Radio World, bless them, has yet another article about the public’s lack of awareness regarding HD Radio®. Calling it “lack of awareness,” is overly kind and I think they are missing the point. It would be better phrased “apathy” or “indifference.”
There is a general misconception in the world that one either loves or hates something. That is not true, the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The public has voted, with their wallets, for things like 3 and 4G wireless devices, satellite radio, iPods and other entertainment venues. Why? Because HD Radio® is not an advance, it is a repackaging of old ideas with slick marketing. The general public has viewed the great digital radio conversion with a jaundiced eye, opting to sit on the fence and wait for something better. What has iBiquity given them?
The technology itself is a step backwards with many band aids needed to affect the same coverage area as analog FM. A technology that has poorer building penetration, less coverage area , mobile reception issues with no appreciable difference in sound quality or program material offerings. A power increase from 1% to 10% analog carrier power (20dBc to -10dBc) hasn’t really made a difference. Now, studies are underway looking at asymmetrical sidebands and same frequency repeater networks for FM IBOC. All of these things, not to improve radio reception, but rather to achieve the same coverage as analog FM.
The AM HD Radio® has even greater issues.
There is nothing at all surprising about the public indifference toward HD Radio®.
I went to put the HD transmitter back on the air for WEBE yesterday, to be confronted with this:
Harris Deathstar HD radio exciter
Swearing ensued.
The fault is with the RF upconverter, which is unlocked. I don’t know why the GPS is unlocked, I’ll have to climb up on the roof and look at the antenna.
An interesting take from a non-broadcaster that gets it mostly right. The premise for HD radio™, as the author states, was to serve two purposes; improve sound quality and add extra programming channels. I have a few issues with this statement:
Regarding the improved signal, that still holds true, and can be especially beneficial for AM radio, which has struggled for some time with signal degradation.
I would argue the opposite. HD Radio™ has done nothing to improve the signal quality of the AM band. It has, in fact, degraded the band further by adding digital hash to adjacent channels, limiting the on channel analog bandwidth to less than 5 KHz and creating on channel background hiss.
Thus, HD Radio™ has done neither of those two stated goals. In addition to that, from the radio station owner/operator’s perspective, it is expensive to install, expensive to license, expensive to operate and has no audience.
In an open letter to broadcasters, the entirety of which can be found here: Ford Exec Writes Open Letter to Broadcasters, Jim Buczkowski, who’s official title seems to be “Henry Ford Technical Fellow and Director, Electrical and Electronic Systems Research and Innovation Ford Motor Company,” nearly begs broadcasters to install HD Radio technology at their radio stations.
One thing that seems to be missing from the open letter, something mildly important called: Disclosure. According to iBiquity’s own website, Ford Motor Company is an investor in the technology. Other investors include:
Clear Channel
CBS Radio
Grotech Capital Group
J.P. Morgan Partners
New Venture Partners
FirstMark Capital
Harris
Texas Instruments
Visteon
Not an inclusive list by any means, but something to keep in mind when reading the letter or the latest iBiquity advertising in various trade magazines.
Back to the letter; the cliff notes version is this:
Through the use of HD Radio, AM/FM broadcasters can now embrace the digital age
Drivers now have many choices for in car entertainment, including satellite radio (Sirius XM) and online services (Pandora, et.al) that offer “Crystal Clear” audio
Through Satellite radio, MP3 players, and IP streaming services, drivers now have extra features like: Title, song and artist; Song tagging; iTunes; album art, etc which they have become accustomed to
Installing HD Radio will be a big upgrade and make AM/FM station on par with those “digital age” services
For the first part, there is not a single broadcaster in the country that is not already aware of HD Radio. Every radio station manager and owner knows that it exists, most people in the general public do not. Radio stations are hesitant to install HD Radio equipment because it is expensive, has a questionable return on investment, is unimpressive and technically dubious.
