ThatVoice22
Banned
Second day in a row, KHMX has no HD-1 signal, no Smooth Jazz on HD-2 either. Temporary outage or sign of the future?
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Mix 96.5 - No HD
- Thread starter ThatVoice22
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Based on the flames I get whenever I suggest there is something wrong with this wonderful technological kludge, I would say no. Paranoia reigns supreme, stations are scared not to run HD.
It's CBS.....may be on back up xmtr with no HD in it...
Besides the 5 or so listeners who know HD exists, evidently noone cares.
HMMM OP asked either/OR question.....and you answered with a no.....No to WHICH one?? Gotta love cryptic answers...
It's back. If you guessed transmitter issue, you win.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Given the amount of time it was off, it is obvious that HD is not a priority to them. And it has been off KRBE a couple of days. Not a priority over there as well. And the same with both Eagles last year. HD isn't important to these stations - they don't care, and they don't get very many complaints when it is off. Nobody cares. HD is dead, it is just on life support. The availability of radios in cars doesn't translate to consumer demand.
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purpledevil
Guest
Yet somehow, here we are again for the umpteenth time discussing it...
HD is king, gentlemen. I mean, where else can one go to hear radio stations that had their plug pulled on the main channel years ago?
The Point, best of the 80s & more....
Houston's rock station, Rock 94-5....
Good times and great oldies....
Energy 96-5, no wait, 95-7....
The Wave....
Oh yeah, gimme a heaping helping of some of that.
How would you know what's a priority to the station? Clearly you don't.
It was off for exactly 36 hours. A part had to be flown in with Saturday delivery. It returned to the air mid-day Saturday. Does that sound like not caring to you?
HD Radio in Houston is in pretty much the same boat as any radio station in Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland-Odessa, Waco, Beaumont, etc. The main transmitter for just about any radio station in those markets is the ONLY transmitter. There is no such thing as a backup transmitter in those markets, and often, the only transmitter is 30 years old or older. Does that mean they don't care? Hardly.
Transmitters break from time to time. Electronic components fail.
You anti-HD guys are a hoot. You complain about how much money has been spent on HD implementation, then you whine and accuse owners of not caring when there's no backup HD transmitter.
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purpledevil
Guest
The real "hoot" is that given the piss poor choices available on Houston's HD signals, programmers think the general public is going to rush right out and buy an expensive unit to receive these stations. It's no wonder you can go to an electronics store down here, ask the associate about HD radio, and watch as the blank, forlorn look washes across his/her face.
I don't question your give a damn, gooroo. That's all Bruce and his quirkiness. I do, however, question exactly what you guys are doing to make HD more attractive to potential buyers, because the offerings available on HD currently, leave much to be desired and certainly doesn't motivate most listeners to rush out and buy another piece of equipment.
I don't question your give a damn, gooroo. That's all Bruce and his quirkiness. I do, however, question exactly what you guys are doing to make HD more attractive to potential buyers, because the offerings available on HD currently, leave much to be desired and certainly doesn't motivate most listeners to rush out and buy another piece of equipment.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
I am not anti-HD. I listen to HD-2. I own HD radios. The implementation of HD sucks - and I have no problem pointing out the technical problems plaguing it.
Last I checked, there were no HD stations in Midland / Odessa. I think there is only one or two in Lubbock, not sure about Amarillo.
My point is still valid. If the main signal on any Houston station went silent, the station has a backup plan to get back on the air immediately or ratings and revenue stops. HD goes down - eh - who cares. No backup plan. Listners don't care, there are no ratings, and no revenue. Not a priority.
It is profoundly irritating to me, because about the only over the air signals in Houston I listen to are HD-2. I don't care for most of the main formats. The preset in my car, at home - they are on HD-2's, The main analog channel and HD-1? Of no interest. So I notice when they are off. But I don't think very many other people do.
Until stations view HD radio as a priority, and move heaven and earth to keep it up and running, listeners like me that ONLY listen to HD-2 are going to continue to have the perception that stations just don't care about HD radio. I am a good deal more forgiving than most people, I actually come back and listen to HD - after a 36 hour outage. Or two week outage. On at least the third day of outage on KRBE. How can the radio business expect apathetic consumers to care - if they don't? The HD-2 is gone? OK, back to Pandora. It drops in the car because of the LO in the car beside them at the traffic light? OK, HD doesn't work, back to the iPod. After a couple of times, the average consumer has the perception that HD radio DOESN'T WORK. You know what? They are right! They won't be touting the alternative, creative formats on HD-2 like I do. They will hear about HD radio, and the thought will be - it isn't reliable, stations don't care enough to keep it on the air, I don't want it. And they won't buy it. Which is exactly why you can't buy an HD radio in Walmart, Target, Frys, or Best Buy.
