"HD Radio: Truly a Failure" -Bernie Wise-Energy-Onix

[SUPERCASTER]

Watch for this excellent article about HD Radio's technical failures, published in the new Radio World issue March 26, 08 page 84, by veteran broadcast equipment manufacturer Bernard Wise (Energy-Onix). Unfortunately it's not posted on the net yet, but it illustrates why HD Radio is defective, promises much and delivers little.
Add to that HD Radio's (snail) sales, programming, marketing failures, additional expense, lack of public acceptance, and it's easy to see why HD Radio is "truly a failure".

 

[Savage]

ATTENTION EVERYONE! What's the over/under on how long it's going to take someone to weigh in here to this effect:

"Bernie Wise?? Harrumph!! Little dweeby Energy-Onix company that doesn't sell squat....obscure product line....Leonard Kahn lite....naysayer.....loser that doesn't sell 0.5% of the gear sold by Harris annually....(fill in your own gratuitous attack here)....."

Sorry, Bernie. You've gotta get in line with The IBOC Faithful or take the grief. After all, EVERYONE knows that HD "is the only answer to radio's ills...."

 

[radioskeptic]

I'm afraid it wont be posted on the RW web site. They post feature articles and guest commentaries, but not the letters to the editor that appear under the "Reader's Forum" banner -- and this was a letter, not guest commentary.

I have to agree with Supercaster, though. It was excellent. In fact, it may well be the most succinct and compelling case anyone has ever made against Ibiquity's half-baked system in so few words.. And best of all, he didn't neglect the flaws in the FM system, which so many of you neglect because they are dwarfed by the far worse flaws of the AM system.

 

[NE Miss Radio]

It's off topic but I have to tell my great Bernie Wise story.

We had been on air about 1 month and took a brutal lightning strike causing a transmitter outage. Bernie was on the phone talking me through locating the failure. In the middle of it I heard a soft "whumph" and then saw two cigarette lighter-sized flames, one from the primary side and one from the secondary side of the plate transformer.

Never having seen a transmitter burn before (!) and being about 1 1/2 miles from water I slowly moaned "Oh, s#!t." Bernie, still there on the phone, responded as cool as a cucumber in his New York accent,

"Well, it sounds like we've found your prahblem."

Turned out I blew out the flame on the transformer quite easily.

Bernie went in to the factory on a holiday, got a new transformer (warranty), took it to the airport an hour away, and counter-to-counter shipped it to me the same day. THAT, my friends, is service.

 

[Savage]

Bernie is a consummate pro and a good broadcaster. Can't wait to get RW to read his letter.

One note: we up here in New York don't have accents. It's the folks in Mississippi who have accents! ;D

 

[Play Freebird]

I just read Bernie's letter and agree that his points are quite valid.

His comments on AM frequency response and modulation can be easily verified in the field. I was in the Rochester area last week and compared the audio of IBOC station WHAM with Bob Savage's WYSL, as well as my 2.5 kW "pure analog" station which is about 35 miles SW of the city. The extended frequency response and increased loudness of the non-IBOC stations was easily detected on every receiver I tried -- including a cheap Sony clock radio, a GE Superadio, an inexpensive portable, and the Blaupunkt "Digiceiver" in my car.

My station's loudness increase over WHAM was still apparent in areas where they had a 25 dB field strength advantage.

It's time to put this experiment to rest and move on to Plan B.

 

[Carmine5]

Yesterday, I spoke to a friend of mine who is the Operations Manager for KFRN 1280 in Long Beach, CA.

I asked him when the station plans on converting to HD. His reply: "No receivers, no audience, big expense and doesn't work well at night. Does that answer your question?" He's more interested in the station sounding its best in analog (and battling interference from Mexico).

So I don't look for KFRN to add HD-AM anytime soon, if ever.

C5

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

It's off topic but I have to tell my great Bernie Wise story.

We had been on air about 1 month and took a brutal lightning strike causing a transmitter outage. Bernie was on the phone talking me through locating the failure. In the middle of it I heard a soft "whumph" and then saw two cigarette lighter-sized flames, one from the primary side and one from the secondary side of the plate transformer.

Never having seen a transmitter burn before (!) and being about 1 1/2 miles from water I slowly moaned "Oh, s#!t." Bernie, still there on the phone, responded as cool as a cucumber in his New York accent,

"Well, it sounds like we've found your prahblem."

Turned out I blew out the flame on the transformer quite easily.

Bernie went in to the factory on a holiday, got a new transformer (warranty), took it to the airport an hour away, and counter-to-counter shipped it to me the same day. THAT, my friends, is service.

