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Every one they ever sold was returned!

R

radioskeptic

I was talking to a clerk at a Radio Shack earlier this evening. They had two "HD" radios on the shelf.

I asked him whether anybody ever bought an of those things. His candid answer really surprised me.

"Every one we ever sold was returned," he said. "They just don't work here." (Meaning the exurbarn area.)

Yet the factory radio in my 10-year-old Saturn works just fine there.

And "iNiquity" wonders why there's no market for their half-baked system?
 
radioskeptic said:
I was talking to a clerk at a Radio Shack earlier this evening. They had two "HD" radios on the shelf.

I asked him whether anybody ever bought an of those things. His candid answer really surprised me.

"Every one we ever sold was returned," he said. "They just don't work here." (Meaning the exurbarn area.)
Click to expand...

Same deal at my local Radio Shack (about 25 miles west of Philadelphia), where the store manager once worked for me as a part-time remote broadcast engineer. We had a very similar discussion several months after the Accurian HD receiver was introduced. Here's the problem as he sees it:

Consumers are led to believe HD means cleaner reception (because they've heard the claims of "CD-quality sound, Crystal-clear reception, No station drop-off, and No static, hiss or audio distortion"), but in exurban residential areas, there's often insufficient signal strength for a receiver to lock on to the digital carriers. (Unless a high gain antenna is installed on the roof or in the attic)

So when someone at the outskirts of a large market buys an HD receiver expecting this "miracle box" will finally provide decent in-home radio reception, then plugs it in, turns it on, and hears no difference, he or she feels let-down and ripped-off -- and then returns the radio.

If the industry is REALLY SERIOUS about addressing this problem, the proposed 10 dB digital power increase isn't going to cut it; however, the BMC expanded band plan could offer a solution. As a non-hybrid OFDM system, it would allow multiple on-channel boosters to fill in areas not covered well by a station's main transmitter. This option would would be especially valuable in markets with hilly terrain. I'm thinking not only of the western suburbs of Philadelphia, but portions of north Jersey like Morris and Somerset Counties, which are in the New York metro but have many shadowed areas. Of course, there are many other markets in this category, like Boston/Worcester, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Binghamton, Springfield, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.
 
That's exactly the same reason I've heard so many times with Digital TV, too.
They buy the box and some "whiz-bang" amplified antenna, try them out and get poor results, then return everything.

I don't think that raising the digital power, by itself, is the answer, though. They should lower the analog power by 10 dB, and increase the digital by 3, 6 or 10 dB. That "balancing act" might do more good, since I suspect that the enormous amount of analog power swamps the digital.

Here in SLC, no one can increase power at all. The antenna combiner and FM antenna is already glowing. The former CE of Farnsworth Peak always swore that lowering everyone's power would help multipath issues. Maybe this would be a good time to experiment....lower the analog, and make a corresponding increase in the Digital.
 
C’mon, Kenglish, you can’t be serious, can you? Do you really want to reduce analog power by 10 dB?

Keep in mind that even a cheap FM receiver generally has a capture ratio 3 dB. For better receivers, it’s often under 2 dB! (If you don’t know what capture ratio is, you really need to brush up on basic theory. You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect )

If you lower the analog by 10 dB and raise the digital by 10dB, they’d be equal in level. That would be the kiss of death for analog reception on any very cheap receiver with poor selectivity, since the “skirts” of the IF curve billow out so far that the digital would get through to the detector scarcely 3 dB below the level of the analog, even with the station tuned in perfectly – which is seldom the case.

And if that 10-dB analog cut were combined with a digital increase of only 6, or even only 3, dB – yielding a difference of 3, or even 7, dB between the analog and the digital -- that digital signal could be the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” when combined with a variety of weak co- and adjacent-channel signals, that would effectively have a combined level less than 2 dB of the desired analog signal at the receiver’s detector.

Now are you really ready to throw analog “under the bus” to promote a failed digital system that nobody but a rapidly dwindling band of “iNiquity” cheerleaders wants?
 
I would just turn off the digital and wait to see if anymore than the three engineers in market that actually listen even bother to call.
 
kenglish said:
The former CE of Farnsworth Peak always swore that lowering everyone's power would help multipath issues. Maybe this would be a good time to experiment....
Click to expand...

This is probably correct.

If you lower the power of an FM station far enough, car receivers would blend completely to mono in the mutipath areas, causing a reduction in noise and distortion. Of course, you'll also lose most of the fringe area listeners, so the easier solution is simply to turn off the stereo pilot!
 
Sure, why not?? AM stations operating HD have reduced analog bandwidth to "near-telephone" quality, 6 kHz, 5 kHz, or in some cases as narrow as 4.5 kHz. ("Listeners are too stupid to notice," is the rationalization frequently offered by the HD crowd.....)

While we're trashing terrestrial radio in the stupefyingly dumb lurch to force HD on the marketplace, let's sacrifice FM listeners as well!

Let's blindly follow Phil Spector's time-honored call: "BACK TO MONO !!!" ::)
 
Hey Fm listeners already suffer. Higher frequency responce on anolog isn't what it used to be before IBOC was turned on. *Thinks to self: Wonder if they chopped that responce off on purpis, so that they could make better responce for those sellective people who have HD?) Also decressed stereo seperation on anolog, too.
John
Bensalem, PA
 
RadeoEngineer said:
Just curious. Is English your native language?
Click to expand...

For the record, John is Blind so please don't jump on his grammar to0 much, he does the best he can with the software he has.
 
John are you a ham? Lots of blind hams out there who have a blast. I belong to a lot of ham lists who are run by a blind ham. Many of us transmit in good old AM too by the way, there is a fairly large back to AM movement and there is no IBOC on the ham bands. Some guys even use old broadcast transmitters converted for the ham bands.
 
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