FCC Audio Division Chief Doyle Unhappy With HD Conversion

[TheBigA]

Which raises the question: Who plays "God" in these situations. Who can give voice to a national policy that would put equity into the go-dark and don't-go-dark situation.

There is no equity. You have government on one hand, and big radio on the other. They each do what benefits themselves. There is no "national policy" because everyone's looking out for themself. So who do you root for? You can try to come up with regulations that attempt to level the playing field so the "good guys" win, but everyone has lawyers whose job it is to circumvent regulations. The small owners don't trust the NAB, so there's nothing they can say that will have credibility there. Individual owners aren't organized. They're just Don Quixote running their small stations by themselves, getting no help from anyone. This is how we got into this mess.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

I hate it when the only logical answer is: "Doom and Gloom!"

I don't know if I snagged a copy, but when my oldest child was in college, we went to visit her and taped on her refrigerator door was this cartoon. A dragon sitting on the ground, back against a tree and a big exaggerated, swollen belly. Scattered about on the ground were left-over, bent-up parts of knight's armor. The caption: "Sometimes the Dragon Wins"

On second look you realized the oversize toothpick the dragon was using was a "lance" that once belonged to a knight on horseback.

I'm trying to come up with a 21st Century version of that image for today's circumstances. Somewhere in that cartoon will be tea-pots. I just don't know if they will be shiny or if they will be bent-up.

Maybe the dragon will be using an old 150' guyed tower to pick his teeth, and the guy wires will serve as floss.

 

[local oscillator]

It's quite true -- we independent broadcasters are nearly on our own. The FCC cares only about broadband, and the NAB cares only about the big groups. All of their rhetoric to the contrary is pure hypocrisy. At this point, I must put in a word of praise for my state broadcasting association in which ALL members are treated equally and fairly. If there are internal disputes (i.e., on HD Radio), it doesn't take sides. Refreshing.

 

[flashback]

perhaps i am being simplistic but shouldn`t the fcc and other goverment agencies be fixing the problems with digital tv( which is their mandate and in my opinion their responsibility because of that)before they start to push digital radio which has as much a potential of problems dtv has?if not more problems?

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

What are the problems of digital TV that need fixing?

 

[mmnassour]

perhaps i am being simplistic but shouldn`t the fcc and other goverment agencies be fixing the problems with digital tv( which is their mandate and in my opinion their responsibility because of that)before they start to push digital radio which has as much a potential of problems dtv has?if not more problems?

With the exception of those foolish, foolish, stations that elected to do digital on VHF, this thing appears to work rather well. Almost every signal is digital or about to be so, and analog receivers are quickly populating Goodwill and nowhere else.

And this is similar to HD Radio......how?

 

[flashback]

What are the problems of digital TV that need fixing?

periods of pixilation and periods of time recieving no signals at all.

analog tv had dependibility with their signal.digital does not.

the big reasion, i believe, the problems don`t get attention is most people have cable or satalite tv .if you have over the air tv and neither cable or satalite tv those problems occour way too often.

 

[flashback]

in answer to the question 2 posts up on what that has to do with HD radio, if mandated digital tv causes problems so often and it is a stationaty reciever wouldn`t the mobile recievers(car radios) have many problems?

 

[kenglish]

What are the problems of digital TV that need fixing?

periods of pixilation and periods of time recieving no signals at all.

Those are all problems related (primarily) to people's lack of proper antenna, not a problem with the Digital TV system. Not much that "they" can fix...except by educating the viewers.
(I wish the FCC and NAB would have put out a handbook on this stuff, long ago.)

 

[KeithE4]

What are the problems of digital TV that need fixing?

periods of pixilation and periods of time recieving no signals at all.

Those are all problems related (primarily) to people's lack of proper antenna, not a problem with the Digital TV system. Not much that "they" can fix...except by educating the viewers.
(I wish the FCC and NAB would have put out a handbook on this stuff, long ago.)

Partially, but not completely. I have a decent pair of rabbit ears with a UHF yagi built in (a Terk model), and I'm 5 miles southeast of the South Mountain tower farm in Phoenix. I still get dropouts when a plane flies overhead, and for some reason, when the location of the sun is in line with the towers (summers, at around 5 PM in my area), some channels (not all) can drop out for a few minutes - that one I can't explain unless it's a solar noise issue.

Some antennas are amplified. This can be bad in local areas since the preamp can overload, causing intermod that will wreak havoc on digital and analog signals alike. It may or may not be noticeable on an analog signal, but it can kill a digital signal if the intermod products fall inside the TV channel you're watching.

