivers will more than double in 2010, and that is on top of a doubling from 2008 to 2009. Can anyone point to any other facet of AM/FM that has seen this sort of growth over the last several years?

Sure, analog AM and FM receivers continue to fly off the shelves in all the markets quoted above too.  Furthermore, doubling receiver sales from one small number to another small number is not that dramatic.  As Mark Twain said: “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  It’s like the rookie batting 1000 after his first time at bat; it happens occasionally, it is really not that dramatic or remarkable.

Comparing new technology such as the iPad to middle-aged technology such as IBOC is silly.  The iPad has all sorts of neat features, interactive programs, applications, etc.  IBOC is just a one-way radio that does sound any better than the old-style radios.

Remotes using a Smart Phone

I was fooling around with my HTC  Android phone yesterday and discovered something that has a definite use for radio remotes.  An Application called Hertz will record .wav files, which can then be transferred via e-mail or ftp to the studio and played back on the air.  The program is pretty slick, it allows sample rates from 8 to 44.1 kHz.

I made a sample recording, the microphone in the HTC phone is okay, a better microphone would sound better.  After it was done, I emailed it to myself and listened on the laptop.  The email took about 4 minutes for 20 seconds of a 32 kHz .wav file.  One could cut that down by choosing a lower sample rate.  I have found that 32 kHz is the minimal acceptable sample rate for analog FM.  Anything lower than that sounds choppy.

In another potential use, a news reporter could use this to record audio to save and transfer to a computer using a USB cable.  The recording time limit depends on the size of the SIM card and the sample rate.  Additionally, my HTC Android phone will detect and use WiFi networks, where available, for data services.  Using a WiFi network will avoid those 3G data charges and also increase download/upload speeds.

My Verizon plan has unlimited data transfer, so it really doesn’t matter what sample rate I use, your mileage may vary.

Couple the Hertz app with the VNC app mentioned previously, and a person could do all sorts of things remotely with a radio station.  The Hertz app is available for free download from the Android app store.

East wind rain

Yesterday, August 14th, was the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.  Prior to the start of the US involvement in WWII, the Army and Navy had been intercepting and decrypting radio messages between Japanese military units, consulates, embassies, and other overseas locations.

Back in the day, most everything was sent via Morse code over HF radio circuits.   It was the fastest way to send information from one point to the next.  These messages would be encrypted offline, either by hand or by a special typewriter.  The message text would then be altered into 5-number, seemingly random, groups.  On the other side, they would be deciphered using a key that matched the enciphering key.   There were several different ciphers systems being used, some for diplomatic traffic, several others for military, merchant marine, etc.

Since the messages were transmitted via radio, they were easy to intercept.  Everyone knew that the other side was listening.  The Japanese assumed that their codes were secure because a “Caucasian mind could not possibly unravel the intricacies of a Japanese code.”  An assumption the Navy cryptanalysts had different ideas about.  Through the 1930s and early 1940s they broke some of these codes, but not all of them.

The Japanese diplomatic code was called “purple” by the US cryptanalysts.  It relied on a machine called System 97 (by the Japanese) which used telephone stepper relays to generate an ever-changing stream of random code groups.  It was considered too secure to break.  William Friedman, a mathematician working for the Army, studied the purple messages and deduced that it was a machine-generated code.  He then went to work on duplicating the machine and after a year or so came up with a perfect replica of the Japanese System 97 machine in early 1941.  From that point on, almost all of Japan’s diplomatic message traffic was being read by the Army, Navy, and state departments.  This work was top secret and carried out at the war department in Washington.  Information gleaned would be sanitized and transmitted to major commands as needed for tactical intelligence.

In early November 1941, the Japanese foreign office came up with the following code to be transmitted to the embassies in the event of the outbreak of war:

HIGASHI NO KAZE AME (East wind rain) = Japan – US

KITA NO KAZE KUMORI (North wind cloudy)= Japan – USSR

NISHI NO KAZE HARE (West wind clear)= Japan – Britain

It is believed that on either December 4th or 5th, East wind rain message was received and decrypted.  This was testified to Congress in 1945 by the head of the Navy COMMINT section, however, no record of the decrypted message exists.  Instead, there is a blank page and a missing message number (JD-7001) in the Japanese diplomatic intercepts file.

The fleet commander at Pearl Harbor knew none of this, as the information was kept under close wraps by the Navy Department in Washington.  In early December 1941, almost everyone figured that war with Japan would happen very soon.  Most of the Washington set believed it would start in the Philippines, then a US territory.  No figured that the Japanese would steam 3,900 miles undetected and launch a sneak attack on the US military base in Hawaii.  The attacking planes homed in on the signal from KGMB (after-war reading of Cmd. Fuchida’s (IJN strike leader) diary indicates the actual station was KGMB on 590 KHz, and not KGU as their website claims), to help find Hawaii from carriers still 230 miles away.  The station had remained on the air overnight to assist a group of B-17 navigates from the west coast.  Unaware of the impending danger, the Hawaii military bases were enjoying a peaceful Sunday morning until 7:48 am, when the first bombs began to fall.

Of course, had the Japanese pressed the attack and launched a third wave to take out the fuel storage and repair facilities, indeed, history might be different.  The Pacific Fleet would have had to retire to California, leaving Hawaii exposed and quite possibly invaded.

Most people on the mainland first heard about the attack via radio.  At 2:22 pm Eastern time, the AP issued a news bulletin and at 2:27 pm CBS broke into their Sunday afternoon programming to announce the attack.  The radio played an important part in WWII from start to finish.

VNC for Android phone

With the advent of computer file storage and automation came unmanned operation.  Unfortunately, what often happens with unmanned operations is somehow the engineer becomes responsible for station operation and ends up getting all the phone calls when anything goes wrong:

  • Traffic forgot to transfer the Sunday log and the station is off the air at 12 am Sunday morning.  Call the engineer.
  • Part-time DJ didn’t read the directions on merging logs, call the engineer.
  • Windows has encountered a problem and needs to reboot, call the engineer.
  • The server has locked up, call the engineer.
  • Silence sensor, engineer’s phone number

I got sick of driving to the radio station when things got out of whack with the AudioVault, so I installed VNC on all the machines.  From that point, I could log on from home and see what the problem was.  It was great, when traffic goobers up the log transfer, I called the traffic director at home and had her go in a fix it.  Untrained operators, called the program director.  Unfortunately, I don’t have Bill Gate’s phone number, so the Windows issues are still on me.

All of this was great as long as my laptop was around.  Being married, however, I had to occasionally listen to my wife, who insisted that we not take the laptop to dinner or the movies with us.  There were those occasional times when it would have been nice.

With the purchase of the Android phone, however, I no longer have to worry about that.  Android VNC is a free app that allows an Android phone to connect to any VNC server application.  The user can save all the VNC connection information on the phone.  It has several mouse options including a touch pad, touchpad mouse, mouse trackball, etc.  It connects to most VNC servers: incl TightVNC, RealVNC on Win and Linux, x11vnc, and Apple Remote Desktop on OS/X. 0.4.3.  Special commands such as ctl-alt-del are available through the menu.  It is also fully zoomable.  All in all, I can do almost anything with the Android phone that I can do on the laptop.  My wife is thrilled.

It is a time saver.