I sent this email a few minutes ago...

[clouseau]

I GUESS IT'S PRETTY UNPROFESSIONAL OF ME TO I POST THIS. MAYBE THEY'LL STOP PAYMENT ON MY "SECRET PAYROLL" CHECK....


Ms Lee, (That's Kitsa Lee, Ibiquity Sales rep for those of you in Rio Linda)

I apologise for not getting back to you sooner as you had requested.

As you no doubt expected, we have determined it does not make any sense whatsoever to convert a translator to HD at the current rates. Ibiquity has apparently decided that "Everyone" pays the same regardless of class. The $10,000 license fee (now increased I'm told) makes no sense when we built the translator for under $5000.

You have been helpful with suggesting "Workarounds" should our originating station (Which we do not own) ever go digital.

None the less, it appears Ibiquity has NO INTEREST whatsoever in spreading the technology over the 10000+ translators in the US. I must admit this is odd as their website shows less than 1600 total stations on air at this point. I will not attempt to assess their strategy.

While the power of translators is often misjudged, I expected a more favorable response than "Full Power" prices. I guess you feel it is a Sellers market.

Thanks for holding open the offer of pre increase pricing for the translator I represent. However at this time I must decline the offer and allow you to withdraw from the offer.

On a personal note, you have been responsive and VERY helpful and understanding of the realities of translator implementation. Still, a 200% increase [over original construction cost] before we start buying equipment is definitely a deal breaker.

Thanks for your professional conduct and assistance. Should Ibiquity ever decide more realistic pricing is in order, please contact me immediatly. We're willing but FAR from able (At current rates).

Please accept this email as a formal decline of your previous pricing and consider it a release of any obligation you may have had associated with it.

I wish you well.

Clouseau (Identity altered to Radio-Info Standards)

KXXXXX Licensed City, USA

End Quoted Email.

Now I know I'm a paid shill so I guess you should just declare that Ibiquity eats their young as well. Face it... They hate everyone.


ON a related front let me say that Hippo has renewed my faith. He strongly DISlikes HD yet stood up for truth with regards to FM interference elsewhere on these boards. He and I disagree on a lot. But I'll do his "bash my head against his" anytime when there is honesty involved. Hats off to your honesty... you myopian.

Many could learn from a few on this board.

Clouseau

 

[Savage]

Thanks for this, Inspector. Good for you - and I mean it.

 

[clouseau]

Thanks for this, Inspector. Good for you - and I mean it.

A spade is a spade. While I support the idea and the advancement of the current system, it's galacticly ignorant to figure you are ever going to get ANY station built for less than $10K to buy an "ENHANCEMENT" which does not increase service area for $10k. I would say that LPFM is almost in the same boat. Now there are a very few LPFMs who are going the route of "Big Business" and actually have the cash, but I think you could probably count them on the fingers of one hand.

If "I" were iBiquity, I'd give away the non transferrable license for HD to translators and LPFMs for free. Under a worst case scenario, this might cost Ibiquity.... $20,000-$30,000 in lost revenue nationally over the next 5 years? I would guess that number is closer to zero than $30k.

They would receive annual license fees for HD-2/3 if implemented by any of these stations. Theywould receive licensing fees from the manufacture of the transmitting equipment and an override for the inevitable radio purchases.

Now a lot of this sounds like Ibiquity is giving away the farm, but they would only be giving away what they are NEVER going to be able to sell. As a commercial operator, this would piss me off. Imagine the implementation, though. EMF would be all over this for their other formats. Ditto Air-1. You have little HD stations running around the nether regions like Tribbles. A Savage nightmare. Remeber though, if they cause legit interference, then they have to cease operations or fix it. This might have been an interesting area for the interference folks to sharpen their pencils. And frankly where they clearly hold the cards...

Nah. Makes too much sense. I see iBiquity has signed another 10 stations since the price went up Sept 30 (I think).

The rollout continues...

