WBCN All digital field test results

When I said the WBCN test data may not see the light of day, perhaps I spoke too soon.  For your viewing pleasure, here are the results of the WBCN all-digital HD Radio tests:

WBCN All-digital AM IBOC Field Test Project (link has been broken, this may have been released by accident)

Well, that will teach me, won’t it.

I have given it a summary read and my first impressions were correct; from a technical standpoint (antenna, ATU)  this is a very favorable test configuration.  The results look pretty good on the surface, although they appear to have had some nighttime interference problems, go figure.  I’ll update this post when I have time to fully read the whole paper.

Update: The link I provided earlier has been taken down.  It may be that the information was not supposed to be released to the general public.  Several people have asked me to upload the report to my own server so that they can download it and read it themselves.  This leaves me in a bit of a quandary; the report itself is important information and its implications for the future of broadcasting are huge.  On the other hand, it is the work of a private organization and not the public domain, thus if released by accident, then it should not be shared.

This story from Inside Radio is more or less accurate as to what the report contains, although it paints a somewhat favorable picture.  There appear to be some issues meeting the NRSC5C mask for the MA3 (all digital) mode.  That seems to be fine, however, as the NRSC5C mask can be modified to meet field conditions.  How convenient is that?  The information about the number of AM HD Radio stations seems a bit off, latest I have is 207 AM daytime, and 66 AM nighttime stations out of 4,659 transmitting hybrid digital-analog HD Radio, or 4% daytime and 1% nighttime respectively.

When I have time, I will do some more analysis and post my own conclusions.

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4 thoughts on “WBCN All digital field test results”

  1. Paul, the link doesn’t work for me. If I click the link, I get the message “HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found” and if I change the http:// on the link to ftp://, I get asked for a username and password. I tried a few default username/password combos, but they didn’t work. Do you think they would mind if you mirrored the file on your site?

  2. Do you know where this engineer got the data for this statement published on insideradio.com?

    …“By next year there will be more HD Radios in use than satellite receivers,” CBS Radio SVP of engineering Glynn Walden said at the NAB Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.”

  3. Pulled it out of his ass? I don’t know exactly how he came to those conclusions, it is hard to predict the future.

  4. Perhaps vehicle manufacturers are installing more HD radios than satellite receivers, which could change which medium has the greater installed base. Still, that says nothing about how many people actually listen to HD radio, or want it. I myself have an HD radio receiver, and only use the HD function of it as a novelty. That doesn’t make HD radio a success.

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