P
PeteRFNY
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Why DX? For the same reason the mountain climber climed the mountain: because it's THERE. ;D
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chuckydoll
Guest
BRNout said:
"Enjoy" Matt Drudge? He is a right-wing snitch who relies on hearsay and pays sources for stories. He has a big lineup because station owners want only right-wing screechers or homegrown national socialists.
Then again KDKA got outbid for Pirates baseball by a N/T FM.
wkbam1690 said:
I was a DXer, starting in the late 50's and ending a few years ago when I realized the hobby consisted, in the US, of a bunch of whiners who wanted to preserve antiquated technology at a time when AM is dying. The FCC has flooded the band, there are many more international stations interferring, and AM programming is limited mostly due to the fact that only older people will put up with its lousy quality. I see no reason to DX any more, as the good catches are seldom more than 1000 miles away.
R
raydofan
Guest
BRNout said:
Yeah, I hate that religious crap.
JeeperOne
Banned
Hi everyone:
Just my opinion though
Cheers
Some of it is also NORTH and to THE RIGHT of 92.1 Mhz too. KRKS-FM 94.7 here in Denver is a prime example of this. What a waste (Even for the marginal signal that 94.7 puts out). If Salem were to program that station right, they could take it all news (As in NO talk, e.g. WINS) or sell it to someone (Like CBS?) who could turn it into a Free FM (Read HOT TALK) outlet.raydofan said:
Just my opinion though
Cheers
DavidEduardo said:
"50000-Watt AM stations"
http://www.northpine.com/broadcast/50kwam.html
WHO-AM News Talk Information 9.7 7.2 9.9 10.6
WLW-AM News Talk Information 8.9 9.9 11.2 9.8
WSB-AM News Talk Information 9.3 8.7 9.2 8.2
WGN-AM News Talk Information 5.3 5.5 5.8 5.4
WBBM-AM All News 4.2 4.1 4.4 4.6
WLS-AM News Talk Information 4.1 3.7 3.7 3.8
WTAM-AM News Talk Information 7.3 8.0 6.5 7.3
WJR-AM News Talk Information 4.8 4.9 5.3 5.3
KMOX-AM News Talk Information 8.4 7.7 8.2 8.4
KSL-AM News Talk Information 5.9 6.7 8.6 7.7
http://www.arbitron.com/radio_stations/home.htm
Here is just a sampling of the many 50KW AM stations either ranked #1, or in the top-5. News/talk/sports is very popular on AM and is keeping the band viable; however, AM-HD will destroy the band with adjacent-channel interference and only 50% the coverage of analog, at best. I listen to nighttime AM all over the East Coast and appreciate the non-local programming.
I should mention that last evening I was driving along enjoying listening to CBW-990 (Winnipeg, MB), WHO-1040 (Des Moines, IA), and some other clear-channel stations whose signals here, traditionally strong and very listenable, could be destroyed should AM IBOC at night go on air. Why diminish the choice radio listeners have always had on AM, the "old" internet as one radio magazine once put it? Just going up part of the dial, one can hear Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Louisville, Denver, Toronto, New Orleans, etc. - why ruin this?
kc0ltv said:
I *am* a DXer, and not at all fond of IBOC, but...
It really is not reasonable to expect radio station operators to operate their stations as targets for a hobby. It would be rather like expecting (whoever the heck it is who owns Heath Co. these days) to keep selling Heathkits simply because of tradition. The stations seem to think that IBOC will improve (or at least protect) listenership, and as long as they do, it's going to happen regardless of what happens to distant reception. After all, that New Orleans station belongs to their competitor... (or, it's their own, but they've got one in your town too, that they figure you'll listen to if you can't get WWL)
(that said
- What happens to the rural listenership? Either there's going to be a pile of format changes (FM stations going news/talk) or a lot of listeners outside large cities are going to lose nighttime access to the news/talk format. There's only ONE local nighttime AM signal where I live -- and I'm only 30 miles from Nashville. In much of the North, "nighttime" starts during, or even before, evening drive in the winter.