Clouseau

 

[Savage]

I don't get the iBiquity logic. Given current market conditions it would be more in the nature of common sense for them to make it EASIER for more stations to implement the technology instead of discouraging it.
The successful launch of new systems invariably involves a "loss-leader" component, as a strategy to buy market share.

Of course I have no way of knowing, but it almost seems like they're being forced to meet some kind of financial-performance "bogeys" or benchmarks.

 

[JohnnyElectron]

Inspector Clouseau: There IS ONE OPTION - if, and only if, your originating station is already in HD, you can buy a tuner/exciter package from FANFARE Electronics that takes the ENTIRE signal from the origination station and PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter - there is NO demodulation of the HD signal, therefore you don't have to pay for the translators, only for the originating full-power FM station. It works like a charm too.
Please contact me off-list if you want to discuss it further, but it does work great (and works great at getting around the license issues).

 

[clouseau]

Inspector Clouseau: There IS ONE OPTION - if, and only if, your originating station is already in HD, you can buy a tuner/exciter package from FANFARE Electronics that takes the ENTIRE signal from the origination station and PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter - there is NO demodulation of the HD signal, therefore you don't have to pay for the translators, only for the originating full-power FM station. It works like a charm too.
Please contact me off-list if you want to discuss it further, but it does work great (and works great at getting around the license issues).

The originator is NOT in HD and my guess is it will be "close to never" before it will. It is a Distant rural station translated in a rated market. Even if it did, that precludes the hourly sponsorship announcements as well as the ability to originate EAS in an emergency.

I've heard about hte actual "HD Translator" from Armstrong (I think). It works politcally in a few situations, but not the one I 'm working with (or the vast majority of other translators either I would suspect.)

Thanks for the input, though.

Clouseau

 

[Chuck]

You make good points about translators and LPFM. It would be a cheap way for Ibiquity to jump start this thing, providing it actually could be made to give decent reception. That's the part I doubt.

Even if you do it, what good does it do? Translators have a maximum analog ERP of 250 watts. LPFM's have a maximum ERP of 100 watts. Many of both classes of stations are restricted to a lot lower power than the maximum. Some are as little as 10 or 20 watts. Given that the IBOC standard calls for a digital power level 1/100 of the analog signal, I find it hard to believe that a 0.1 watt HD signal would be worth doing. Depending on elevation, you might get a mile out of it, but I sincerely doubt that it would penetrate any buildings at that distance. Assuming I'm right about the coverage, I can't imagine investing $35,000 in equipment, plus the licensing fees for such dismal performance. Even 2.5 watts digital (which would be the maximum power allowed) sounds quite paltry.

I just don't see that happening even if Ibiquity gave away the license as you suggest. I understand that digital is more robust than analog; consequently requiring less power to cover the same area, but somewhere there has to be a point of diminishing returns.

Does anyone have any data or better yet, real world tests that would indicate otherwise?

 

[JohnnyElectron]

The only good thing that I've had to say about HD-AM (so far) is that our local graveyard has a 7.25 Watt Digital component, and it covers the city of license quite well, so I AM impressed with that, and confused why 500 watts of digital power is so crappy from 50KW AM stations less than 60 miles away? So, theoretically, 2.5 W of digital should get you 2-1/2 miles, at least on AM at night, but don't know about FM.

iBiqiuty should be giving translators a $500 pass and call it a day.

 

[ve3jf]

The only good thing that I've had to say about HD-AM (so far) is that our local graveyard has a 7.25 Watt Digital component, and it covers the city of license quite well, so I AM impressed with that, and confused why 500 watts of digital power is so crappy from 50KW AM stations less than 60 miles away? So, theoretically, 2.5 W of digital should get you 2-1/2 miles, at least on AM at night, but don't know about FM.

How do you figure 7.25 Watts? Nearly all graveyarders are 1 kW, which would make the digital power either 59 Watts or 68 Watts, depending on how they set the "switch" that controls the secondary/tertiary sideband power levels. If they're not 1 kW, you can figure the digital power as -12.3 or -11.7 dBc.