Making the comparison to Satellite Radio and or IP streaming services, which all require subscriptions or data plans, is a bit of a stretch. Someone who will pay a fee for in car entertainment is usually a tech geek. As the subscription rates for Sirius XM shows, that works out to about seven percent of the US population (~20 million subscribers/~300 million people). It is a bit harder to nail down those who listen to streaming products like Pandora, iHeartRadio or other webstreams in their cars, but I’d estimate not more than ten percent do.
While 3G and 4G wireless services are great, it still does not have the same coverage as standard and FM broadcasting stations. Last time I tried to listen to Pandora in my vehicle, it kept dropping out and was not easy to deal with. With TuneIn radio, I had the same experience during urban, suburban and rural driving. Thus, the “Crystal Clear” reception is also a bit of a misnomer.
Further, fooling around with iPods, iPhones, TuneIn, Pandora, etc while driving is not the best idea. Even on vehicles with built in IP connectivity or satellite radio, looking for song titles and other information while driving is not recommended. Thus, the value added services of HD Radio are of questionable at best in a moving vehicle.
I hate to keep beating a dead horse, but for as long as the iBiquity crew continues to spout disingenuous bull sh!t about their failed technology, I’ll keep posting about it.
Once a bastion of the AM dial, News and or News/Talk format radio stations seem to be springing up on the FM band more and more often. The original premise for creating talk radio on the AM band was the lower bandwidth and reduced (or perception of reduced) fidelity when compared to the FM band lent itself to non-music programming. The reality is that receiver manufactures never carried through on the NRSC-2 technical improvements, and AM receivers reproduced thin, low quality audio. I digress, the story goes, the FM band was great for music and the AM band did well with information and talk.
Of course, there were always a few exceptions to those general rules, but for the most part, that pattern held true until about 2009 or 10. That is when AM station’s programming began to be simulcast again (everything old is new again) on FM stations and HD-2 subchannels. It would be interesting to examine why this is so and what it means to the radio business as a whole.
The general trend in the music industry has also been down. This is important because record labels and the radio business used to go hand in hand. Record labels had the job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Those groups or artist that had the talent would be given recording contracts and airplay. With exposure, they would become more known, sell more recordings, record more songs, etc until they peaked and began to decline. Radio stations prospered under this arrangement because they took on none of the risk while getting huge vast quantities of program material to playback, and charge advertising fees for spaces within that programming.
So far so good.
Then, two things happened:
The communications act of 1996
The internet
The communications act of 1996 forever changed the way the radio business was run in this country. No longer were there several thousand individual stations, the most influential of which resided in markets #1 and #2. Instead there were conglomerations of stations run out of Atlanta, Fort Worth and a dozen or so other medium sized cities. No longer were stations competing head to head and trying to be the best and serve their respective audiences; rather, station A was positioned against station B to erode some of it’s audience so that station C could get better national buys from big ad agencies. No longer would possible controversial artists like the Indigo Girls get airplay on some groups. Songs were sanitized against possible FCC indecency sanctions, morning shows became bland and safe, and radio on the whole became a lot less edgy as big corporate attorneys put the clamps on anything that would invite unwanted exposure.
The last great musical genre was the Grunge/Seattle Sound of the early 1990′s. Those bands somehow mixed heavy metal, obscure mumbled lyrics, flannel shirts and ripped jeans into something that the dissatisfied Gen Xers could understand and appreciate. By 1996, this had morphed into “Modern Rock,” and carried on for several years after that, to fade out in the early 00′s. Since that time, there has been no great musical innovations, at least on the creative side, other than the ubiquitous Apple computer and Pro Sound Tools software.