- In many markets, it seems likely *local* stations will suffer IBOC interference at night in parts of the market. WISN Milwaukee vs. KMOX in western Waukesha Co., Wis.? WLAC Nashville vs. WCKY in Clarksville, Tenn.? IMHO this risk was not adequately tested.
- I still think it's sinful we're worrying about whether we can afford to assign 24kb/s of bandwidth to a HD3 channel when there's a tested system out there capable of delivering six 192kb/s channels. (and occasionally complaining that 160kb/s isn't enough!)
w9wi said:kc0ltv said:
I *am* a DXer, and not at all fond of IBOC, but...
It really is not reasonable to expect radio station operators to operate their stations as targets for a hobby. It would be rather like expecting (whoever the heck it is who owns Heath Co. these days) to keep selling Heathkits simply because of tradition. The stations seem to think that IBOC will improve (or at least protect) listenership, and as long as they do, it's going to happen regardless of what happens to distant reception. After all, that New Orleans station belongs to their competitor... (or, it's their own, but they've got one in your town too, that they figure you'll listen to if you can't get WWL)
(that said
- What happens to the rural listenership? Either there's going to be a pile of format changes (FM stations going news/talk) or a lot of listeners outside large cities are going to lose nighttime access to the news/talk format. There's only ONE local nighttime AM signal where I live -- and I'm only 30 miles from Nashville. In much of the North, "nighttime" starts during, or even before, evening drive in the winter.
- In many markets, it seems likely *local* stations will suffer IBOC interference at night in parts of the market. WISN Milwaukee vs. KMOX in western Waukesha Co., Wis.? WLAC Nashville vs. WCKY in Clarksville, Tenn.? IMHO this risk was not adequately tested.
- I still think it's sinful we're worrying about whether we can afford to assign 24kb/s of bandwidth to a HD3 channel when there's a tested system out there capable of delivering six 192kb/s channels. (and occasionally complaining that 160kb/s isn't enough!)
I'd understand your analogy if it was in comparison to what I think of as "pure DX'ing" (tuning around the band hoping to log a new station, which most likely can only be heard very weakly in a 5-degree null of a clear channel station, and then only identified by local ads). But it's hard for me to consider merely listening to distant AM signals after sunset via skywave propagation as "true DX". Since the signals are so strong, and since they provide a nice alternative to local radio (here in Duluth we have two talk radio choices, KDAL and WDSM), especially in the winter. Sure, 30% of them might be carrying Art Bell, but that still leaves plenty of other choices one wouldn't have if AM IBOC was on the air at night and indeed as bad as we think it will be.
Your other points make complete sense. Indeed, around equinox, skywave propagation begins to heat up at around 3:00 p.m. local time. And DAB makes much more sense to me than IBOC, although a "DAB 2.0" using AAC or another advanced coding technique (preferably an open one) rather than MP2 would be better. I simply have a hard time seeing AM "HD Radio" as being a competent format.
Good points w9wi, but I personally don't believe that opposition to IBOC automatically equates to requiring radio stations to operate their services as targets for a hobby. If anything is a strange, esoteric specialty that enjoys special pandering from the industry, it's arguably IBOC rather than DX; after all, the latter simply consists of radio signals doing what they've naturally done since the industry began.