Barry

 

[JohnnyElectron]

The same engineering group set up both AM-HD stations; the 5KW AM is running just under 50W digital (used to run AM stereo and Kahn stereo at one time), and the 1KW is running only 7.25Watts of digital blow.

Adjacent channel interference and 2nd adjacent channel is incredibly nasty for such a low power level, but as I said, it does cover the area (on non-thunderstorm days) much better than I ever thought.

 

[radioskeptic]

In Reply # 4 above, JohnnyElectron wrote:

Inspector Clouseau: There IS ONE OPTION - if, and only if, your originating station is already in HD, you can buy a tuner/exciter package from FANFARE Electronics that takes the ENTIRE signal from the origination station and PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter - there is NO demodulation of the HD signal, therefore you don't have to pay for the translators, only for the originating full-power FM station. It works like a charm too.
Please contact me off-list if you want to discuss it further, but it does work great (and works great at getting around the license issues).

The raises a couple of questions, and a promising possibility.

If Fanfare’s package “PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter” (presumably meaning only the legitimate parts of the signal, not the separately generated “HD” side channels), does that include any SCA components?

This is not just a rhetorical question. If the “skirts” of the IF curve are steep enough to reject first channel interference from other stations (they don’t have to be too tight to reject the station’s own IBOC – at minus 20 dB, or even -10 dB, capture ratio should take care of that!) – are they still wide enough to allow suitable recovery of SCA’s? (Because of their high frequecies, the the FM sidebands generated by SCA’s are at the outer edges of the channel.)

If so, this system would pass FMeXtra signals, because those are actually digital SCA’s. And I don’t buy the argument about FMeXtra being vulnerable to multipath to the same degree as analog SCA’s. Both conventional SCA’s, which are analog FM subcarriers, and the quasi-AM (DSB, suppressed carrier) analog stereo difference signal, are being transmitted, in effect, as narrow-band FM, and narrow-band FM can be noisier – and more vulnerable to multipath – than AM. But the digital form of the FMeXtra SCA’s should, in theory, make them recoverable under such conditions, shouldn’t it?

 

[Radioman100]

The raises a couple of questions, and a promising possibility.

If Fanfare’s package “PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter” (presumably meaning only the legitimate parts of the signal, not the separately generated “HD” side channels), does that include any SCA components?

This is not just a rhetorical question. If the “skirts” of the IF curve are steep enough to reject first channel interference from other stations (they don’t have to be too tight to reject the station’s own IBOC – at minus 20 dB, or even -10 dB, capture ratio should take care of that!) – are they still wide enough to allow suitable recovery of SCA’s? (Because of their high frequecies, the the FM sidebands generated by SCA’s are at the outer edges of the channel.)

If so, this system would pass FMeXtra signals, because those are actually digital SCA’s. And I don’t buy the argument about FMeXtra being vulnerable to multipath to the same degree as analog SCA’s. Both conventional SCA’s, which are analog FM subcarriers, and the quasi-AM (DSB, suppressed carrier) analog stereo difference signal, are being transmitted, in effect, as narrow-band FM, and narrow-band FM can be noisier – and more vulnerable to multipath – than AM. But the digital form of the FMeXtra SCA’s should, in theory, make them recoverable under such conditions, shouldn’t it?

Why would anyone want to bother passing FMeXtra along? There's only one radio that can receive it, and unlike with HD Radio, there doesn't seem to be more on the horizon.

 

[ve3jf]

The same engineering group set up both AM-HD stations; the 5KW AM is running just under 50W digital (used to run AM stereo and Kahn stereo at one time), and the 1KW is running only 7.25Watts of digital blow.

Adjacent channel interference and 2nd adjacent channel is incredibly nasty for such a low power level, but as I said, it does cover the area (on non-thunderstorm days) much better than I ever thought.