The internet greatly changed the way recording labels did business, mainly by eating into their bottom line. This had the effect of circling the wagons and throwing up a protective barrier against almost all innovation. The net result was fewer and fewer talented artists being able to record, which pushed those people into smaller, sometimes home based recording studios. While those studios can put out good or sometimes even excellent material, often the recordings lack the professional touches that a highly trained recording engineer can add. Add to this the mass input of the internet and no longer are bands or artists pre-screened. Some may point to that as a good development with more variety available for the average person. Perhaps, but the average person does not have time to go through and find good music to download from the iTunes store. Thus, a break developed in the method of getting good, talented artists needed exposure. Youtube has become one of the places to find new music, but it is still a chore to wade through all the selections.
Thus, when FM HD-2 channels came into being, there was little new programming to be put into play. HD radio was left to broadcast existing material with reduced coverage and quality than that of analog FM. That trend continues today where now analog FM channels are being used to broadcast the news/talk programming that used to reign on AM.
What will happen next? If Tim Westergren has any say, the internet (namely Pandora) will take over and terrestrial radio will cease to exist. Current trends point solidly in that direction, although I think Tim is a little ahead himself in his prediction.
News/Talk on the FM dial point not to an attempt to shift the wheezing, white, (C)onservative/(R)epublican programming to a younger demographic, who will, if I am any judge of history, remain unimpressed. No, rather, they are running out of other source material, simulcasting syndicated talk radio is cheap, lean and a good way to make money without having to pay actual salaries.
I am still in awe of iBiquity and I have to hand it to them for stick-to-it-tiveness. The newest “fix” for their FM IBOC system, colloquially known as HD Radio™, is in contour on channel repeaters. According to the article “Performance of FM HD boosters varies,” (Radio World on line edition), the reason for such boosters is to “increase or fill in FM Digital foot print so that the digital coverage matches that of analog.”
The idea that IBOC is somehow an improvement over FM analog is becoming (or has become) untenable. In order to make the new system cover the same area with the same reliability as the old analog system, on channel bandaids boosters are now needed? And what is with this extending coverage? How much more expense will radio station owners have to deal with to make this scheme work? And I still don’t understand where the improvement over analog only systems comes from.
As the article points out, however, all is not well in paradise; the IBOC booster signals interfere with analog signal close to the booster transmitter. This becomes problematic if the receiver is an analog only device. As of this writing, most of the radios in this country do not have HD Radio™ capabilities. Thus, radios that are currently working perfectly well will cut out can become useless around these repeaters.
For your reading pleasure, the entire NAB report can be found here.
Try as they may, neither the NAB, iBiquity or Greater Media can supplant the laws of physics. Then there is that insanity definition floating around:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
This is a youtube video of a Police song from the 1980′s received via skywave and recorded off air on an AM radio.
Video Description:
The classic 1983 #1 smash hit, as received in analog C-Quam AM Stereo… in Japan… via nighttime skywave in the Tokyo area, roughly 500 miles away from Sapporo (ed: where the station is located). The audio quality is among the best I’ve ever heard from analog AM radio, thanks in large part to an excellent wideband receiver, very quiet band conditions, and the Orban Optimod-AM 9100 audio processor being used by HBC Radio to its maximum extent: 12.5 kHz audio bandwidth with stereo enhancement added (above and beyond the amount naturally provided by the matrix processing used by AM Stereo).
Absolute trash, I tell you. Just awful.
Of course, I know several FM stations around here that wished they sounded as good. Naturally, in Japan, they have sought to minimize night time interference problems by limiting the number of stations on air and enforcing the rules and regulations in place to protect those stations on the air. They also seem to allow greater bandwidth, out to 12.5 KHz in spite of the narrower channel allocations (9 KHz in ITU regions I and III, vs 10 KHz here in the US, ITU region II). One other thing to note, there is no digital buzz saw occupying several channels of broadcast spectrum. Keep in mind, this was received in Tokyo, likely a very high noise environment.
I was trying to find out the power level of the transmitter, the call sign is JOHR in Sapporo Japan, frequency is 1287 KHz. HBC is the Hokkaido Broadcasting Company, a privately held company. The state run radio outlets in Japan are NHK, which have several radio and TV stations throughout the islands.