Whose fault is it? "it took 36 hours to fly in a part" - THAT's the attitude! That would not be acceptable for the station's main signal. Someone would get FIRED for making a lame excuse like that to station management. There are NO EXCUSES for a station outage. It is unacceptable, and until station management has the same imperative to keep HD-2 on the air as a station's main signal - consumers darn sure won't care! NO EXCUSES! Make the ____ thing WORK!
Way to miss the point.
The point is there is no backup transmitter for ANY signal in the markets I listed. When any of those stations go off, they stay off until an engineer can fix the problem, assuming he has the necessary parts on hand.
I'm not talking about HD, I'm talking about THE radio station. Off. Down. Not broadcasting.
Acceptable? It's been working for all of those markets for a very long time now. Do they go off and stay off for 36 hours sometimes because they have no backups? Yes.
Somewhere along the way, the owners of those stations made the decision to not invest in a backup transmitter.
I mention those markets because the number of potential HD Radio listeners in Houston isn't much bigger than those markets. Currently, there are about 500,000 HD Radio equipped vehicles in Greater Houston.
Radio in the smaller markets has been doing just fine with only one transmitter for a very long time. They just accept the inevitable outages when they come and move on.
When the time comes, big market stations will invest in backup transmitters for HD. Right now, the available listeners equate to your average Lubbock sized market, and there are no backup transmitters - HD or otherwise - in Lubbock.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Right now, KCBD is on the air in Lubbock in spite of its tower going down. And Lubbock is a much smaller market than Houston.
You made my point for me. Nobody will take HD seriously until it is reliable. When KRBE HD-2 is off, and my radio defaults KRBE analog, I change the station. I am a much more tolerant consumer than most, because I have had to eat static for most of my life because my preferred formats haven't been available locally. Most consumers have never had to deal with static, outages, etc. If HD doesn't work when they tune in, they have NO tolerance for it. They will simply say to themselves "HD doesn't work", move on, and never come back. You think the KLOL listeners 10 years ago simply tolerated Spanish on their station? Nope - KLOL was gone and so were they. When Air-1 came on the air, those listeners were gone and never came back. How much MORE upset and intolerant will listeners be when HD-2 doesn't just change format - but is completely silent. Whatever listener base that HD-2 had, they are GONE and probably won't come back.
If there is a business decision not to have backup HD transmitters, it is because HD isn't driving revenue. That is a valid business decision. But it also means the station is admitting that HD hasn't caught on with the consumer, and they know it. Nobody is serious about this technology except maybe me - because I get music not available on analog channels. I am an HD geek, same as I was an AM stereo geek. That half million radios in cars? How fast did AM stereo get deployed, then slowly get deleted in cost savings measures. It is done for - and a big part of the reason is reliability.
Want more proof HD means nothing to stations? They throw away HD-2 on formats they have deemed "obsolete" like oldies and smooth jazz. In the case of the point - a failed format. If there was any sort of ratings on HD radio, those formats would be gone - and replaced with more of the same bland focus grouped popular drivel as on the main channels. At that point, I will abandon HD radio for satellite, Pandora, and streaming because there won't be anything worth listening to on HD - either.
Which way will it go? My guess is - wither away from consumer apathy. I see no evidence in the ratings that I am wrong.
KCBD is a TV station. There's a little more revenue involved than your average Lubbock radio station.
I'm done arguing with idiots.
I'm done arguing with idiots.
Actually, I know of a couple of Houston market signals with no backups! One I personally had to fix after lightning MELTED the 816R5B lowpass filter and blew the YC130 tube to pieces (there were puddles of hardened molten aluminum in the bottom of the cabinet!) CEC had to counter to counter ship via SWA a new filter; a spare tube was used from another site...BUT in the meantime, I cheated a little...had the signal back ON the air before leaving at 2 am to drive home, get a few hours ZZ and then back to Hobby to grab the shipment from CEC and back to the tower site...I took the IPA output and looked at it on an IFR spectrum analyzer....was clean enough (nothing above -60dbC I could see) so pulled the feed line out of the top of the cabinet, put the bullet on a block of wood, ran 1/2 Superflex from the IPA up to the 3 1/8in main line and split one end of the Superflex....jammed the center conductor into the bullet and used heavy braid to connect the "shields" together....at 1kw or so, it covered ALMOST as far as it would at 33kw...(ok not as far but I was impressed anyway!).....
