HD will be in 140+ models of new cars by the end of 2013.
It's not "flopped." It's just beginning.
Suggesting the Commission is taking bribes is ridiculous.
And YES, I'll accuse the FCC of taking bribes. Any time - to their face. Bribes don't have to be money, they can be suggestions of political favor if you support one digital system over another. There were competing systems, that were technically much better. Why did we end up with iBiquity? Because Clear Channel is big and powerful. If they didn't bribe their defective system into law, they sure applied high pressure to the right people in high places to get it enacted. Something is really wrong when a critically flawed system like iBiquity ends up being adopted. I'd love to find out exactly how it happened, and blow the whistle on it - because it is the American public who is now stuck with a defective system that has poor robustness, and splatters all over adjacent frequencies. On the AM side, it doesn't work at night unless you are on top of the tower. And it splatters on not just first adjacents, but second adjacents as well. There were some real programming options on some of those second adjacents - so I even suspect some broadcasters are intentionally jamming competitors with HD. There have been some complaints by broadcasters to that effect. Corruption, incompetence, and money often go together. I wish I had proof, but I don't.
We needed a robust, low cost, low power system that had the potential to really revolutionize the dial. It should have been enacted on a new band, with existing broadcasters given spectrum there. With careful selection of the system and the new frequency band, we could right now have fully digital three band receivers in cars, with extremely good coverage, interfering with nobody, allocations done intelligently instead of the current state of both AM and FM bands. Consumers would more readily adopt it because it would actually WORK when they tried it out intead of drop out and not lock like iBiquity. The best case scenario - the FCC didn't know what the heck they were signing off on - they trusted iBiquity, who did bad engineering and inadequate testing on the system. When and if they discovered problems - instead of going back to the lab and re-designing until the problems were solved, they covered them up, glossed them over, misrepresented facts to fit their cherished assumptions - the essence of bad science and bad engineering. A little example is when they said the GE Superadio 3 is not a broadband receiver, then published an IF bandwidth spec for wideband that clearly matched the narrow setting of the bandwidth switch. They further said that all radios are narrowband, when the old tired "3 IF can" reference design had not been manufactured in 20 years. All new AM sections now consist of an IC and one really sloppy wideband ceramic filter. Little misrepresentation of facts like that all through their published material completely erases their credibility with serious engineers such as myself. And cries out of cover up after cover up of engineering blunders and deficiencies, sloppy test techniques, tests designed specifically to make their system look good. Take your choice: bad engineering, cover ups, money, influence peddling. The big losers - the American public, iBiquity's investors who are going to take a financial hit, and ultimately broadcasters who did not get the digital upgrade they deserved.