Anyway, AM is dead. Killed by the very owners of the broadcasting companies themselves with help from the NAB. They are the ones that petitioned the FCC to loosen up the allocations and allow more and more stations to be crammed into the band. That is old news. The new news is same forces that killed AM radio are diligently working their magic on the FM band as well. More stations, translators, digital IBOC nonsense that doesn’t work, more of everything. After all, more is better. Until it is not. Then it’s too late.
Looks like the AM HD Radio™ juggernaut continues… To sink under it’s own technical faults that is. According to the list the number of AM stations running IBOC in the US is now down to 233 stations from a high water mark of 290 or so. That represents a total of just 4.8% (233 IBOC/4782 Total stations) of all US AM radio stations. On a related note, Bob Savage of WYSL 1040, Rochester, NY has a good idea:
I’ve always said – if you want to see surprising new life in the AM band, s**t-can the stupid irrelevant NRSC pre-emphasis filter and allow stations to run to 15 kHz during daylight hours and 10 kHz nighttime. Mandate C-QUAM in all receiver and receiver devices.
It will sound better than HD, be more robust, and cause far fewer problems. Plus it wouldn’t obsolete a single radio out there, while making a whole bunch of them sound a whole bunch better.
It is so simple in concept, so easy to implement, with almost no expense to AM stations. Again, Mr. Savage:
Most software-based processors have com ports which can be addressed by a remote control system like Sine Systems, so when the power gets reduced at evening pattern change, the bandpass can be changed at the same time…..vice-versa at sunup. No biggie.
For older setups a simple outboard relay and rolloff network could accomplish the same thing. It’s a little more complex but again, not a big deal.
Wow. Facepalm.
Wish somebody had though of that a few years ago, it might have save several million dollars and we’d have a different AM band today.
There are a few shoe horned AM stations around here that might be adversely effected by 15 KHz daytime bandwidth, but those are few and far between. By and large, most stations are spaced correctly where this could really work and work well. It certainly would not generate the chaos that AM HD Radio™ has.
The standard FM channel in the United States, as defined by the FCC is 200 KHz (See CFR 47 73.201). The occupied bandwidth of an FM IBOC signal, as created by Ibiquity, Inc, is 400 KHz. See below picture:
HD radio trace on FSH3 Spectrum Analyzer
A picture is worth a thousand words. Engineering types will understand this without explanation. For non-engineering types, here is your thousand words (or so):
On the left hand side of the screen is the signal strength scale. Each vertical division is 10 dB. This is not absolute signal strength, it is referenced to -20 dBm. However, it gives a good relative signal strength for both the analog carrier and the IBOC carriers. The analog carrier is centered on the screen, it slopes upward like a steep mountain, peaking at -50 dBm relative. The IBOC carriers are on either side of the analog carrier, they are flat, approximately 75 KHz wide and peak approximately 20 dBm below the analog carrier (-20 dBc). For some reason, likely the bandwidth and/or impedance match between the antenna, high level combiner and the two transmitters, the left IBOC carrier is actually peaking around -14 dBc.
The span, as noted on bottom right hand side of the screen is 500 Khz. Each horizontal division is 50 KHz. The entire span of the measurable signal is eight horizontal divisions, thus 400 KHz.
As noted above, the allocated channel bandwidth is 200 KHz, thus this station is exceeding it’s allocated bandwidth by 100%. This is allowed under CFR 73.404, which is titled “Interim hybrid IBOC DAB operation.”
IBOC proponents will make the argument the FM radios work on something called “The capture effect,” which is to say that if two signals are on or close to the same frequency, only the stronger signal will be demodulated. Thus, the IBOC carriers have no effect on the adjacent channels that they are interfering with so long as the adjacent signal is stronger than the IBOC carrier. The argument is further carried forward by assuming that with a stations protected contour (60 dBu in most cases), the IBOC carrier will never exceed that analog carrier.
