SayNoToIBOC said:
"IBiquity Digital's Make-or-Break Point Approaches"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58846-2005Feb27.html
YES !
No wonder, they are squirming at iBiquity - under investigation by the CPB, legal complaints filed against them, and being stalled by the FCC and RIAA ! Oh David, when you searched on, "iBiquity financial", this article came up, before yours - oops !
This paragraph from the above-referenced article caught my attention:
"Patrick M. Walsh, iBiquity's chief financial officer, said the company had $4 million in revenue in 2004. Much of that revenue came from two of HD radio's main competitive threats -- satellite radio companies Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., which license iBiquity's technology for their own all-digital signals. Walsh said revenue should double year-over-year this year and next, and "grow much faster thereafter." The company will begin to hire more people, as well."
So digital-only HD radio ALREADY exists in the USA, in the form of satellite radio. I realize that part of its appeal is that its programming content is continuously available continent-wide (no need for long-distance drivers to change stations), plus the fact that the FCC's content restrictions don't apply to it because it is a subscription service not freely available to everyone. Still, it shows that all-digital HD radio can work well on a band of its own.
With that being the case, having terrestrial all-digital HD radio on the Long Wave band (150 kHz - 530 kHz, with protections for the relatively few aviation Non-Directional Beacons [NDBs] there) and/or the now seldom-used old Armstrong FM band (48 MHz - 50 or 52 MHz if I recall correctly, which is now only used by a few old public service radio systems) seems more sensible than trying to make the hybrid analog/digital HD radio system both work well *and* coexist with existing analog AM and FM radio stations.
The hybrid analog/digital IBOC system is a kludge at best, especially on AM. It's like trying to simultaneously have a bullfight and a horse dressage competition in the same arena. If all-digital HD radio could have its own terrestrial band or bands there would be no need to compromise its power output to avoid interfering with its analog signal component, since there wouldn't be any.
Long Wave in particular would be attractive for HD broadcasting because there would be no night-time skywave interference problem--it's all groundwave. Since would-be HD radio listeners have to buy new receivers to hear HD radio anyway, it wouldn't matter if it was on different bands than existing AM and FM stations.
-- Jason
