Never buy an HD Radio without a money-back guarantee

[satech]

Dear iBiquity... I want my $32 back.

That's how much I spent on a new-old-stock "VR3" HD Radio car radio adapter on eBay, just to put my money where my mouth is and see if mobile HD reception really is as bad as I and others have been complaining about. And the answer is a resounding yes!

The adapter promises easy installation, because you don't have to tear out your existing in-dash receiver. But in retrospect, that would've been an easier thing to do, even if it would mean losing the clock, temperature display, and steering wheel controls that my car's factory head unit provides. I was just barely able to wedge the adapter's tuner box up into the dashboard in a location where it could reach the car's antenna plug, but that leaves me with wires running out to the control/display unit, 12V cigarette lighter power input, and audio output to my car's aux-in jack. The adapter does provide an antenna pass-through to your existing car stereo, but the insertion loss renders AM reception useless, and no RF modulator is provided for vehicles which do not have an aux-in jack.

The control unit's backlit white-on-blue LCD has virtually no contrast and is almost impossible to read during the daytime. A regular 1980s-style black-on-green LCD would've been far superior. Also, the buttons are tiny and no direct access to the presets is provided, so you need to press three different buttons just to scroll through and select one of your presets.

And finally as far as the actual reception is concerned, ironically the only thing it's good for is receiving C-Quam AM Stereo! The AM IBOC is useless. Even the strongest 50,000-watt signal on the dial keeps dropping out to analog at the slightest hint of signal fade or power-line buzz. Meanwhile, it's able to pull in clean, consistent C-Quam Stereo from a pipsqueak little 1000-watt graveyard channel station, although the analog AM audio is brickwalled at 4.5 kHz and very shrill-sounding. No stereo indicator is provided for either analog AM or FM, although with the nearly unreadable display, you wouldn't be able to see it anyway.

FM "HD" reception is almost as bad. Even in strong signal areas, the HD keeps dropping out to analog, and since most stations don't have their analog and digital audio synched up perfrectly, it creates an annoying phasing/flanging effect as it blends from analog to digital. Combine that with an overly agressive high-blend on the analog FM side, and the resulting effect is akin to a combination of a shortwave radio signal and a worn-out cassette tape. The treble keep fading in and out with all sorts of annoying phasing and flanging effects, in addition to the very metallic sounding "HD" codec artifacts. No force-to-analog feature is provided, so I have no choice but to turn it off and resort to using my car radio's built-in analog FM tuner, which sounds far more pleasant and consistent and has better reception, too (the VR3 adapter has noticeable picket-fencing in areas where the built-in tuner just has a little background hiss).

The FM HD2/HD3 reception is also useless, due to constant signal drop-outs without any fallback to analog. And since most HD3 channels in my area are simulcasts of co-owned AM news/talk stations, this is especially annoying. Losing a few seconds of music is not so bad, but losing half a sentence of spoken word programming renders it unintelligible. Our ears do a miraculous job of still understanding what is being said under heavy analog interference, but we can't understand anything from silence.

Here was Radio World's less-than-favorable review from 2008... I'm at least glad I didn't pay the full $169.99 list price!

http://www.rwonline.com/article/66274

 

[nd2023]

That may be why you got it so cheap.

 

[tomservo]

satech I'm curious as to your listening environment. Are you in an urban area, or suburban? What city?

I haven't done extensive testing yet but on casual listening my cheapie $40 Insignia portable FM only HD radio has actually surpassed my expectations for HD decoding, even though some stations suffer the same phasing / blending / timing troubles you describe.

Where I live the only HD option is public radio, but I've been to Memphis a few times with the unit and found the reception to be acceptable in the urban environment. Even the two 'short stick' stations (101.1 and 97.1) seemed to decode all the way across town without issue. And this is with just a cassette line-in wire for antenna, strung over the rear view mirror.

So far the class C public station seems to decode clearly and consistently only out to about 20 miles from the tower site, and about 40 miles if I'm not moving.

 

[kenglish]

What kind of antenna are you using, and where is it located? I think most car radio antennas are junk, nowadays...looks matter more than performance, I guess.

I'm thinking about doing some experimenting with a simple, old-fashioned telescoping whip antenna.

 

[satech]

The listening area is about 30 miles West of New York City, with hills and valleys. But my complaints focus on areas of relatively flat terrain, because in the hilly areas the HD doesn't even try to decode there. For example, WNYC-FM stayed in analog during my entire commute this morning. The "HD" indicator flashed on the display quite often, but it was never able to lock onto the signal long enough to decode the digital audio. The analog FM signal was listenable the entire time, except for one half-mile segment where I drive down a hill and lose all the NYC FM signals.

The car is a 2008 Mazda3 with an amplified "bee-sting" roof-mounted antenna. I've never had any complaints about reception with the factory radio, on either AM or FM. In fact, it does a good job of pulling in distant AM signals far beyond their 0.5 mV/m contour. My only complaints about it are that it blends all but the very strongest FM signals to mono, and it brickwalls the AM audio at 4.5 kHz. Otherwise, its sensitivity and selectivity are top-notch.

 

[satech]

BTW, the thing which I think is preventing consistent HD reception of the NYC FM stations even in strong signal areas is the abundance of adjacent channel signals from neighboring markets. In certain areas of NJ, the dial is simply packed to the brim with listenable signals from NYC, Philadelphia, Allentown, PA, and multiple markets within NJ.

 

[Play Freebird]

BTW, the thing which I think is preventing consistent HD reception of the NYC FM stations even in strong signal areas is the abundance of adjacent channel signals from neighboring markets. In certain areas of NJ, the dial is simply packed to the brim with listenable signals from NYC, Philadelphia, Allentown, PA, and multiple markets within NJ.

And to make matters worse, tropo propagation begins to increase this time of year along the eastern seaboard, reaching a peak in late summer. Along the Jersey shore, it's not uncommon to hear some Boston and Providence FM stations as if they were local, but these effects also reach inland to the Philadelphia market.

 

[tomservo]

The car is a 2008 Mazda3 with an amplified "bee-sting" roof-mounted antenna. I've never had any complaints about reception with the factory radio, on either AM or FM. In fact, it does a good job of pulling in distant AM signals far beyond their 0.5 mV/m contour. My only complaints about it are that it blends all but the very strongest FM signals to mono, and it brickwalls the AM audio at 4.5 kHz. Otherwise, its sensitivity and selectivity are top-notch.

I've got a family member with a Mazda (no visible antenna though) with the exact same characteristics. Not good for fidelity but a decent DX'er!

Satech's right, it sounds like an adjacent channel issue. I've run across that, too, where an otherwise strong station won't decode because stations on each first adjacent.

 

[8638]

BTW, the thing which I think is preventing consistent HD reception of the NYC FM stations even in strong signal areas is the abundance of adjacent channel signals from neighboring markets. In certain areas of NJ, the dial is simply packed to the brim with listenable signals from NYC, Philadelphia, Allentown, PA, and multiple markets within NJ.

And to make matters worse, tropo propagation begins to increase this time of year along the eastern seaboard, reaching a peak in late summer. Along the Jersey shore, it's not uncommon to hear some Boston and Providence FM stations as if they were local, but these effects also reach inland to the Philadelphia market.

Add Cape Cod and all of Long Island to that mix during tropo on the Shore.

Where I am, it's the relative weakness of the signals, not adjacent channels, that causes reception problems of HD. And what can be received changes by the day, sometimes by the hour. And this is with a 7 element Yagi on a rotor, feeding the receiver with RG-6.