I would question how they measured the digital power - if the system was set up according to the NRSC-5A specs, the power would be a lot higher than that. Why would they deliberately cripple the digital performance, which is already mediocre at best? Unless, of course, they plan to slowly crank it up as time goes on... the "frog in the pot" technique.

Barry

 

[JohnnyElectron]

Barry: here's his reply regarding the 5KW and the graveyard station:

"The Ibiquity standard calls for the digital carriers to be 20 dB down
from the analog carrier. That is the standard approved by the FCC. So,
if you use the formula dB=10log(p1/p2), you can see where the 50 watts
comes from.

What makes it all the more incredable is you need to realize the
robustness of the IBOC signal. If you were to put 7.25 watts of analog
AM into the antenna, it would not cover nearly as well as the same
power level of the digital signal."

-.-

 

[JohnnyElectron]

RADIOSKEPTIC: Regarding your Translator questions:

> If Fanfare’s package “PASSES ALL of the signal thru to the exciter”
> (presumably meaning only the legitimate parts of the signal, not the
> separately generated “HD” side channels), does that include any SCA
> components?

Yes, it will pass the entire baseband. This includes the SCA's and the HD-R skirts.

> This is not just a rhetorical question. If the “skirts” of the IF
> curve are steep enough to reject first channel interference from other
> stations (they don’t have to be too tight to reject the station’s own
> IBOC – at minus 20 dB, or even -10 dB, capture ratio should take care
> of that!) – are they still wide enough to allow suitable recovery of
> SCA’s? (Because of their high frequecies, the the FM sidebands
> generated by SCA’s are at the outer edges of the channel.)

The TRO is a new breed of receiver. It has a 3x 3stage front end with sensitivity that provides full quieting at about 10uV.Adjacent rejection will be in the neighborhood of -90dB. It's bandpass is classified, but suffice it to say that HD-R signal will be processed intact.

> If so, this system would pass FMeXtra signals, because those are
> actually digital SCA’s.
Yes,
There's an interesting test article by Michael LeClair in the 10/17 edition of Radio World's Engineering Extra magazine(pg2) on FMeXtra."

So, it looks like the Fanfare will do the trick no matter what you throw at it for translator use.

 

[ve3jf]

Barry: here's his reply regarding the 5KW and the graveyard station:

"The Ibiquity standard calls for the digital carriers to be 20 dB down
from the analog carrier. That is the standard approved by the FCC. So,
if you use the formula dB=10log(p1/p2), you can see where the 50 watts
comes from.

What makes it all the more incredable is you need to realize the
robustness of the IBOC signal. If you were to put 7.25 watts of analog
AM into the antenna, it would not cover nearly as well as the same
power level of the digital signal."

-.-

Sorry, but this is nonsense - for the AM system, the "iBiquity standard" does not say that the digital power is -20 dBc. He's confusing AM IBOC with FM IBOC, and the two systems have many differences. The digital power in the AM system, as I said before, is either -12.3 or -11.7 dBc. All of the gory details can be seen here:
http://topazdesigns.com/iboc/AM-IBOC-Parameters.html

It's sad that, even at this late date, the details about the AM IBOC system are so poorly understood, even by many of the people who are busily deploying it.

Barry

 

[radionekkid]

Barry: here's his reply regarding the 5KW and the graveyard station:

"The Ibiquity standard calls for the digital carriers to be 20 dB down
from the analog carrier. That is the standard approved by the FCC. So,
if you use the formula dB=10log(p1/p2), you can see where the 50 watts
comes from.

What makes it all the more incredable is you need to realize the
robustness of the IBOC signal. If you were to put 7.25 watts of analog
AM into the antenna, it would not cover nearly as well as the same
power level of the digital signal."

-.-

as i understand it, you must add 11.6db to your number and that is arrived at by dividing the 4360.5 hz bandwidth of the digital carriers by 300hz resolution and extracting 10log of that number.