TROUBLE IN HD PARADISE: NPR DIGS IN ITS HEELS OVER DIGITAL HIKE

[Savage]

If you check the recent post-NAB edition of RW you'll learn there's big trouble brewing in HD-land, with pubcasters and Alliance pro-HD zealots increasingly at odds over the proposed digital power increase for FM-HD.

A thoughtful, well-crafted and technically unimpeachable field study by NPR has landed with a thud, revealing that almost any digital increase over the current -20 dBc in most populous areas of the country will result in massive tuneout among the vast majority of still-analog listening due to adjacent-channel IBOC interference, particularly in the car. (NPR Engineering Chief Mike Starling dryly notes that most radio listeners do not sit immobile in their living rooms tending to meticulously maintained and installed audiophile receiving systems with sophisticated external antennae, a truism apparently lost on HD-pushers.)

So there it is: NPR won't go for -10 dBc because of the interference debacle which will inevitably result.  NPR won't even go for -14 dBc, the current "compromise" being batted around without enthusiasm by ANY of the parties.  iBiquity meanwhile attempts the equivalent of lifting oneself by one's own shoelaces, struggling to defuse the disastrous NPR findings without undermining pubradio's critical support for HD which they desperately need.  At the NAB there were reports of acrimony between pubcasters and pro-HD Alliance nuts who are evidently bitterly lumping NPR with, one supposes, Bob Savage, in the hated "HD Naysayers Club."  (Starling, perhaps anticipating a looming typical HD Radio attack on his professional bona fides, has invited third party critique of NPR's findings by any reputable organization, which would certainly leave out iBiquity, CBS, Greater Media or other self-interested HD liars.)

Check the NPR "HD Interference Calculator."  For just about any callsign from the Northeast region you enter you get the same result: -20 dBc is the max.  Very occasionally you'll encounter a -18 dBc or a -16 dBc, whoopdee doo, in terms of enhanced digital coverage. 

Can a public attack on Starling or NPR by "Guy Wire" be far behind??

Of course, the kicker is: -10 dBc won't improve anything much, even if it were attempted.  Ask any sentient broadcast engineer.  And virtually nobody's going to indulge in six-figure rebuilds of transmitter sites and double their utility costs just to implement an HD digital power hike.

Footnote: manufacture of HD-AM capable receivers has just about ceased.  All the new HD products, like the portables, are FM only.

It's over.

NEXT!

[OKCRadioGuy]

Yup... What we need to get pushed though next though Savage is AM on the former channel 5 and 6 TV bands in DRM.  Also the radios should be able to recieve DRM on the current AM band.  Moving the lower-powered AMs up to the former TV band after about 20 years (having them shut off the former AM channel at that point) and letting the big boys run a DRM HD channel down in the current AM band after that would be great. 

[rbrucecarter5]

Yup... What we need to get pushed though next though Savage is AM on the former channel 5 and 6 TV bands in DRM.  Also the radios should be able to recieve DRM on the current AM band.  Moving the lower-powered AMs up to the former TV band after about 20 years (having them shut off the former AM channel at that point) and letting the big boys run a DRM HD channel down in the current AM band after that would be great. 

No - I don't want to see ANY digital standard on AM.  After being able to hear HD sidebands over 1000 miles in the daytime - and in the summer in the middle of the day in rural NM - I am convinced that ANYTHING digitally encoded on the AM band will cause massive interference.  What is needed is to either relegate AM to wideband mono, which it excels at, or bring back C-Quam and mandate its inclusion in receivers.  Add to that an intelligent re-allocation scheme, done in stages, to relieve congestion on the band - and definitely done in cooperation with Mexico.  A lot of interference could be resolved if the majority of frequencies from 1230 to 1490 were re-allocated as local, non-protected services and limited to 1000W maximum - instead of just 1230, 1240, 1400, 1450, 1490, I think I left one out.  But anyway, if the majority of AM could be moved to those, the clears would be clear again, perhaps even super powered to overcome powerline and other new sources of interference, and wideband audio would sound great, especially if stereo was added.  the vast majority of all new AM radio designs are wideband anyway - not due to any desire at all to produce quality audio, they are merely made with cheap wideband IF components.  Why not take advantage of all that bandwidth for fidelity instead of highly audible hisssss?  All easily done with existing, proven technology.

