Wed 4 Apr 2007
One Response to “ Full Digital IBOC? ”
Trackbacks & Pingbacks:
You must be logged in to post a comment.
-
Archived Entry
- Post Date :
- Wednesday, Apr 4th, 2007 at 15:28
- Category :
- IBOC and Technical
- Tags :
- Do More :
- You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
-
Works best with Firefox
-
Ted: Your RadioWorld article was a very good one. I believe you when you say that ultimately Digital AM will be a great improvement. But addressing only the group owners with deep pockets can survive. Those of us who are indies struggle to survive while Ibiquity wants to be in our bank accounts forever. If you love Free FM, the industry needs to embrace Free AM & FM from the financial roulette that we are faced with this system. Frankly, I believe this is not the most technically proficient system avaialble, what about DRM, or some of the other systems that should be considered.? If we look back on the early “halcyon days” of AM, it was a unique way of the radio manufacturers to degrade the first IF stages of AM radios to put the band in jeopardy. If you recall, in the old days of AM/FM simulcast prior to the 19kHz
stereo pilot, broadcasters would broadcast in stereo with the Left channel on the AM, and the Right Channel on the FM.
Roll the clock further forward with wideband AM, a great system, and with good signal to noise ratio and not trespassing on the 10kHz
envelope. This is a moneygrab and will send most of us indies into early sales.
Its by talking with the old radio engineers who will confide in how the AM industry was originally destroyed to drive the market to the FM band. Now we see a system that I’ve heard, sounds just okay, and puts at risk the future of local AM. Listen to any of the old 50′s AM-FM tube radios, and the two bands sound remarkably the same. What happened? The arguement is that the AM band needed to be de-cluttered by shrinking the channel size. Roll the clock forward, the FCC moved the expanded band forward as a way to again, declutter the band. The expanded band stations had a five year window to darken their original in-band frequencies. Now we see several of those darkened stations going “hot” again.
So whats the deal.. On the one hand, IBOC is supposed to revive the AM band. Seems like a lesson is huge contradictions. While not an RF engineer, it seems there are easy AM receiver circuitry fixes for the noise and the quality.
This seems to be another way to give the corporate giants a way to own everything, the trouble is, they’d prefer to run 25 stations out of a single IT computer room. As a 39 year veteran of local radio, this is not my idea of “localism”. Guys in Washington need to understand what real localism is, not what the corporate giants are telling them.