I personally view IBOC as an attempt to make the medium do something it wasn't designed to do. The same broadcasters who insisted that their Class C signals would be utterly destroyed by a 10-watt analog LPFM three channels down (!!) are of course perfectly willing to double and triple the bandwidth occupied by their own massive signals in order to squeeze an entirely new broadcasting service into existing spectrum. As an example, our local college radio station has a translator on 100.7, less than four miles from my apartment. I'm supposed to be just inside the translator's 60 dBu, but my CAR radio barely gets the damn thing. I've spoken with the engineer at 100.7, and he confirmed that the translator is running its full licensed power; terrain isn't an issue (real-world coverage matches theoretical predictions fairly closely here in the flat Upper Midwest) -- which pretty much leaves only the expanded bandwidth from the local IBOC blowtorch on 100.3 to blame. Yep -- 10 watts of something deviating by the standard 75 KHz, bad; double the bandwidth at ten thousand times the power, completely fine. Having rich lobbyists really pays off, eh? (The worst part of it is the corporate Newspeak that inevitably accompanies self-interest like this. Things like this are never plain old dirty pool, they're "creative and proactive innovation in the accelerated deployment of enhanced services to the consumer" or some such obfuscatory nonsense to make us think we're getting the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't want to sound naive -- I know that this is nothing new, and that boys will be boys. I just wish they could be honest about what they're doing and say they just needed to get laid, rather than insisting they love us and want to be with us forever. Heh heh.)
But back to IBOC -- it's really nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to compete with satellite radio, after terrestrial broadcasters finally realized that XM in particular had attacked the Achilles heel of post-Telecom terrestrial radio (i.e., voicetracked, over-consulted, over-researched, narrow-playlisted hell.) And I even recall hearing rumors that Clear Channel, before it sold most of itself to Bain, was lobbying to use portions of FM IBOC bandwidth to provide Internet service! Sorry guys, but you went into the radio business knowing its geographic and technical limitations (i.e. that it can't provide 100 channels in a 12 MHz spectrum as satellite services do). You went into the radio business knowing that it was the *radio business* -- not the Internet business, and not the streaming-content-on-demand business. And certainly not whatever the hell else your lobbyists could pay Congress to squeeze into it while ignoring basic technical realities, the intended nature of the medium, and the legal status of the airwaves as a public trust...
I personally view IBOC as an attempt to make the medium do something it wasn't designed to do. The same broadcasters who insisted that their Class C signals would be utterly destroyed by a 10-watt analog LPFM three channels down (!!) are of course perfectly willing to double and triple the bandwidth occupied by their own massive signals in order to squeeze an entirely new broadcasting service into existing spectrum. As an example, our local college radio station has a translator on 100.7, less than four miles from my apartment. I'm supposed to be just inside the translator's 60 dBu, but my CAR radio barely gets the damn thing. I've spoken with the engineer at 100.7, and he confirmed that the translator is running its full licensed power; terrain isn't an issue (real-world coverage matches theoretical predictions fairly closely here in the flat Upper Midwest) -- which pretty much leaves only the expanded bandwidth from the local IBOC blowtorch on 100.3 to blame. Yep -- 10 watts of something deviating by the standard 75 KHz, bad; double the bandwidth at ten thousand times the power, completely fine. Having rich lobbyists really pays off, eh? (The worst part of it is the corporate Newspeak that inevitably accompanies self-interest like this. Things like this are never plain old dirty pool, they're "creative and proactive innovation in the accelerated deployment of enhanced services to the consumer" or some such obfuscatory nonsense to make us think we're getting the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't want to sound naive -- I know that this is nothing new, and that boys will be boys. I just wish they could be honest about what they're doing and say they just needed to get laid, rather than insisting they love us and want to be with us forever. Heh heh.)
But back to IBOC -- it's really nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to compete with satellite radio, after terrestrial broadcasters finally realized that XM in particular had attacked the Achilles heel of post-Telecom terrestrial radio (i.e., voicetracked, over-consulted, over-researched, narrow-playlisted hell.) And I even recall hearing rumors that Clear Channel, before it sold most of itself to Bain, was lobbying to use portions of FM IBOC bandwidth to provide Internet service! Sorry guys, but you went into the radio business knowing its geographic and technical limitations (i.e. that it can't provide 100 channels in a 12 MHz spectrum as satellite services do). You went into the radio business knowing that it was the *radio business* -- not the Internet business, and not the streaming-content-on-demand business. And certainly not whatever the hell else your lobbyists could pay Congress to squeeze into it while ignoring basic technical realities, the intended nature of the medium, and the legal status of the airwaves as a public trust...
