No HD on WCBS-FM today

[RichWood]

AM iboc has been on an increasing number of stations since fall 2002, it's been allowed 24hr for five months now.....where's the fortold public outcry?

No only hasn't there been any, there also has not been one instance where AM iboc has hurt (or yet helped) the ratings of any station.

The complaints appear to be coming from stations getting clobbered. The fear of ratings impact is real. Why else would Citadel order all AM IBUZ shut down at night. It seems that WABC and WJR were clobbering each other. Since they also own a network that includes ratings in "fringe" areas, it could have a serious impact on the value of network inventory. If you have any background in programming or research you'd know that 5 months is nowhere near enough time see it's effect on ratings.

Rich

 

[Play Freebird]

The FCC will not allow any more spectrum for broadcast use. You're about 10 years too late to the game. Broadcasters wanted new spectrum but the commission said no.

No problem then, because channels 5 and 6 are already assigned to broadcast use. And will be nearly abandoned across most of the US a year from now. The few holdouts (if they really see an advantage in remaining on low-band with DTV) can probably have their pick of 2, 3, or 4.

Oh, by the way, a new FM Radio station debuts next Monday in New York on Channel 6:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/02-06-2008/0004750508&EDATE=

 

[LinoNYC]

AM iboc has been on an increasing number of stations since fall 2002, it's been allowed 24hr for five months now.....where's the fortold public outcry?

No only hasn't there been any, there also has not been one instance where AM iboc has hurt (or yet helped) the ratings of any station.

The complaints appear to be coming from stations getting clobbered. The fear of ratings impact is real. Why else would Citadel order all AM IBUZ shut down at night. It seems that WABC and WJR were clobbering each other. Since they also own a network that includes ratings in "fringe" areas, it could have a serious impact on the value of network inventory. If you have any background in programming or research you'd know that 5 months is nowhere near enough time see it's effect on ratings.

Rich

IBUZ again?

Why else would Citadel order all AM IBUZ shut down at night.

That would be the Citadel that shut down nighttime operation of what, 9-10 iboc stations last Oct 2?

This potential problem has been known for atleast 5 years, some stations aren't going to be able to use it 24hr..some not at all.

If you have any background in programming or research you'd know that 5 months is nowhere near enough time see it's effect on ratings

Five months is enough time to see a trend. It's enough to evaluate listener complaints, aside from a few zealots who haunt boards like these, where are they?

Here in New York City, three of the original four 24 hr iboc stations are still on, only WABC has dropped it.

Lino

 

[Savage]

Yes, and two of the four are owned by the group which arguably has the biggest stake in the financial fate of IBOC and iBiquity and has invested heavily in both. Its Corporate CE is "the father of IBOC" and I would wager that they'll pry the last Dexstar from Glynn Walden's cold, dead fingers. CBS will be the LAST group to shut off HD-AM.

There are few complaints because almost no AM-HD stations are operating at night - about 1.7% of operating AMs, at last count a whopping 78 (out of 4700 AM stations.) Even with this minuscule number there have been numerous well-documented cases of serious interference. WRVA 1140 just shut off IBOC at night because it was obliterating WDFN 1130's southern Detroit-market coverage (both are CCU.) KDKA is being killed at night by WBZ, but CBS has made a corporate-level decision to sacrifice the country's most historic station "for the good of HD," which for someone (unlike many posters here) who loves AM, is tragic, myopic and unnecessary. WSM is being stepped on by WFAN, and on and on.

The Citadel night HD shutdown you dismiss so cavalierly was disastrous for AM IBOC. That eliminated 12% of HD night operation at one stroke only two weeks after it began. Martin Stabbert couldn't have been more blunt about the reasons: essentially, he said the system is crap.

As long as we're disparaging "a few zealots who haunt boards like these," the fast-dwindling cadre of HD faithful actually populate this very board. Aside from you seven or eight guys and a handful of dutifully loyal engineering executives at Crawford, plus the CBS mad scientists, that's about it. The industry trade publication coverage is brutal about HD-AM.

There have been no significant new IBOC-AM installs since The Great 9/14 Night Rollout. None. The IBOC station population is about what it was in August. A sales engineer friend says he had two tentative HD-AM installs which have both been cancelled. I have heard other similar reports.

It's over. The system was tried and found to be a failure. AM radio needs to move on and find real solutions. See my letter in this week's Radio World.

 

[LinoNYC]

It's over. The system was tried and found to be a failure. AM radio needs to move on and find real solutions. See my letter in this week's Radio World.

Had there been; an Internet, a message board and a Bob Savage he would have called FM a failure in 1957...NTSC color a failure in 1961. I trust you are enough a student of broadcasting history to recognize these as significant low points in systems that ultimately proved successful in the marketplace.

As a child in 1965 several engineers I met at NBC's color studios in Brooklyn advised against buying a color set because they were failure prone and the "color isn't very good" In the studio I often saw the video engineers and camermen quietly cursing at lengthly camera line up, it was often impossible to make all 4 look even similar.

If you think that iboc pre-processing requirements are stringent, you should have seen the requirements for Orthicon color in set palette, costume and lighting..the huge increase in light levels (350-450 fc) alone led to the same sort of complaints about operating cost that broadcasters are now complaining about in digital radio and tv.

BTW: I remember reading about radio engineers complaining that FM stereo increased noise floor and effectively reduced coverage.

Bottom line; Way too early to say "it's over" unless you count on people's short memory or thrive on embarrassment.