Had some that same trick in Dallas (used just the exciter though) where the main site (which had not gotten its redundant yet) was having electrical work done...and the Aux, a HT20 on another tower dumped off the air...due to a former engineer wiring the Burks wrong!! (LONG story).....damn thing had ran perfectly the weekend before but NOOOO not this Tuesday night in a cold Jan.....as I kept scratching my head at the Harris and it refused to come on with me pushing the Plate ON button (the filaments and blowers were just fine though), I kept thinking "there is a 1500ft tower and if I could just put a signal off it" and then the light bulb popped on...drove back to the main, ran an extension cord from the combiner room into the xmtr room, plugged the STL rack and Exciter into it, some RG 8 with crimps on one end and lodged the center into the bullet and screwed down the shield into the open port of the antenna switch and ran the Digit to max out....and sure enough, back on the air....(through the combiner)
Funny thing is a lot of stations in DFW did not have backups or gen sets until the 39 tower fell in 1996...the FM band was pretty much silent that afternoon (except for those not at CH, like the non comms to the north and KEOM)..
And to add to that, KCBD is back "on air" using a digital subchannel of a competitors carrier, NOT their own signal or tower!...Their 814 ft tower has yet to be replaced...they are NOT back on RF 11...the FM that was on the 11 tower is on using a 1/2 power signal from what I have heard....it will be a while before BOTH are back to full strength. A replacement antenna has arrived but I think PEs are still looking at the concrete base to determine if it can be reused or if a new concrete base will have to poured for a new tower (I think the tower was 3 legs to the bottom and not a single point base on a pin)
Hell I remember when the 93.3 KYKR tower site in the BPT market had its fire in 1989....the FM and the adjoining 1510 AM transmitter in the building burned to the ground (ruled arson)...KYKR was down for over a week....and when it returned to the air, it was using a much lower power xmtr (some say it may have been just an exciter!)....It was MORE than a month before that signal was back to full power.
I personally lost some equipment I had in the building...even seen a WACOM duplexer melt?? (not a pretty sight!) The receiver board on the repeater, which was in a diecast AL box that survived the heat, actually had the resin COOK OUT of the pc board...After removing the cover hoping the rcvr had survived, we found out different....you could pull the components out of the remaining fiberglass!!....the heat got so intense, some of us looking at the tower leg closest to the building could swear it had gotten warped by the heat....BUT evidently it was ok...that tower still stands today with 95.1 and 92.5 on it
AM stereo cannot be compared to HD....And turning OFF AM stereo at the xmtrs did NOT save any money...once the studios were wired for stereo and the STLs were made to handle it, there was no further costs. AM stereo was a political issue that died thanks to Kahn and Reagan's FCC.....Today, AM stereo would be a killer IF the radios had Noise Blankers and decent audio response....
HD with its royalties is different......KVLU in Beaumont turned theirs off.....guess they could not afford it...KKMY (KISS 104.5) is still running it but thats to "feed" a fill in translator on 103.3 that barely covers Beaumont (when tropo is in, Freeport blows it away even looking at the translator tower!) and the audio does not come close to 102.5's audio....who they are trying to compete with....the number of HD radios in the BPT area? probably more on the shelves at places like Advanced Auto than what is actually used in the cars!...Best Buy and other "audio/visual" retailers sure do not push them. Usually they may have ONE HD model being shown..(and the Pioneer as Advanced Auto Parts was cheaper than Best Buy's price last time I looked!)
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
About the only bright spot for HD - other than the zombie-like devotion to it by their advocates - is car radios. But car radios are artificially marked up, consumers barely notice the price compared to the overall cost of the vehicle. They are also now multi-purpose entertainment and information centers, the GPS, backup camera, AM, FM, satellite, auxiliary, Pandora, sound for rear DVD player, etc. The addition of HD is often not even advertised, because consumers are far more interested in how they get GPS updates than they are in a digital radio system they probably haven't even heard of, or if they have - they don't know how to use. We are talking about people that never learned how to program VCR's, remember. Aftermarket radios are a thing of the past, because nobody will sacrifice all that functionality just to get an HD radio in car models a few years old. My daughter is one - she surprised me by loving the oldies on my HD radio. But her car has one of those non-HD multipurpose units. My wife with her 10 year old car doesn't want me to replace her radio with an HD radio, even though she loves oldies, because her steering wheel controls won't work and it "wouldn't look right." I notice HD advocates don't talk a lot about aftermarket HD radios any more. Dead issue.