That is not necessarily true, especially in areas where terrain (and buildings, underpasses, unintentional directionality in transmitting antenna, etc) can attenuate signals close in causing the IBOC signal to become equal to or stronger than the adjacent analog signal. This effect causes picket fencing. Lower powered FM stations; class A, LPFM, etc, are especially vulnerable to this effect.
Further, even in areas where the analog carrier is stronger than the IBOC carrier, the noise floor has been moved from -100 dBm or so to -70 dBm, which is a 1,000 times greater. To assume that raising the noise floor by 1,000 times will have no effect is, as they used to say in the Navy, making an ASS out of U and ME. Mostly you, in this case. This effects the receiver by making it less sensitive, it will also add noise to the demodulated signal as the elevated noise floor will show up as background hiss. Even further still, higher IBOC carrier levels, as authorized by the FCC in January of 2010 can interfere with the stations own analog carrier.
According to the both Ibiquity and the FCC, which stated in the Notice of Proposed rule making, the reason for interim IBOC operations are:
iBiquity’s IBOC DAB technology provides for enhanced sound fidelity, improved reception, and new data services. IBOC is a method of transmitting near-CD quality audio signals to radio receivers along with new data services such as station, song and artist identification, stock and news information, as well as local traffic and weather bulletins. This technology allows broadcasters to use their current radio spectrum to transmit AM and FM analog signals simultaneously with new higher quality digital signals. These digital signals eliminate the static, hiss, pops, and fades associated with the current analog radio system. IBOC was designed to bring the benefits of digital audio broadcasting to analog radio while preventing interference to the host analog station and stations on the same channel and adjacent channels. IBOC technology makes use of the existing AM and FM bands (In-Band) by adding digital carriers to a radio station‘s analog signal, allowing broadcasters to transmit digitally on their existing channel assignments (On-Channel) iBiquity IBOC technology will also allow for radios to be ”backward and forward” compatible, allowing them to receive traditional analog broadcasts from stations that have yet to convert and digital broadcasts from stations that have converted. Current analog radios will continue to receive the analog portions of the broadcast.
Few if any of those goals have been met. As far as the forward/backward compatible thing, it just isn’t so unless a person actually owns an HD Radio. As noted in previous posts, few consumers have seen fit to purchase an HD Radio, nor have car manufacture’s taken to installing them en mass in new cars, so there is no forward compatibility. Instead, we have FM radio stations interfere with each other and themselves in an attempt to “modernize” the audio broadcasting business. This is a bigger problem for small, community radio stations that can neither afford to install the expensive, proprietary HD Radio system, or broadcast quality receivable signals with an adjacent HD Radio signal raising the noise floor by 1,000 times or more.
I can think of no other greater threat to free over the air broadcasting than HD Radio and the degradation of AM and FM services that comes with it. The consumer has shown that they don’t care. If given the choice between free over the air broadcasting that has mediocre programming and is full of interference, and some type of paid internet streaming service that sounds reasonable with good programming, they’ll go for the latter.
In short, some cobbed together digital modulation scheme is the last thing that radio needs right now.
I have received an e-mail from occasional reader John, who comments that many of the Windy City AM’s have turned their buzz saws off. I note myself today, the same can be said for many of the NYC AM’s. WABC has had their’s IBOC turned off for quite some time. The latest to turn off is WNYC on 820 KHz. Several people have noted the loss of noise on their signal this morning.
According to Ibiquity’s own website, only six AM stations in the NYC market are currently using IBOC.
What does this mean?
Could it be that management is finally realizing that the cure is worse than the disease? The disease being alleged poor audio quality, and the cure being IBOC itself.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
~1st amendment to the United States Constitution
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
~Benjamin Franklin
...radio was discovered, and not invented, and that these frequencies and principles were always in existence long before man was aware of them. Therefore, no one owns them. They are there as free as sunlight, which is a higher frequency form of the same energy.
~Alan Weiner
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers
~Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Article 19
Open Mic