[mgpt6]

Lower Power AM stations would be better in served in the long run if they migrated to FM where TV Ch. 5 and 6 are now. There are few full power DTV stations on 5 and 6 and DTV does not work well in Lo-VHF channels anyways.

[rbrucecarter5]

Can a public attack on Starling or NPR by "Guy Wire" be far behind??

Of course, the kicker is: -10 dBc won't improve anything much, even if it were attempted.  Ask any sentient broadcast engineer.  And virtually nobody's going to indulge in six-figure rebuilds of transmitter sites and double their utility costs just to implement an HD digital power hike.

Footnote: manufacture of HD-AM capable receivers has just about ceased.  All the new HD products, like the portables, are FM only.

It's over.

NEXT!

Guy Wire has no credibility due to his unwillingness to unmask.  I do not respect cheap shots thrown out by anonymous people.  RW is starting to become less respectable in my eye for allowing this lone ranger figure to speak iBiquity's party line with impunity.  It reminds me of Obamania, or perhaps of the resurrected "V" - all dissenting opinion is quickly and harshly repressed.

I wish it was over, but it is not.  A handful of broadcasters, greedy to make money off of HD-2, will fight this until their HD encoders finally give up 20 years from now.  Their sad devotion to this fatally flawed system makes the C-Quam fanatics look mainstream.  There is an extensive article in Radio World engineering extra about how the full 10 dB is absolutely required for a few extra miles of digital around Boston freeways.  But the article totally ignored the effects of skip, which are going to render the HD sidebands unusable anyway - probably at any power level.  I just wish this whole experiment had happened to fall on a solar max - we would not even have HD right now if it did, because solar max will transform the FM problems to where they are like the present AM problems on HD.

HD AM is like the Clintons - forgotten but not gone.  We will be stuck with legal jamming for as long as it takes for the equipment to break down.  I just wish Castro would get mad about HD interference and crank up his stations.

[Savage]

Careful what you wish for, rbruce.  If Castro launches an onslaught of jammers you just KNOW he'll aim at the perpetrators but miss and hit the good guys.  It's Murphy's Law of jamming....

Maybe Beantown HD needs -10 dBc, maybe they don't, but that doesn't mean they're gonna get it.  NPR has a lot of political clout with the Commission, and they're labouring mightily these days to put their foot down about the digital increase without looking like they're doing it.  Hence all the muted chatter about selective sideband tinkering and SFNs.  iBiquity says they're all for all those creative solutions.  Which of course means: precisely the opposite is the case, since just about every public stance the company takes is a complete lie.

We're seeing it play out in slow motion: iBiquity and The Alliance have abandoned the battlefield entirely on HD-AM, and they're taking up defensive positions in the bunker on HD-FM.  They can play all these digital-power war games all day, all week, all year - but for the real world, it's over.  The public, most broadcasters and receiver manufacturers have gotten the HD Memo, read it, understand it, and have moved on.  No matter how many NAB speeches are made, how many outrageous pro-HD press releases are cranked out, no matter how much utter nonsense we hear from IBOC perpetrators at CBS and Greater Media, it doesn't alter the reality of the marketplace.  Go ahead - try a digital increase.  It won't MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.

HD's rigor mortis twitches are being spun as "signs of life."  That doesn't make it true.

[rbrucecarter5]

Careful what you wish for, rbruce.  If Castro launches an onslaught of jammers you just KNOW he'll aim at the perpetrators but miss and hit the good guys.  It's Murphy's Law of jamming....

Maybe Beantown HD needs -10 dBc, maybe they don't,

I think we both need to be careful, along with everybody else that is saying the emperor is naked.  There will be a lot of money lost when this thing falls, and a lot of anger - all directed at us.  I think we opponents will be darn lucky if the iBiquity thugs don't file lawsuits against us, blaming us for the fall of their beloved sacred cow.

I looked carefully at the maps in the RW Engineering extra - and noticed that the Boston stations want to cover out of market cities with HD - like Providence RI!  As if Providence doesn't have enough radio stations of its own, I am sure the owners of which will take issue with Boston radio blaring into their market. 

