KRBE question

[davideduardo]

You guys miss the point - nobody cares about range, but they care about building penetration. If range is suffering, so is building penetration. Both point to a decrease in broadcast power. If one is reduced, the other will be reduced. So if KRBE reaches Huntsville and Beaumont, which they don't care about, they are probably penetrating many more feet into buildings - and they DO care about that!

I think all operators have done A-B tests and have not detected any primary coverage area problems.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

Agreed....there are no sales to Beaumont listeners from Houston stations..same thing for those in Huntsville....outside the contour of the stations...

As for the statement "You widen the bandwidth, you lower the gain proportionally", that is an incorrect statement....wideband CBR style FM antennas have similar gains to other antennas...they will have a different pattern due to design....the Dielectric vs ERI is a good example of that...Also the Sanger 104.1 north of Dallas (which was never a Cedar Hill signal nor a major signal in DFW anyway; was a C2 or C3 iirc) is gone...Cumulus turned it off and returned the license to the FCC a while back...

You are talking transmit side, I'm talking receive side. If you take an HD radio with fixed IF bandwidth of 450 kHz or something, it is trying to amplify that entire bandwidth which include the station at the center, plus big parts of two adjacent frequencies. If there is static on the adjacent frequencies, gain will be dictated by the station in the middle plus whatever is on the sidebands. It takes more energy to amplify a wide bandwidth than it does a narrow bandwidth, and the static on the sidebands will mix with the signal from the station, and it will show up in the audio. I've noticed this on tuners with wide / narrow bandwidth settings, noise is much less when the IF focuses just on the channel being received. There is a trade-off, of course. Nice, flat IF ceramic filters produce better audio (according to some audiophiles), while narrow IF filters are better for weak signals.

Variable bandwidth adaptive IF - like in Pioneer car stereos and high end home HD tuners are the best of both worlds. I tune 94.9 in certain places in NW Houston, I can audibly hear as the IF quickly steps down to the smallest setting of 60 kHz, and as it does, KLTY starts coming through. Only mono, because stereo sidebands are cut out, but if you are over 200 miles from a station in a car, you aren't going to get perfect stereo anyway. I tune over to a local on either side, in a split second the IF widens up to allow HD sidebands to come through and I get HD. Without adaptive IF, I wouldn't get KLTY on a strictly wideband HD radio, nor would I get HD reception on locals with a car radio modified with narrow ceramic filters for DX. It is nice to have a radio that does it all. KLTY in Houston is an interesting curiosity, but if I am out in the vast expanses of the Western US, the nearest FM may be a couple of hundred miles and it is nice to have a car radio up to the challenge.