mimo said:
What you should care about is the fact that you would be causing interference to another station in it's local listening area, and infringing on that station's owner's right to a living. You should also care about the fact that there IS a treaty known as NARBA, and 2 of the other countries in that agreement are being interfered with. HD radios ARE NOT available in Canada, yet here, we recieve interference from American stations running IBOC. We can't tune into these stations with HD radios and listen to them in HD. Local stations are having serious interference issues from a FOREIGN entity. I've stateed before in other posts, a station in my own city (50,000 watts) has had serious signal degredation from a station that's 10 hours away. The interference is a violation of NARBA and we're forced to just DEAL WITH IT? As an owner how would you really feel if you were receiving calls from now former listners saying they can't hear you anymore. Enough of them will make a difference to your bottom line. IBOC does not give you any better audio, and new technology doesn't draw in the listeners if they weren't attracted to the programming. A clean sounding station is always nice, but what any owner should do, is make sure they have the BEST SOUNDING station they can on their respective band along with the BEST POSSIBLE programming, and they should do so without blowing other stations off the dial, either local or distant. I'm not trying to attack you. I'm just trying to make you aware of how an average listener would feel. As a Canadian (and I think Mexicans would agree) we have the right to listen to our own stations without the interference from a foreign station using technology that's not available to us. I really wanted IBOC to work. Believe me, when I heard about the technology being developed, I was hoping for something that would bring go0d music back to the AM dial and would make AM sound go0d, and for something that would work for both AM AND FM, and would drastically improve both, while still giving us the distance we've always had on AM with improved sound, and get rid of the annoying multipath and dropouts of FM. I would have liked to see AM stereo become mandatory and improved receivers also been mandatory.
It's interesting that you use the term in the first line "fact". You obviously haven't been involved in testing of the system within a market as I was, nor do I suspect you have any experience in receiving in-market interference that makes listening difficult between stations inside a DMA, because it really doesn't exist. I suspect you are merely parroting the claims of others on this board that probably don't even own a IBOC radio. Is there cumulative noise between stations both running IBOC? Sure, but who cares other than a handfull of distance listeners that don't spend money in the market anyway? Now if one is using a radio with a wider frequency response, (GE Superradio) attempting to listen to a weaker adjacent station while in wide-band mode, then sure you'll hear hiss! But there is a fix for that, it's called narrow band mode! See how simple that is??
Look, AM listening is dying.. The old line that "everytime you see a funeral procession, there goes another AM listener", hold true. AM Stereo was a failure for whatever opinion you care to subscribe to. The fact remains that the vast majority of listeners didn't care about AM Stereo,(I still have a factory AM Stereo capable radio in my Jeep), and neither C-Quam, Quasi-Quam, nor Kahn ISB would fix the terrestrial noise problem on the band created by computer monitors, noisy pole-hogs, plasma TV's, and switching power supplies on more than 50% of the common household devices in your home today. The enemy for Medium Wave transmission is modern comsumer devices, poorly designed and maintained transmission systems, tunnels, steel overpasses, and consumer interest. And the claims that the audio on the digital stream of a AM or FM IBOC decoded signal is somehow inferior to a demodulated amplititude modulated signal is like someone claiming a Ford Model T is easier to drive than a 2007 Lexus.
