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AM HD isn't "Critical"?

WRTO: 1200 kHz. One thousand watts at night. EIGHT towers. And IBOC.

Obviously the operators of this station are "certifiable."

I stand corrected - unfortunately for listeners of the former legend WCFL, it is NOT a Citadel station. Or they wouldn't be getting hammered with IBOC hiss, because Martin Stabbert wouldn't put up with it.
 
WMVP 1000 will not decode in HD for me here on the north side of Chicago.
Neither will 1200 or 1390.

WGN is still hiss free for the last several days.
 
Only in The Wonderful World of HD Radio does 50kw, 3 towers = 1kw, 8 towers. At least in terms of non-performance.
 
1200 WRTO runs the IBOC in the mode that requires the narrowest BW for analog audio.
IMO a disgusting sound. The station that showed a .1 to .2 in the PPM ratings. However very successful financially according to the resident expert.
 
WGN Chicago still has the HD off as of this AM.
 
Well I have a like/dislike of IBOC AM. Since I live in Columbus OH, I can get WTAM 1100 AM, WJR AM, WWKB AM afternoons and evenings. In Columbus Ohio the following AM's are on FM HD sub carriers/stations. WTVN AM, WOSU AM, WBNS AM, two feeds of WCLT AM. Now if its to simulcast AM stations of FM HD sub carriers/stations then I don't mind
 
"A well known IBOC site" reports today (12-2) that out of 4700 operating and licensed AM stations in the US, a whopping 260 are broadcasting in pristine HD-AM hybrid digital. But wait! Only 84 of those are on with HD at night. And out of that total, ten are listed with the notation "intermittent operation." Of the ten, SIX "intermittent operation" stations are among the 84 listed as running IBOC 24 hours. So the "real" number of continuous operating HD-AM stations is somewhere between 78 and 84 stations, likely closer to the lower number, or about a station and a half per STATE.

Pretty lousy. But it's even worse when you look at the trendlines:

stopiboc.com reported that 90 days ago, in September, there were 258 operating HD-AM stations, with 87 on at night. So the overall numbers are essentially unchanged with three fewer 24-7 HD-AM operators.

A year ago (Fall '07) there were 256 HD-AM stations in operation with 65 on at night (the pop-count of "intermittent" operators from that date wasn't preserved.) But even giving IBOC the benefit of the most optimistic guesstimate, as close as we can get to actual facts about this "standard," iBiquity's president's recent e-mail to yours truly that "things are strongly moving in a positive direction" seems a tad overblown. HD-AM is adding stations at the blazing pace of about one to two per month. And they are ALL Alliance members. The preponderance of licensees turning IBOC off permanently are those without an investment in HD Radio, e.g., non-Alliance members. This would circumstantially indicate that only those with a direct pecuniary interest in HD-AM are putting it on the air - instead of adding it because of any actual engineering merit.

BTW: where are the vaunted "technical adjustments" promised to reduce skywave interference, back when Citadel turned their AM-HDs off at night 14 months ago? (Hint: there aren't going to be any.)

Sic transit IBOC-AM.
 
Tom Wells said:
WGN Chicago still has the HD off as of this AM.
Click to expand...
Tom, as you pointed out 11/21/09, the HD was off. It is now December 2nd and it is still
off. Should we get our hopes up that this is permanent? If they really cared about getting it back
on line don't you think it would be back up by now? They have had it off a couple of times in the
past, but, it only lasted a day or two before the "buzz" was back. It is amazing how much better
the station sounds without it.
 
TR1992 said:
Tom Wells said:
WGN Chicago still has the HD off as of this AM.
Click to expand...
Tom, as you pointed out 11/21/09, the HD was off. It is now December 2nd and it is still
off. Should we get our hopes up that this is permanent? If they really cared about getting it back
on line don't you think it would be back up by now? They have had it off a couple of times in the
past, but, it only lasted a day or two before the "buzz" was back. It is amazing how much better
the station sounds without it.
Click to expand...

A member of one of the DX clubs I belong to wrote to them and received this reply, who knows what it really means:

** U S A. IBOC on WGN-AM?? We did not drop it. We just have it turned
off for now while we are evaluating some processing changes that we
made. I do not know how long we will have it off but it will probably be
turned back on some time in the future (James J. Carollo, Director of
Engineering, WGN Radio, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611; Office:
312-222-4701 Fax: 312-222-4192 jcarollo @ tribune.com
 
one of the 2 HD AM's in my local market appears to have totally abandonned IBOC during
non-daylight hours. And it is truly incredible to hear the contrast between how they sound
in analog with the IBOC off as opposed to all other times. Why they would want to screw
up their sound for the 99.7% of their listeners who do not listen in HD is beyond me.
 
Oh, I see: "We did not drop it." No, they're just not using it and it "will probably be turned back on some time in the future." Because of PROCESSING changes. Sure. Makes perfect sense. ::)

More IBOC intrigue. It's like nobody associated with this freakin' thing is capable of straight talk and candor, with the exception of Martin Stabbert. It's always fudging, double-talk, hyperbole and outright lying.

This thing from Carollo reads like the statement from Cox about how they had HD exciters for the AMs. But they weren't actually USING them: the equipment was installed, tested and aligned - then turned off and left in the transmitter equipment racks. But they insisted they "still had HD Radio installed" (just not actually used on the air.)

Translation: we're fulfilling contractual agreements with iBiquity. And that's it.
 
So, WGN just now realized that their 10KHz CQuam sounds 10 times better to the listening public with (even regular) radios? Yep, that 5KHz audio bandwidth and associated HD processing sucks the life out of a news/talk station.
Music on HD AM does actually sound good, but voice/phonecalls are for crap with the HD-AM codec.
 
There’s a business model of the future, playing music on AM Radio. That shipped has already sailed years ago, like Bellbottoms did, some FM’s are changing music formats to talk.
 
Savage said:
Oh, I see: "We did not drop it." No, they're just not using it and it "will probably be turned back on some time in the future." Because of PROCESSING changes. Sure. Makes perfect sense. ::)

More IBOC intrigue. It's like nobody associated with this freakin' thing is capable of straight talk and candor, with the exception of Martin Stabbert. It's always fudging, double-talk, hyperbole and outright lying.
Click to expand...

Yes, "sometime in the future" is the clincher, bye bye WGN IBOC, all three Chicagoans who could receive you between drop outs will miss you.
 
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