So I bought a new Insignia HD radio from Best Buy. I'm sure iBiquity will love this additional sale, even though I bought it to replace a broken HD radio. To them, I am a customer who went to Best Buy exclusively to buy a new HD radio. I made sure to check that it was Version 4. New York HD2 stations will now have a major increase in their cume thanks to me
It performs better than my old one. HD decoded in a second with the call letters and locked in 3 seconds for a strong signal, and HD2s didn't drop out for as long as it did on the old one. When the HD reception dropped, it usually came back in a second. The RDS is very slow to decode however.
The annoying birdie at 107.9 is gone, and I find this unit to be more sensitive. It didn't overload standing across the street from a 100 watt station (on a 250 foot tower), and I could barely hear a first adjacent, which doesn't even come in on a car radio at that spot.
There was slight tropo from the approaching tropical storm, and I was able to hear bits and pieces of faraway stations.
My old HD radio isn't completely useless now, it still picks up very strong signals. Perhaps I could give it to a radio geek in Manhattan.
I'm sure the average person would not buy the same brand of radio after it breaks (or even buy a newer version of the same radio if their current one is working), but I'm a radio geek.
Of the reported 3 million HD radio sales so far, assume that 1 million of those radios are broken. Another million are sitting at radio stations prize cabinets, used to monitor PPM encoding or EAS, feed translators, or are used by station employees. 900,000 are in car manufacturing plants, yet to be installed, or are returned by drivers who are dissatisfied. 80,000 are in homes (primarily in iPod docking stations) or Zune HDs. 19,000 are gathering dust at homes. The remaining 1000 in daily use mostly belong to radio geeks.