 

[JohnnyElectron]

VHF band HDTV is pixillation station; when those same two channels were temporarily on UHF, they were fine; now they are grossly underpowered on VHF to provide a consistant signal; same for the very high end of UHF HDTV - very weather related signal stregnth.
Prefer antenna instead of cable as cable has compressed and has artifacts.
Good point too: much, if not most, of radio's audience is mobile, and mobile and digital don't work so well together without two backups to maintain the digital signal dropouts (ie: satellite radio has 2 birds PLUS a terrestrial repeater). All digital radio might be fine at home with a fixed antenna; but in your car I wouldn't expect it to be very robust at all. (now, if all these digital stations could run their old analog power with digital, then we'd be talking some serious stuff; but the VHF stations here got 'fluff' for power and lost coverage going from analog to digital on the same VHF channel with an underpowered digital signal.

 

[tomservo]

in answer to the question 2 posts up on what that has to do with HD radio, if mandated digital tv causes problems so often and it is a stationaty reciever wouldn`t the mobile recievers(car radios) have many problems?

The ATSC digital television system wasn't designed with mobile video in mind. There's a different standard for mobile video that some television stations are beginning to put online, that supposedly is a lot more robust. As I understand it, digital video broadcasting in Europe uses a different digital system that's much more mobile friendly. Lots of luxury cars over there come with digital TV tuners in dash as standard or an option.

Obviously mobile digital technology CAN work, look at your cell phone. Voice calls don't usually drop out much anymore and can often follow you hundreds of miles under average conditions with little to no interruption. Much of IBOC's failure has been trying to balance the maximum data throughput in a minimum footprint (that still spills out onto adjacent channels). Not to mention VHF is not a good place for digital. Or at least not VHF below about 150 MHz.

Digital has been good to me, TV-wise. In rural Mississippi I went from 4 analog signals (NBC, PBS, Family Net and TBN) pre-transition to 8½ (NBC, Family Net x 2, TBN, ABC, Fox, PBS, Create and a SD-only CBS that only worked between 9:30 and 11pm on clear nights.) Where I live now there were 11 analog choices but 25 digital ones. Heck, from a purely stationary point at home even HD has benefitted me. I get 5-6 more stations with HD than analog only, including 2 or 3 that are unique formats for the market, plus one AM talk relay that gives me their service 24 hours a day instead of day-only.

 

[JeeperOne]

Anyone can put an analog radio signal on the air. It takes buck$ to put an iboc digital signal on the air.
If analog broadcast dies, it's a good way to quash any discordant voices.

Wow...I think you give these civil servants more credit than they deserve.

The fact is that the folks in Egypt didn't need no stinkin' radio to start their revolution.

In fact, all they used/needed were SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES & CELL PHONES !!!

Last time I checked, that's digital

If discord is really the truth, it doesn't need to be perpetuated by electronics. It will travel through word of mouth, as it always has.

Exactly

Not that any of this has anything to do with HD Radio, since no one has any radios anyway. But the obvious difference between IBOC and the digital system TV uses is that IBOC requires the analog signal. Now if the FCC guy was supporting the views of engineers who have proposed giving OTA radio new spectrum for actual true digital broadcasting instead of IBOC, you might have a point.

That's ASS-U-MING the FCC was listening to engineers who actually have a clue (Because they're paid to!) that is.....

Cheers

 

[Tom Wells]

In light of the "departure" of FCC Commisioner Meredith Baker to Comcast,
so shortly after the approval of the NBC/Comcast deal, this interesting bit came up..

Found this at the end of a Huffington Post column, HuffPostTech, by Joelle Tessler, May 11 2011.

"Before joining the FCC, Baker was head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information administration, where she helped oversee the transition from analog to digital broadcasting."


This is sure interesting to me, and certainly another piece of the puzzle that is iboc.

 

[SirRoxalot]

Obviously mobile digital technology CAN work, look at your cell phone. Voice calls don't usually drop out much anymore and can often follow you hundreds of miles under average conditions with little to no interruption.

One critical difference between cell phones and receivers is that cell phones also have a transmitter. Digital works best when both ends of the connection know if data reached its destination correctly. If receivers don't have the ability to respond, then "Best Effort" digital broadcast has even more issues as analog broadcast. Remember, it's still an analog carrier carrying digital information. With an analog signal, the recievers can switch to mono, then you'll get the typical picket-fencing and fading. With a digital signal, you get silence gaps.