Grrrradio said:
Excellent point ! HD/IBOC is is a poor substitute for the capabilities of Satellite Radio and Wireless Internet. Broadcast radio should just stay in the radio business. HD is DOA, anyway.
Why DX? I don't get it. It's pointless to dx distant am and fm stations when most of them sounds the same anyways because a handful of conglomerates who own them. People need to give up that boring hobby of theirs. Like or not, IBOC is here to stay. Give it a few years, the listener's interest for HD radio will exceed satellite and internet radio. Analog will disappear quicker than HD.
I don't know, I highly doubt that HD Radio is going to take over the AM and FM bands anytime soon, if ever. FM, maybe... It will at least be here to stay in hybrid mode. But, as for AM, I think that the "bang for the buck" is too low, given the difficulty in getting reliable HD-AM reception, lack of multichannel ability due to the lower bitrate, and the audio quality that falls a little short of being "like FM," also due to the lower bitrate. It doesn't even matter that I automatically inherited HD-AM by buying an HD Radio receiver, it's just not a big plus. Regardless of DX, my opinion is that it does more overall harm than good.
To me, the sound quality is substandard to AMAX, but is (fortunately) devoid of background noise or crackle. That is, if you live within 25 miles or so of your 50,000 watt blowtorches and can keep the signal reliably locked. And there are no storms within 50 miles. And your neighbor never runs a vacuum cleaner. And ComEd/Exelon/ConEd doesn't have any leaky lines in your neighborhood. HD-FM doesn't suffer from these issues, and the adjacent-channel interference is far, far less.
If analog AM truly is "too far gone" because of these problems today, then it is "too far gonner" with HD-AM.
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As for DXing stations being pointless "because they're all the same anyway," that's like saying nobody should bother with mountain climbing, because all mountains are essentially the same. Why run a marathon when you could just drive 26 miles in a car? Why race boats when we can fly planes at 10x the speed? Because it, in itself, is a challenge, and that in itself makes it worth doing. If you like doing it, do it! The signals are there, so why not try to see what you can get? And, if you can hear signals a long way off, why not share that with other people? It's fun, it's challenging, and regardless of there being far "better" alternatives (the Internet for one), it doesn't change the fact that you can develop an understanding of how the ionosphere affects signals, and it doesn't change the fact that getting an MW signal from 1,000+ miles away is not always easy. The challenge won't end with HD, either. It will be different, yes. And, it's very possible the AM band could become a big mess at night with HD, but it will also be something new to experience.
To me, the sound quality is substandard to AMAX, but is (fortunately) devoid of background noise or crackle. That is, if you live within 25 miles or so of your 50,000 watt blowtorches and can keep the signal reliably locked. And there are no storms within 50 miles. And your neighbor never runs a vacuum cleaner. And ComEd/Exelon/ConEd doesn't have any leaky lines in your neighborhood. HD-FM doesn't suffer from these issues, and the adjacent-channel interference is far, far less.
If analog AM truly is "too far gone" because of these problems today, then it is "too far gonner" with HD-AM.
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As for DXing stations being pointless "because they're all the same anyway," that's like saying nobody should bother with mountain climbing, because all mountains are essentially the same. Why run a marathon when you could just drive 26 miles in a car? Why race boats when we can fly planes at 10x the speed? Because it, in itself, is a challenge, and that in itself makes it worth doing. If you like doing it, do it! The signals are there, so why not try to see what you can get? And, if you can hear signals a long way off, why not share that with other people? It's fun, it's challenging, and regardless of there being far "better" alternatives (the Internet for one), it doesn't change the fact that you can develop an understanding of how the ionosphere affects signals, and it doesn't change the fact that getting an MW signal from 1,000+ miles away is not always easy. The challenge won't end with HD, either. It will be different, yes. And, it's very possible the AM band could become a big mess at night with HD, but it will also be something new to experience.
sls27 said:
It's a boring hobby for you. It's obviously not a boring hobby to many people who happen to not be you.