If DE is right - and he almost always is - only 1/3 of radio listening is done in cars, so the broad availability of original equipment HD radios in cars will only be 1/3 effective in generating consumer interest. I think we are ten years into HD radio now, and there sure isn't a lot of demand, which doesn't bode well for HD radio. DE is also right - very few stand alone radios are available at all. Those that are for sale are multi-purpose devices like iPod docks, AV receivers, and the like. I don't even see very many clock radios any more. I think this reflects the decline in consumer interest in radio in general. It is no longer the primary source of music listening. There certainly aren't any HD radios except in the aftermarket car stereo department, which I expect to crash in the next few years as more and more cars have those multipurpose systems.
All of this is to get back to my point about AM stereo. It was widely deployed in car radios, back in an era when car radios were primarily radios, and aftermarket replacement was easy. Availability in cars did nothing to spur demand for AM stereo, just as it doesn't seem to be spurring demand for HD radio. If HD was to have any chance, it needed to be the compelling feature in sales of ipod docks, AV receivers, and the other devices that include radios. 30 years ago, AM stereo didn't make inroads into those devices, and now HD radio is failing to do the same.
Given THOSE similarities - the trend is starting to be clear. This is a big flop with consumers. Stations are going to see the failure of it as a revenue stream, and start shutting it off in increasing numbers. Those car radios - even if the IC has the chip on it - if it takes an additional 5 cents of external components - the car radios won't be made to use the ability. After all, 5 cents in a million cars is 50,000 dollars saved. That pays a lot of the salary of the accountant who pointed it out.
I hate to be pessimistic, because I love the variety of formats I get now. But if HD was really popular, those HD-2's wouldn't be playing what I like. They would be playing more of the same and packed with commercials. Or it would be gross things like Kardashian radio, or all hip-hop butt songs. Stations won't be generous to people like me with discriminating tastes if they can make ten times the money with Kardashian gossip radio. The mere presence of niche formats I enjoy says a lot to me about just how unpopular HD radio really is. I have a TM-152 and two Sony SRF-A1's, along with a Delco AM stereo gathering dust in my closet. I expect them to be joined by HD radios in a few years, because after the last HD-2 goes off the air for good, just like AM stereo did, those radios will be replaced with newer models lacking HD. So it will be at radios stations as well.
By the way, I was called an "idiot" above for pointing out the obvious. Any other rude person want to insult me here, or am I right?
The way I understand it, the royalty payments to Ibiquity are derived from the revenue of HD2 and HD3 channels. If there's no revenue, there's no royalty after the initial licensing fees.
I'm fairly sure they get a piece (maybe a big piece) of the action when an HD importer is purchased. An importer is nothing more than a WinXP or Win7 computer with a multi-channel sound card in it - nothing magical. They cost over $10k though. A typical Harris importer is literally a 1RU Dell server. With sound card and OS, it might be $2500 worth of hardware. The other manufacturers roll their own PCs and I doubt there's $1500 worth of components in any of them.
If the non-comm already bought their stuff, that's probably not why they turned it off. I'd suspect power bill or cooling issues as the real reason. A lot of the first generation setups ended up wasting huge amounts of power in the circulator setup. For 1st gen, the only way around that was a separate digital antenna or a dual input antenna. You don't see a lot of those in the smaller markets.
I wasn't aware that KCBD was back on by piggybacking onto a competitor, but I'm not surprised. Most of the TV stations in the markets I listed don't have backup transmitters either. (At least they haven't at the sites I've been to that were co-located with FM transmitters.)
Since the DTV conversion, I'd bet the number that did have them in the analog days has shrunk. If they had one, it was probably because they upgraded from an older transmitter at some point and kept the old box as a backup. Most DTV in the smaller markets are probably still on their 1st gen DTV transmitters.
And my apologies to everyone except Bruce for the "idiots" comment. Clearly ContinuousWave, you know your stuff. While my comment was worded plurally, it was singular in intent.
Bruce is just loud, and his long winded opinions aren't grounded in anything even resembling reality. I remember discussions a few years ago on this site where he was trying to convince everyone that large groups of people in Lubbock were buying GE Superadios to DX the Radio Disney station from Dallas.
If anyone believes that B.S., I have some prime oceanfront property in West Texas I'd like to chat with you about.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Thanks for the update on Lubbock - I think the tower was right by their studio, they are very lucky they didn't lose their building as well. That is a very unusual tower base for an area as windy as that. I would think they would do well to have the more flexible configuration in the replacement. That tower height is interesting. If they put up 2000, the FM would show up in both Midland and Amarillo! As it is, the FM's go 80 miles. There used to be what looked like a 2000 foot tower a bit west of Tahoka. I assumed it was a Lamesa going after the Lubbock market.
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