But, here we are, having a techincal discussion about all of this. The average listener won't care about the engineering aspects. All he'll know is that there's a strange and annoying noise in what used to be a reasonably clear signal. He may or may not complain to the station, but if it goes on for too long he'll be gone. Further erosion of AM's core demo is also not what it needs right now.
I think everyone may have to admit that Leonard Kahn took the right approach. Rather than ignore the laws of physics and the findings of Claude Shannon, he didn't try to cram 3 liters of water into a 1 liter container like iBiquity did (and now iBiquity is wondering why 2 liters spilled on the floor adjacent to the bag). With channel separations less than channel size, there simply isn't room to transmit a full digital signal next to the analog. If the problem you're trying to solve is the fidelity issue, reuse the information you're already sending in analog and just transmit the treble in digital and use a smart receiver to recombine it!
Like you say, the average listener won't care about the engineering aspects. All he'll know is that the frequency response of CAM-D sounds a lot better than analog only. At least you'll still be able to hear your skywave in traditional, lower fidelity when you're farther from the transmitter, rather than the iBiquity-developed situation of mutually assured destruction: being able to hear neither signal.
On the contrary, the onus is on the opponentsof this system to come forth with a viable solution to AM's unsustainable condition.
CAM-D as an interim, followed by conversion to DRM.
We also need to clean out the band, especially all the stations that should never have been licensed. As I said before in another post (where someone nominated me "FCC Broadcast Plan Czar"), all Class C and D stations should go to FM, as well as most Class B stations operating on what should be clear channels should vacate mediumwave as well. They should end up on the additional channels created by our friends at iBiquity. All that should remain on mediumwave are the Class A stations, and they should be allowed to raise power to at least 500,000 watts when they switch on DRM, with 10 kHz channel size in mode B or C. The band should be cleared out and kept clear to allow for protected contours of all existing Class A stations out to at least 0.1 mV/m operating at 500 kW.
The message from the FCC should be this: when you broadcast in hybrid (CAM-D) mode or pure analog mode, you are limited to 50,000 watts. When you go DRM with a strict 10 kHz channel size, you can blast 500,000 watts from your facility because you aren't stepping on your neighbors' turf. WLW might have been given 500 kW non experimental if it weren't for the adjacent channel interference.
