Radio stations have  paid  royalties to composers for playing music on the air, but not to the performers.  This is because radio has traditionally been a great way for performers to promote their music.  That logic is no longer so firm, now that websites, streaming services and music appliances compete with radio for the music listener’s ears.

The NAB initially responded to the calls for radio to pay performance royalties by labeling the royalties as a “tax”.  This didn’t get much traction with Congress who saw through the disingenuous claim.  It might have been that the record labels had a better lobby than the NAB.

A number of big broadcasters finally came to the conclusion that stonewalling the royalty tsunami was not going to work, so they sat down to get the best deal they could.

The crux of the draft is that broadcasters will pay royalties a lower rate than webcasters and other distributors, and to sweeten the deal, they tossed in an additional wrinkle:  Require FM radios in every cellphone.

This kind of protectionist ploy never works out in the end.  There are a raft of reasons why this is a BAD IDEA.

• First and Foremost – AM Radio gets no cellphone radio – AM music stations pay the royalties, but get no sweetener.
• The deal is for FM Analog radios – Not Digital radios – effectively crippling deployment of  HD Radio
• The cellphone buyer has to pay for an FM radio raising the cost of the cellphone
• The cellphone has to have an FM radio even if the phone has only a tiny speaker or no headphone jack
• Tiny FM radios without a headphone connected have terrible sensitivity, giving the listener a bad experience with FM Radio
• Cellphones will have the cheapest FM radio possible giving the listener an even worse FM Radio experience.

The first two factors are critically detrimental to broadcasting.  The balance of the problems set up radio for a bad user experience, driving listeners to more reliable and satisfying choices.

All AM broadcasters and broadcasters who have invested in HD Radio need to let the NAB know that they think that this is a BAD BARGAIN for radio, and let your Congressmen know that this kind of protectionist scheme is not in radio’s long term interest.

• Red – 3.0 mV/m – Generally the Sellable area of the station
• Purple – 0.5 mV/m – Rural protected service area, but nobody would buy ads.
• Blue – 0.1 mV/m – You might still get it on a car radio

For FM they are:

• Red – 60 db/uV or 1.0 mV/m – Protected service area for Class A and C stations
• Purple – 50 db/uv or 0.316 mV/m – A pretty weak Signal, nobody would buy ads.
• Blue – 40 db/uv or 0.1 mV/m – You won’t pick it up, except in rural areas

I determined this by comparing the plots of sample stations in Radiosoft’s Comstudy with their Radio-Locator maps. Hopefully this clears a few things up!

The results showed that mutually reducing transmission bandwidth down to 5 kHz  is a big plus for speech.  There was either a benefit, or no change from the 10 kHz results when reducing the transmitted bandwidth to 7 kHz irrespective of format or first adjacent channel interference level.

The study was done with a selection of receivers, and used blind A-B testing to determine listener preference.  This methodology is superior when the sources are a selection of several transmission bandwidths.

This study assumed symmetry:  both the desired signal and the undesired signal were limited to the same bandwidth.  This implies a standard to be adopted by all stations within the AM band, which may or may not be a factor for stations that receive interference from stations in other countries.

Since stations broadcasting speech receive a big plus, there will probably be pressure by the “talkers” to adopt the narrower 5 kHz limitation.   This is also the bandwidth limitation required for medium wave HD radio’s analog signal.

The study did not include the effect of HD radio interference to first adjacent channel stations, and whether an analog station has any benefit from wider transmission bandwidth when an HD signal is the interferor.  In the end, HD radio’s medium wave “Digital Only” signal will be an excellent neighbor to other “digital only” and Analog stations, but I expect few stations will be moving to this mode in the next year or so.

It has a builtin CD/CDR/MP3/WMA player with title text readout too.

Generally it plays pretty well, except the AM band section has a few bugs:
1) It will not scan stations above 1610 kHz! You can step to them and put them in the memories, but you cannot scan to them and have the radio find them.
2) The AM HD radio sensitivity is not so great. I don’t have a good point of reference for the other receivers available, but from my location in Cherry Hill area, WIP and WPEN played fairly well in HD (although both of these stations have serious HD EQ/processing problems), WDAS sounded great, but kept cutting in and out of HD because the signal was not strong enough (1.2 mV/m) to hold the HD in lock. WOR just barely locked up at 0.6 mV/m. The text came in well enough, but the radio rarely went to HD audio andthen only for a few seconds.
3) The AM HD switching is JARRING. When listening to WPEN in analog and then have the digital switch in, it was most annoying. It almost sounded like the station was changed, even though the program was the same. As I mentioned before, the EQ and processing is so different betweeen the HD feed and the analog that it was nasty. There should be a fade in delay of 1 sec or so, not a hard switch. I know that when the signal unlocks there needs to be a hard switch.
4) If you select an HD-2 channel on FM and turn the car off, the radio comes back with the HD-1 channel. Similarly if you set a button for an HD-2 station, it actually gets set for the HD-1 channel.

The FM section played nicely with clean HD signals, and it was fun to sample the HD2 channels.

Audio quality was fine, as far as I could tell on my Jeep stock speakers, unless there is an equalization mismatch between the AM analog and digital signal paths.

Ted Schober