I've learned over the years everyone has different interests, and that I have no right thinking I am an authority over the enjoyment people get from their own hobbies. Some people DX. Others like model trains. Some people collect garden gnomes. I have a neighbor who is a home-remodelaholic. God rest my grandmother's soul, she enjoyed year after year crocheting blankets, which to me would be more boring than watching paint dry.
I'm not saying that technological progress should cease because it threatens the DX hobby. If DX changes, so be it. If it dies, so be it. I'm just saying your personal feelings about what is interesting and what is boring are unique to yourself, and people aren't going to read what you say and think, "Gee, yeah, he's right, I never knew all along that this was boring."
sls27 said:
“4/4/07 - FCC: Market to Decide Fate of HD Radio”
http://www.diymedia.net/archive/0407.htm
“Sirius, XM, and HD: Consumer interest reality check”
“While interest in satellite radio is diminishing, interest in HD shows no signs of a pulse.”
http://www.hear2.com/2007/02/sirius_xm_and_h.html
"Finally, A Good Use for HD Radio"
"That's why I was happy to hear that even the folks at iBiquity are looking at other options. They have to."
http://www.insidemusicmedia.blogspot.com/2007/07/finally-good-use-for-hd-radio.html
“U.S. automakers not jumping into HD Radio”
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN2632750220070427?pageNumber=1
“Bridge Ratings: Sweat the cell phone and don’t count on HD”
“In other words, Bridge says interest in HD radio is decreasing even as your station works hard to increase awareness. What can I possibly add to this honest and bleak picture that I haven’t said before? My well-intended warnings about HD’s “premature death” seem to be rearing their ugly heads almost two years later.”
http://www.hear2.com/2007/04/bridge_ratings_.html#comments
Doesn't quite look that way, now does it ?
I've never DXed as a hobby, logging things and all. But ever since I was a little kid I loved to take different radios and creep along that AM dial at night just to see what I could catch. Ever since then, everytime I get a new car stereo, or what-have-you, I like to troll the dial for whatever. When I had my first job in SE Ohio, I remember being amazed I could pick up some station way up in Detroit on FM...can't remeber what it was, but that's not the point. My great grandfather, who worked at a lil small-town AM, long before I was born, always had neat radios. You know the ones old folks have (and I mean no disrespect. I'm talking about when I was 5) that have like 5 bands you can tune? I just always thought it was neat. Even now at 35, if its 2 AM, if I'm bored, I take my old 70's console system (when radios were furniture, kids!) and just creep along the AM. Then, I lay the "directional antenna" switch over (and I don't pretend to know what that does, but it does somethin!), and creep all the way back down the dial. The magic was more fantastic as a kid, but even today I like to hear how other folks do their news, what programs they carry, what kind of delay are they running, etc. Its like stealthily airchecking some random, remote colleague. I guess that makes it sound like looking up their skirt, but you know what I mean.
BTW, in all your talk of flamethrower AMs, you left out my hometown - WHAS
BTW, in all your talk of flamethrower AMs, you left out my hometown - WHAS
Ah yes, WHAS... On a longwire antenna and my MFJ-1020 antenna tuner/amp I can hear 840 WHAS during the day, 40 miles south of Chicago. At night WHAS booms in!
If you're a neighbor to WHAS, check the frequencies above & below 840 during the day. Their IBOC equates to a "dirty bomb". Enjoy combing the dial at night while you can. When flamethrower stations like WHAS are permitted to start spraying that RF venom across hundered of miles at night, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict with depressing accuracy what the AM landscape will sound like. It's coming...and until a neighboring station files a lawsuit to stop it on the grounds of it doing financial harm, this cancer called IBOC will spread until it sucks the life out of much of the AM band. Not much would make me happier than to be wrong about this...I've been wrong before. But I don't think I'm wrong on this one.FatPunk said:
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