You sound angry. Some cars don't even have AM radios any more. If just one meter carrying driver listens to the AM simulcast on its HD subchannel then that makes it worth doing.
Personally, I only listen to WCBS on 101.1-HD2. If I had to listen to to the AM signal I'd spend a lot less time with it, probably almost no time at all. I realize in in a small minority of people who use HD like that, but the number of people who do is not zero.
I'm not angry, at least not about this topic. Just frustrated. Because, as I wrote, it's been over 20 years and HD has had more-that-ample time to become mainstream, and yet the vast majority of listeners either (a) still don't know it exists, (b) don't understand what it is and how to use it, or (c) don't give a rat's ass. In those same two decades, most people have been exposed to satellite radio and streaming audio, whether or not they've decided to sign up with Sirius or Spotify. Both technologies have their own problems, as do old-fashioned AM and FM analog, but HD is largely a failure in the marketplace of
listeners. That's just facing reality.
The rational thing to have done, which I believe is still possible, is to completely turn off HD as of some date certain (like, let's say, 12/31/23), and eliminate all backdoor stations (translators for HD sidebands). Then re-license all translators (except those that provide fill-in for existing analog signals within their protected contours) for the exclusive purpose of migrating in-market AM stations somewhere onto FM. Give priority to the smaller, signal-challenged stations, but require the AM's to leave the air after a transition period, maybe 6 months from the date their translator goes live. And limit how many of these situations any one owner can take advantage of - let's say two - with all additional stations they own having to be de-licensed and sunsetted.
Where there are AM-FM simulcasts, similarly impose a drop-dead date for those AM's to sunset. And whoever's left on AM gets to choose from a toolkit of viability options: boost power, apply to change frequency allocation, alter or eliminate directional restrictions, some combination of all of those, whatever it takes for a station to be viable and for the mess to be cleaned up. Which will be more doable when most of the other signals are gone.
Or ... offer owners a one-time tax writeoff for taking their remaining station(s) off the air permanently. I'll bet most of them would grab
that opportunity. But one way or the other, the mess we're in has to be remedied if terrestrial broadcasting is still going to be viable ten or twenty years from now. But the current HD mess just isn't the answer, and it sounds like the big owners are finally figuring that out.
All this could have been predicted a quarter century ago, and most of it could have been avoided. The one "black swan" event was, IMO, how much the AM noise floor deteriorated due all the 21st century technology that has been allowed to stomp all over it by the government agency that was charged with regulating exactly that.)
Nope, not angry, though maybe I shouldn't start typing before I've had any coffee.