I've actually been to Boston, listened to the radio up there a bit.  I only drove one of those routes, but I can tell you the analog circle on the map - that is a crock.  Car radios are generally pretty good, I was having SERIOUS analog dropouts way inside that circle, and certainly before the HD "red" on multiple Boston stations.  Specifically it was I-70 about Worchester, when you go down into a valley.  Dropouts were due to the rough terrain, and dropouts like I was experiencing will not be cured by a mere 10 dB power increase.  The dropouts are several decades in signal strength.  So the listeners they are trying to serve with digital won't be served any better than they are with analog right now.  The whole thrust of the initiative is so the HD-2 listeners won't hear a dropout and look for alternatives.  That seems to be the thing they are most worried about.  Well - I've proposed for a couple of years they back up these HD-2's on the AM band, buying out marginal stations on the fringes of their area.

I won't back off from my claim that I can get 70 mile HD lock, and I bet the other fellow won't back off his 84 mile claim - and I will be glad to duplicate the research for iBiquity, the FCC, station owners - anybody that is willing to pay expenses for the test.  The problem is the same it always has been for Boston and anywhere else there is HD coverage issues - terrain, lower ERP to begin with, too crowded of a band, too short of a tower.  These have plagued analog reception for years, and they also plague HD.  Big surprise.  HD never was going to be a magic bullet to fill in coverage where it can't exist in the first place.  It takes tall towers, a lot of ERP, and flat terrain to get reliable, clean analog reception in the fringes - 30 miles for Boston, 70 to 80 miles for Texas.  NOTHING is different about HD - the sideband power levels are just fine where they are, the 54 dBu circle on the RW engineering extra article is a JOKE, those stations don't do anywhere near that well, and the coverage pattern would be incredibly complex if it had any relationship to reality.  The whole power increase is a thinly veiled attempt to up the station's coverage well beyond what it ever was in the first place, to cover cities outside the COL, and probably to jam first adjacents that are daring to take fringe listeners away.  What a SHAM.

[Savage]

Not even iBiquity is that stupid (suing us about the failure of HD.)  It's not like the system doesn't have fatal flaws.  Then there's this pesky thing called "The First Amendment" that always trips up shifty people who want to shut up critics, just so they can get away with something.

"Truth is always a defense" in a libel action, so that's the problem for them.  iBiquity would also have to quantify how some poster on radio-info actually cost them money as part of their legal claim.  Then there's the problem of counterclaims: I, for one, would certainly bring one, because unlike them I CAN put a dollar value on how much HD Radio has cost me. And in the discovery pre-trial process I could demand access to all kinds of proprietary information from their files, research, lobbying of the FCC, and so forth.  The last thing iBiquity wants is all their dirty laundry out there, attracting possible Congressional scrutiny or RICO exposure.  I, for one, would be willing to bet: there's a LOT of muck to rake.  Remember the cozy little one-on-one behind closed doors with Kevin Martin?

Defamation is a "disfavored action" at law, meaning judges hate these cases.  You've got to have a pretty ironclad case, clear causative link between the statements and the alleged injuries, and a lot of other hurdles conclusively dealt with up front.  No judge is going to want to set a precedent where for-profit companies can't be criticized on discussion boards and in fact, I think a lot of jurists would be far more sympathetic to the counterclaim. 

Believe me, iBiquity doesn't want to bring a world of hurt down on themselves.  Their lawyers will confirm this if someone were to suggest suing us to shut us up.

[jras20]

Maybe they'd quit playing "HD Radio its time to upgrade" commercials every 15 minuets.

[RadeoEngineer]

You know, I have to chuckle a little at all of this.  iBiquity is like the black night in the Monty Python film where all of the appendages are gone, but he proclaims he's "not dead yet," but he's challenging King Arthur to fight on.   It really doesn't matter what happens next with the power upgrade, because it changes nothing except for the potential interference to other stations, and that's "IF" there's even one station out there that would do the power upgrade.  (I meant for that to be a big "if" by the way.)  Nobody has a stake in this but the i crowd, and they have (at least as far as I know) no way to enforce a power increase on i licensed stations. So what comes out of this upgrade, semi-upgrade, or no upgrade? 

Nothing.

This system remains the failure it was from the start and will never grow because it has become a piece of novelty history with no chance to get beyond its own limitations.  Sooner or later, existing stations running this thing will turn it off, and there are most certainly no stations with plans to implement in the future.  Where does it have to go except off?

I can proudly say I never installed one (missed it by about 1 year before I  retired).