I have my Bernie Wise story too: I took over as CE of a station in New England that had an old CSI transmitter which could never make licensed power, despite Bernie and many other techs from CSI/CCA taking a look at it. This had occurred years before I took over the CE job (the owners had finally given up and bought a Harris box). When Bernie found out that I had the job there (long after CSI/CCA had folded and he founded Energy-Onix) he called me out of the blue and asked, "How's that CSI doing?" If I had needed a new transmitter I would have ordered one from him on the spot. That kind of service is virtually unknown today.

 

[kyscott]

Bernie hit the nail on the head. I had a chance to talk to him at last year's NAB about a transmitter one of my clients has. Bernie is a great guy. Wonder how many other engineers feel the same as him but can't speak out because their employer is in bed with Ibiquity? I will not believe the numbers that Ibiquity spout off until I see HD radios in Wal Mart, on the shelf right next to the regular radios. Not just online, not in the back....on the shelf, in the store like the HDTV sets are. Looks like HD radio is about to be passed by Blu-Ray DVD players. WalMart is scheduled to start selling them in the summer.

 

[SUPERCASTER]

For those who don't receive Radio World some of the main points of why Bernie Wise believes HD Radio is a failure are included in his uncopyrighted January press release available in Adobe PDF format from his Energy-Onix webpage:
http://www.energy-onix.com/
Just scroll down and click on the Adobe PDF logo next to "HD Radio Comments".

Here are some of his comments about HD Radio-AM:

AM Stations
a – HD Radio has an audio frequency response of only 5000Hz. A normal analog
AM transmitter has a 10,000Hz response.

b – An HD Radio exciter and additional broadband matching may cost the AM
broadcaster an additional $50.000.


c – HD Radio occupies the adjacent broadcast channels. Thus, in the evening, the
high reflection of medium frequencies from the ionosphere cause severe
interference to adjacent channels which essentially destroys their “night time”
service.

d – HD Radio cannot modulate more than 95%. A conventional analog AM
transmitter can modulate 125%. Thus, in many major markets where major
stations may operate with HD Radio, they are the lowest sounding stations in the
market. Medium and low power AM stations have much higher audio volumes
since they modulate at 125%.

His critical comments about HD Radio-FM were no better, and perhaps worse.

 

[hipporadio]

..."Bernie Wise?? Harrumph!! Little dweeby Energy-Onix company that doesn't sell squat....obscure product line....Leonard Kahn lite....naysayer.....loser that doesn't sell 0.5% of the gear sold by Harris annually....(fill in your own gratuitous attack here)....."

I know Bernie well [from RCA fame] – he manufactured grounded-grid transmitters built with integrity well-into an era where that design was considered passé. He has offered little to “AM Radio technology” when one considers the qualities of the Nautel, Harris, and BE innovations. I never owned one of his rigs – I was a “Harris Guy”... I never regretted that as an operator, BTW!

His company, E-O, has always exemplified VALUE over glitz... Interesting, that he now weighs-in on the HD debate in this way! I can’t imagine E-O getting into HD... Bernie is best advised to “STAY AWAY”! Actually, I have a few friends in LPFM that own his product, and it is exceptional! ...He needs to remain there and accept his due acclaim in that arena!

 

[KB1OKL]

Here are his comments on FM transmitters from the same document:

http://www.energy-onix.com/

FM Stations
a – Price – The equipment price for an HD Radio transmitter and antenna system
is prohibitively expensive!! The average HD Radio package is a minimum of
$100,000. and can be as high as $250,000.

b – Limited Coverage – The system has been promoted to have an acceptable
signal as far as the 55db contour. We have found that the signal is useable in
practice to the 75db contour.

c- No consumer incentive – Fifty percent of the digital spectrum is a repetition of
the FM analog stereo channel. In a reasonably matched system the FM analog is
comparable quality to the digital when the digital is within its limited range.
There is no incentive for the consumer to use “HD Radio”.

d – Adjacent Channel Interference. We have reports from our customers that HD
Radio has caused major interference with existing FM stations that operate on the
adjacent channel to an HD Radio station. It is well known that their FM “IBOC
stations” operate from 130KHz to 200KHz from their analog center frequency.

e – Annual Licensing Fee – IBiquity has a monopoly on the HD Radio system.
This system cannot be used without paying an annual licensing fee which can be
determined by the management of IBiquity. It is difficult to understand that the
FCC would establish a standard which is controlled by a proprietary source.

 

[LinoNYC]

Here are his comments on FM transmitters from the same document:

I wouldn't occur to you that the original author has an agends, more on that later.

FM Stations
a – Price – The equipment price for an HD Radio transmitter and antenna system
is prohibitively expensive!! The average HD Radio package is a minimum of
$100,000. and can be as high as $250,000.

"Prohibitive" -for whom? No viable FM should have a problem with this sort of capital expense, depreciated over atleast a decade of the equipment's life.

b – Limited Coverage – The system has been promoted to have an acceptable
signal as far as the 55db contour. We have found that the signal is useable in
practice to the 75db contour.