Since we already have cell phone technology, and plenty of apps to allow on-line listening, why not let digital use that infrastructure? The bandwidth required for audio is miniscule compared to video. You're not gonna bust anybody's data plan with audio. For those people in areas where cell coverage is spotty - and there are plenty of them - leave analog AM/FM alone, and stop trying to jam in more signals.

 

[TheBigA]

Since we already have cell phone technology, and plenty of apps to allow on-line listening, why not let digital use that infrastructure?

The big corporate broadcasters are already doing that. But the smaller companies can't afford to create apps or pay for the digital music royalties. FM on cell phones would mainly help the smaller stations.

 

[tomservo]

Since we already have cell phone technology, and plenty of apps to allow on-line listening, why not let digital use that infrastructure? The bandwidth required for audio is miniscule compared to video. You're not gonna bust anybody's data plan with audio. For those people in areas where cell coverage is spotty - and there are plenty of them - leave analog AM/FM alone, and stop trying to jam in more signals.

At this point I just wish my carrier would do SOMETHING to upgrade service in my area. We have 3G (CDMA EV-DO Rev 0) and we really need EV-DO Rev A but they are not interested in doing any upgrades. Going from .7 to 1.2 Mbps is like asking for two more M&Ms in each package, but every little bit helps. I DID get to stream K-EARTH HD-2 all the way home from lunch today and it only broke up once. But it was less than AM quality and in mono. That is no more a replacement for analog radio than the moon for the sun. And frankly, the HD feeds here on the flat coast actually work that well and only cut out occasionally with a decent radio.

I had to take a two day trip up to Birmingham and was reminded of just how bad radio is in big cities. Bland, boring music and HD feeds that just simply do not work anywhere while moving. Even looking at the towers, it was dropping out like crazy. Thankfully the analog local FM talker was reliable all the way down past Demopolis, which is a good 75 miles out from the TX site. If my cell phone hadn't spent more time with no coverage than 1X slow as crap data, I might not have turned on the radio at all.

 

[SirRoxalot]

FM on cell phones would mainly help the smaller stations.

I'm all for analog FM on cell phones. Mandate that, and you could also solve the Emergency Notification problem. If Europe can do it, why can't the US?

 

[Casey]

FM on cell phones would mainly help the smaller stations.

I'm all for analog FM on cell phones. Mandate that, and you could also solve the Emergency Notification problem. If Europe can do it, why can't the US?

FM radio in cell phones has always been and will always be an afterthought. Mandated or not, the quality will always be poor. The reception on any cell phone FM radio I have ever tried was simply terrible and required an external cord for use of an antenna to get any sort of reception. What are the chances that someone would have a cord lying around in the case of an emergency? Next to none. Most people do not carry a headset style cord with them, which would make the radio useless.

Furthermore, how many FM radio stations truly give you news information worth your bother? Sure they would provide national emergency information, but most FM's in most markets do only that. If you want to hear more than that you have to go to AM, TV or internet.

Let's be honest. The NAB does not want the mandate for emergency information. They want to make more money and get more listeners. Typically stations make absolutely nothing while they are delivering emergency alert information. So how can that excuse be valid? They want the mandate because they hope there are a handful of people in the nation that do now know they can get Internet radio on their phone. They are betting on the fact that many people listen to radio daily and maybe one or two percent of them would listen on their phone. In the end they want more listeners and receiving more listeners means more money. Notice the NAB is not pushing for WX to be included in phones. If they truly cared about safety, they would be pushing for WX like no other.

The music industry would have been stupid to even consider supporting this idea. The NAB is clearly lying about their motives behind it. FM radio is dominated by music stations. By mandating radio be placed in phones, not only would it be forcing phone manufacturers to include something consumers do not want, but it also would compete with Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm, etc. All those companies pay high royalties, and by forcing FM to be included, the music industry would be forcing their own revenue to decrease. It would also allow companies like Clear Channel to dodge high-cost royalties from their IHeartRadio service, by referring listeners to the analog signal included in the phone.

 

[TheBigA]

Let's be honest. The NAB does not want the mandate for emergency information. They want to make more money and get more listeners.

I thought you said it's an afterthought. If so, then it won't get more listeners or make more money. But what's wrong with that as a motivation?

In the meantime, if the NAB wants a mandate based on emergency information, that opens the door for the FCC to mandate stations to devote staff and time to emergency information. One thing about Washington is you never get something for nothing. There would be a cost for this mandate, and broadcasters would have to deliver.

Why is everyone so negative about this? It's no big deal. So what that the NAB has other motives? That's not the end of the world.