Savage said:
More sophistry from IBOCers, and more personal attacks. I never said anything about Austria. I referred to "Europe" which includes other little countries like the United Kingdom, France and Spain. You know, SPAIN, where the dominant language is "Clevelandese?"
Austria is but one example. AMs are being reduced in number in many countries, with the near 50% reduction in the AM count in Canada one good example. South Africa only has a half dozen or so left, and many places in Latin America have considerably fewer AMs than 20 years ago. AM is all but gone from the Lesser Antilles and places like the Cayman Islands, the netherlands Antilles, etc. France and England have downscaled either the number of stations or the power output on state run stations, and the Spanish AM nets have migrated to FM in several major cases.
The US has a long history of worldwide broadcast technology leadership in many instances.
That is, no doubt, why in Europe, Africa and Asia there is little US made gear. Or why most TV transmission equipment in Latin America is Japanese... Europeans developed the first digital storage applications for radio, not the US.
The dynamic facing broadcasters across the globe, when successful technical schemes have been launched, has been "get on board or be left behind." (I pause here to allow the IBOCers to emphatically nod their heads.)
HDTV was first implemented in Asia. The US has no leadership in broadcast technology or innovation and hasn't since the cart machine and the Optimod were invented.
My point - and I know this is where pro-IBOCers and I part company - is that the "get on board and dig the benefits!" dynamic is totally missing with HD-AM, and largely missing for HD-FM.
The problem in evaluating HD AM by US standards is that most of the rest of the world smartly recognized that higher power was needed for AM, and that daytimers were not a good idea.
In fact, every directional I know of in South America was installed by preference over a non-directional system. HJED in Cali, 50 kw on 820, is directional to cover up and down the Cauca Valley, without wasting power in the mountains. Several Santiago de Chile stations are directional because the country is only 50 or 60 miles wide, yet 2500 miles long... so they don't shoot wasted power over the Andes; this is much what I did with Ecos de la MOntaña in Quito, directional North South where the people were. Radio 10 in Buenos Aires is 100 kw directional over the metro, as non-directional does not give enough signal, even on 710, to cover the metro adequately.
The US, on the other hand, used 60 to 70 year old licencing criteria to build a band where less than 20% of AMs in the top 300 metros adequately cover the market day and night. Nearly every AM elsewhere is full market coverage; nearly none of ours are.
In the former case, the system just doesn't work. It offers marginal sound quality for most consumers, the coverage is lousy and the interference, co- and adjacent-channel, is unacceptable.
In my third generation car radio, the audio on one example, KNX, is muce cleaner and brighter and crisp in HD, and the HD coverage is slightly greater than the analog noise-free coverate is.
In nearly all cases, any interference is to stations that are not serving or getting listeners in the problem areas. Your station may be one of a number of exceptions, and deserves to be reviewed by the Commission, but it is not the rule.
It also flunks the political smell-test. You can't impose an elitist system that offers little real-world benefit, drives up costs, and benefits large operators at the expense of independent operators (the much-maligned "mom & pop" stations.)
Just like you have the right to "pursue" happiness, you do not have the guarantee of same. In a competitive economy, you have no guarantee that you will not be overcome by technology, superior competition or bosolesence of your "product."
As far as the rest of the world choosing not to adopt various US technical standards over the past decades, such as NTSC TV and 60-hertz AC line frequency, the difference is: those standards were never arrogantly promoted throughout the rest of the world as "the answer" to some perceived shortcoming of the status quo. IBOC is. And it has been rejected by most countries which have considered it.
HD is not being "arrogantly pushed" around the world. Today, in much of the world, anything American is suspect, anyway. Being an American development may be a disadvantage.
Has anybody noticed? Since the Great Nighttime HD-AM turn-on on 9/14, the number of new installs is.....zero. (Source: iBiquity's website and Barry McLarnon's HD station count webpage.) The number of stations using HD at night continues a slow decline.
As stated before, there are so few viable AM signals that it may not matter.