"WE have found' No proof, as usual nut I do get a kick out that "royal" "We".

c- No consumer incentive – Fifty percent of the digital spectrum is a repetition of
the FM analog stereo channel. In a reasonably matched system the FM analog is
comparable quality to the digital when the digital is within its limited range.
There is no incentive for the consumer to use “HD Radio”.

Well let's see. FM iboc offers much better sound quality both due to the absence of extreme high fhz clipping, no lousy composite clipper, much better separation without distortion from multipath.

That last point is worth expanding-on. Last Thursday there was a live broadcast of Madame Butterfly from Lincoln center,. Our T.W. cable has poor audio so I tuned in WQxR's simulcast for the audio on my home theater system. The system consists of Sherwood receiver and DCM, Paradigm and and A.R. speakers. It took a full 15 minutes of fussing with the BIC beambox to get reasonable decent sound that didn't jarr everyone with bursts of multipath distortion.

WQXR is one of the only commercial stations that has not implemented iboc here, had it been so equipped I could have simply have patched the output from the acurian and saved myself alot of the usual annoyance.

Given the topography and RF environment here, FM iboc is now an essential for decent FM stereo, particularly for classical music.

Adjacent Channel Interference. We have reports from our customers that HD
Radio has caused major interference with existing FM stations that operate on the
adjacent channel to an HD Radio station. It is well known that their FM “IBOC
stations” operate from 130KHz to 200KHz from their analog center frequency.

More "we have reports" - nothing.

e – Annual Licensing Fee – IBiquity has a monopoly on the HD Radio system.
This system cannot be used without paying an annual licensing fee which can be
determined by the management of IBiquity. It is difficult to understand that the
FCC would establish a standard which is controlled by a proprietary source.

Deceptive garbage.

This link courtesy "Dumber" -thanks, gives the facts:
http://www.ibiquity.com/i/pdfs/Licensing_%20Fact_%20Sheet_2008.pdf

Note the "one time fee" for the main iboc channel and a 3% or $1000 for each additional hd channel.
Do you really "think" that is a problem for a station?

Finally, the original author has a company offering a competing FM digital system, you don't suppose that, and the possibility that his own line can not be modified for HD would be motivating factors...do you.

http://www.energy-onix.com/HTML/DRE.html

BTW: Any radios for this great system?

Open your mind and eyes, or go away.

Lino

 

[Savage]

MEMORANDUM

TO: ALL
FR: SAVAGE
RE: BERNIE WISE

See Reply #1. I rest my case...

 

[LinoNYC]

MEMORANDUM

TO: ALL
FR: SAVAGE
RE: BERNIE WISE

See Reply #1. I rest my case...

In the referred post you stated: "
"Bernie Wise?? Harrumph!! Little dweeby Energy-Onix company that doesn't sell squat....obscure product line....Leonard Kahn lite....naysayer.....loser that doesn't sell 0.5% of the gear sold by Harris annually....(fill in your own gratuitous attack here)....."

Sorry, Bernie. You've gotta get in line with The IBOC Faithful or take the grief. After all, EVERYONE knows that HD "is the only answer to radio's ills....""

No one made any "gratuitous attack" -on him or his company. I simply pointed out that he made assertions with no proof offered, the one regarding fees was outright misleading and he was not forthcoming regarding his own competing product.

If that constitutes an "attack"..too bad.

Lino

 

[Savage]

MEMORANDUM

TO: ALL
FR: SAVAGE
RE: BERNIE WISE

I rested my case. And it still rests. Who said anything about you, Lino??

 

[Play Freebird]

This link courtesy "Dumber" -thanks, gives the facts:
http://www.ibiquity.com/i/pdfs/Licensing_%20Fact_%20Sheet_2008.pdf

Note the "one time fee" for the main iboc channel and a 3% or $1000 for each additional hd channel.
Do you really "think" that is a problem for a station?

So every station pays the same "one time" license fee, regardless of market size, population coverage or billing? Yes, that's perfectly fair!

As I understand it, the same fee is assessed on translators, even if the primary station has already been licensed. Can anyone clarify this policy? I know that Fanfare and Armstrong are working on direct conversion translator designs which are intended to circumvent this licensing requirement, but this means the digital sidebands cannot not be regenerated, so the bit error rate will likely suffer.

And how much is the "annual fee" or "prevailing rate" that would entitle a licensee to future software upgrades?

 

[RememberWHEN]

Ya know...it used to be said that if you had a license for a station...that was like having a license to print money. The business has changed so much since that day. Seems the whole industry, by-and-large, is struggling to turn a buck.

But, lo-and-behold, it looks like the fine folks that have come up with this IBOC thing have found a way to make sure that THEY will have YOU give them a license to print money. Great throw back

RememberWHEN