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HD Radio on air in Kiev

Does anyone in either country actually have an HD radio? Could you even buy one in Kiev or Santo Domingo? The reason I ask, isn't simply to be a wise guy; these types of countries are tough places in which to find decent receivers to start with. Even a Sony Walkman generally requires a trip to a specific shop somewhere downtown or near the metro area's fanciest mall. Most radios tend to be sold at smaller stores or by vendors and these units are at about the same quality level as a Coby.

Secondly, the prices that someone has to pay for such technology is between 30% and 50% higher than in the USA. So, even the Insignia portable (were it available) would end up costing around US$70 - a lot of money for the average Dominican or Ukrainian. Even if one could find an HD radio, the cost is high and value derived from that extra cost is limited.

So, my point is this: where's the ROI for the station owner? If nobody's listening and the outlook for growth is bleak, what's the use? Why bother? All I can say is that whoever is selling this technology internationally can clearly sell ice cubes to the Inuit. Or she's damn hot looking and doesn't mind fraternizing with the clients. Because there's no other explanation for this from a financial standpoint.

Meanwhile (to beat this drum a little more) smartphone sales are showing healthy increases in such cities as S.D. and Kiev. With smart phones come many, many audio entertainment choices that far outshine anything that HD radio can offer.
 
I *would* say that in the case of Raices Radio, it's to have a nice Web feed. But I am listening right now, and it sure ain't the case. Possibly they felt that the price to set it up will never be lower than it is now, and advertising it on their website (and possibly on-air) will get some folk asking around. But that's speculation only, and I think that you are on to something.

Too bad that not every radio listener is a DXer....HD woulda been kicked off the map long ago.

In the Miami metro, the first station (I think) to apply HD, Romance 106.7, no longer has it!

cd
 
BRNout said:
Meanwhile (to beat this drum a little more) smartphone sales are showing healthy increases in such cities as S.D. and Kiev. With smart phones come many, many audio entertainment choices that far outshine anything that HD radio can offer.
Click to expand...

While watching this video, another question came to mind: The Sony XDR-F1HD is an impressive tuner, but can its LCD display deal with the Cyrillic alphabet? And how easy is it to send Cyrillic text with iBiquity's present software? Although an increasing number of Ukrainians speak English (or another language that uses Roman characters), media services that don't "speak the local language" aren't usually successful.

On the other hand, smartphones and PCs (which, unlike niche products such as the Sony, are sold to the mass market) have much more flexibility to adapt to different systems of writing through Unicode downloads.
 
I have a car MP3 player with RDS output. Ill have to put some weird characters in a song title and see what the SONY does. I do know that it seems to have trouble with the $ symbol. When a local CHR station plays Ke$ha this is what the SONY displays:
 
spunker88 said:
I have a car MP3 player with RDS output. Ill have to put some weird characters in a song title and see what the SONY does. I do know that it seems to have trouble with the $ symbol. When a local CHR station plays Ke$ha this is what the SONY displays:
Click to expand...

RDS was developed in Europe about 30 years ago, so the $ symbol was probably overlooked -- not to mention the Euro symbol, which hadn't been designed yet.

I've noticed that the RDS on my Sangean portable has no trouble with the asterisks in "F**kin' Perfect" by Pink.
 
That character the SONY is displaying for the $ is actually the currency character, so although the $ is not avaliable in RDS it knows how to deal with the character. Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_(typography)

I decided to name an MP3 file with a bunch of symbols to see what the SONY would do. Most of the ones on a standard keyboard worked except for some like ~`^ Ive seen # used many times for "#1 music station", etc. Its also convenient that they included the @ character since RDS was created before email became popular, and I think Ive seen a station use this before telling people to email requests to, unless @ was added in a later revision. Any characters i put in from the character map like accented letters, foreign characters were shown as * on the RDS readout, even the £ character. Im not sure if this was the fault of the RDS transmitter unit or the SONY.
 
That might be the RDS encoder. I think they have a limited character input. I've seen "Ke$ha" displayed on my Insignia before but that may have been an HD station, not the RDS decoding.

Every Sony product I've ever owned with text capabilities (mostly minidisc decks and portables) has had the ability to decode a wide set of ASCII symbols and characters, and all have had the hidden ability to decode Kanji. One of my old portable recorders could access Kanji symbols by a special hidden menu combo and I was able to label a few of my J-rock albums to match what was on the CD case. Every player after that would decode the Japanese symbols properly.

If the radio could decode it directly, I think $ and other special symbols would work.
 
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