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Ford Drinks HD Radio Kool-Aid

That is really not a surprise. Ford, and Ford's former subsidiary and current electronics supplier, Visteon, are both major shareholders in iBiquity.
 
unless the FCC makes HD capability a requirement for Type Acceptance, the "technology" is going to languish.

I'll take my XM radio any day of the week and gladly pay the C note a year before I buy the HD module for any of my cars or the motorcycle.

If Ibiquity and the radio people get together and start making 5.1 surround sound receivers and encode the HD1 in 5.1, I might be interested.
 
Let's hope they were smart enough to design in an HD lockout, because people are NOT going to tolerate the 75% of stations out there that can't seem to sync their HD and analog broadcasts to save their lives.

Yesterday I must have gotten lucky because I was getting an HD signal from Memphis in Oxford, Mississippi, about 47 air miles from the WKQK tx site. Except it was in and out. In and out. In and out. And the sync was at least a second off, maybe more. Made it impossible to listen to, so I had to seek elsewhere for content.

And today, I was actually IN Memphis and I counted four stations out of sync out of about eight signals. Terrible! Sound quality, programming issues of subchannels and reception issues aside, the sync issue is what will drive people to put a foot through their dashboards in anger.
 
The blending to analog is a feature of HD radio. Hearing the analog and HD1 out of sync is a benefit of having an HD radio.
 
Zach said:
And today, I was actually IN Memphis and I counted four stations out of sync out of about eight signals. Terrible! Sound quality, programming issues of subchannels and reception issues aside, the sync issue is what will drive people to put a foot through their dashboards in anger.
Click to expand...

Time alignment is also still a problem in southern California, according to the latest report from Brian, K6STI, who monitors his local stations on a regular basis. Scroll to the bottom for recent measurements.

http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/roster.htm

I can't say the IBOC system is nifty, but it certainly is drifty. I guess what we need is for someone to modify the guts of an old RCA "Iron Fireman" exciter to automatically turn the knob on the delay box. We've tried just about everything else.
 
Play Freebird said:
Zach said:
And today, I was actually IN Memphis and I counted four stations out of sync out of about eight signals. Terrible! Sound quality, programming issues of subchannels and reception issues aside, the sync issue is what will drive people to put a foot through their dashboards in anger.
Click to expand...

Time alignment is also still a problem in southern California, according to the latest report from Brian, K6STI, who monitors his local stations on a regular basis. Scroll to the bottom for recent measurements.

http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/roster.htm

I can't say the IBOC system is nifty, but it certainly is drifty. I guess what we need is for someone to modify the guts of an old RCA "Iron Fireman" exciter to automatically turn the knob on the delay box. We've tried just about everything else.
Click to expand...

El oh el, that article is discussion milliseconds of time sync and I'm hearing SECONDS. Oops.
 
Note that the most recent (July 2010) measurements show KSOQ off by 2244 ms, KYXY at 1243 ms, and KLQV at 2182 ms. To put this into perspective, a scratched 45 rpm record (played at normal speed) would skip every 1333 ms.

Hey, I guess HD sounds like vinyl!
 
Yeah, and about 20 years ago, car buyers had to pay extra for a car radio with a CD player, because CD players, at the time, still weren't standard equipment. About 40 years ago people had to pay extra to get a VHF FM radio as an upgrade to the standard mediumwave tuners, because FM radios weren't standard equipment. So what's your point?
 
Darth_vader said:
So what's your point?
Click to expand...

The point, obviously, is that if a company wants to push its otherwise ignored product into the market it should make it easy and cheap for the customer to take it. Paying for an optional HD radio when there is virtually no demand makes no sense.
 
pocket-radio said:
Car buyers have to pay extra for HD radio, it's not standard equipment. That's really dumb..
Click to expand...

I am into my second vehicle with HD as a standard feature.
 
DavidEduardo said:
I am into my second vehicle with HD as a standard feature.
Click to expand...

I'm curious, if you've had experience with store-bought HD radios, how the factory-installed HD headunits have compared as for performance. Some of the best radios I've toyed with, reception-wise, have been OEM units, so I'm curious to know if OEM HD is any better than some of the other radios out there.
 
Darth_vader said:
Yeah, and about 20 years ago, car buyers had to pay extra for a car radio with a CD player, because CD players, at the time, still weren't standard equipment. About 40 years ago people had to pay extra to get a VHF FM radio as an upgrade to the standard mediumwave tuners, because FM radios weren't standard equipment. So what's your point?
Click to expand...
My car still has a tape player, it's a '92 Honda Accord. I plan to drive it until it dies. So if HD becomes standard in every car in 2015, there will still be cars without HD radio in 2030. I'm sure by the time HD radio is in every single car, cars will be flying (not a far fetched idea considering there already is a prototype of a flying car right now).
 
Zach said:
DavidEduardo said:
I am into my second vehicle with HD as a standard feature.
Click to expand...

I'm curious, if you've had experience with store-bought HD radios, how the factory-installed HD headunits have compared as for performance. Some of the best radios I've toyed with, reception-wise, have been OEM units, so I'm curious to know if OEM HD is any better than some of the other radios out there.
Click to expand...

I am able to carry the HD of KFI from Metro LA to around Banning, CA which is where the analog signal is subject to noise from passing trucks, atmospherics, etc., in the daytime (at night, it is in the skywave canellation zone). KNX is good almost to the limit of my noise free analog area, somewhat to the West of Redlands on I-10. In the farthest areas, the HD will fold back in below some bridges, but otherwise, it is robust.

On FM, the signals are good on the B's anywhere in the LA metro except far Orange County and the high desert... in other words, anywhere it matters to the station.

On the other hand, on the many Class A's in LA, the HD is annoying in a car, as it seems to fold back too often, with slight quality differences.

The new one, in a 2011 model, is a bit better than the old one in a 2007 model...
 
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