Lino

 

[Savage]

There may not have been an Internet message board in the 1960s but there was a Bob Savage. I was there for the days of hours of setup required for cranky, massive TK-41s and 42s. I operated low-band color 2" quad video recorders and took readings on dual FM transmitter/antenna arrays for "vertical" and "horizontal" polarization. Your comparison of those technologies to IBOC is simply unsupportable. I was there and recall it vividly, even compensating for 40+ years of "the mists of memory." Engineers carped about the new stuff, but they also complained about cart machines because those devices put transcription engineers out of work. TX engineers joshed each other at UHF-TV sites about how they supervised "Unreceivable Hopeless Flop" TV. That was, and is, human nature. But never was there a controversy about NTSC color or FM or FM stereo on the order of what's going on today with IBOC.

Color and FM may not have been perfect in the 1960s as you point out, but at least they worked - far better than IBOC does. And there was never a confiscatory greed-based licensing system for those innovations, which were available to all broadcasters with equanimity, as opposed to the HD Radio model of investor companies such as CBS and CCU, cynically expecting to recoup their IBOC investments on the backs of independent broadcasters.

As has been pointed out here before, once solid-state receivers and IC-based color TV chassis became commonplace by the late 60s and early 70s color TV and FM costs came down and the technologies became the norm. HD Radio holds no such potential. Aside from some incremental improvements in receivers, there are no developments in the pipeline likely to make IBOC susceptible of mass adoption. The coup de grace is the well-documented engineering problems it imposes - which are insurmountable.

Sorry: IBOC is junk-engineering. NTSC Color and FM of course were not. If you want to torture logic and indulge in denial by comparing IBOC with every negative comment ever made about every emerging broadcast technology of the last 50 years, well.....have fun. That exercise won't make IBOC any more successful than it currently is, which is to say...not very.

Not that you would; don't take my word for it. Talk to any of the vast majority of broadcasters who have resoundingly rejected IBOC. HD-AM is a dead issue and 84% of FMs not only do not operate with HD, they have no plans to do so. Check the Leslie Report from RW and the recent survey of FM licensees.

 

[LinoNYC]

Color and FM may not have been perfect in the 1960s as you point out, but at least they worked - far better than IBOC does.

Never-Twice-The-Same-Color required much higher signal quality a fact we dicovered when we bought a set in fall 65 and attempted tp use our building's antiquated master antenna. Mild ghosting and slight noise turned into Picasso-like patterns, poor color fit and confetti. I remember hearing out neighbors complain that after having bought an "expensive" color set they now required a new roof antenna, cost= $75-90 w/out rotor. Sound familiar?

And there was never a confiscatory greed-based licensing system for those innovations, which were available to all broadcasters with equanimity, as opposed to the HD Radio model of investor companies such as CBS and CCU, cynically expecting to recoup their IBOC investments on the backs of independent broadcasters.

...And here ladies and gents we have the crux of one sector's opposition. It's composed of two elements: Firstly, it violates the "proprietary" view and ego of many in the industry who consider ownership or even employment as granting sovereignty...
..in other words "keep off my turf".

The second one is fear-based; the idea that if this system ever catches-on it might become a mandate either by goverment fiat or by marketplace popularity.

Aside from some incremental improvements in receivers, there are no developments in the pipeline likely to make IBOC susceptible of mass adoption

I should file that one away for playback when it starts turning up in clock radios, home theater systems etc.

The coup de grace is the well-documented engineering problems it imposes - which are insurmountable

In the case of some AM installs you may be correct. Sadly, this system isn't going to be the "great equalizer" that puts AM on level with FM, but where it can be used it gives AM a shot at being accepted by younger (read: nunder45) listeners the ones who have ignored AM for almost 35 years.

Not that you would; don't take my word for it. Talk to any of the vast majority of broadcasters who have resoundingly rejected IBOC. HD-AM is a dead issue and 84% of FMs not only do not operate with HD, they have no plans to do so. Check the Leslie Report from RW and the recent survey of FM licensees.

The radio sector is in a period if decline, hangover from the consolidation boom, dot-com bust, recession and now Ipods taking away it's future listeners. Against this it's not surprising that a many would take a conservative approach toward investing in new ota tech especially when everyone is screaming "internet-wi-fi!"

You're wrong about my opinion of "your word" i do have a degree of respect for you and the fact that you own your operation and do much of the engineering. You are however heavily biased to the point of obsession on this topic.

If in fact your viewpoint prevails all you will have won is a continued and accelerating death march for the medium you have worked-in and clearly love.

Lino

 

[Play Freebird]

Keep in mind that both NTSC color TV and FM stereo provide their supplemental information within the bounds of the assigned channel, using "interleaving" techniques. In the case of color TV, the chrominance subcarrier distributes its "bundles" of energy in such a way that they fall between the sidebands of the luminance signal. The GE/Zenith FM stereo system, approved by the FCC in 1961, was designed so that the L+R and L-R components could both peak at 90 percent modulation, avoiding a 6 dB loss in mono signal-to-noise ratio that the competing Crosley system would have required.

When "Project Acorn" (which launched USA Digital Radio/iBiquity and led to today's HD Radio system) was first announced, we were told that the digital signal could also be interleaved with the analog sidebands, allowing the system to operate on-channel in both the AM and FM bands. Although I was skeptical, many broadcasters believed this claim, and efforts to develop a full-digital system in L-band were halted.

However, field tests later proved that it was not possible to provide acceptable results while keeping the digital carriers within the station's analog channel. So the digital information was shifted to the adjacent channels under the premise that a skewed interpretation of the existing FCC AM and FM analog emission masks would provide the needed legal loophole. It's a pretty safe bet that USADR's lawyers and/or financial backers overruled the engineers on this matter.

Of course, COFDM is much different than an AM signal in the way energy is distributed. The mask limits necessary to avoid objectionable analog-to-analog interference don't transfer over to digital, which is why we have a such a problem with first-adjacent interference (not an issue with NTSC color or FM stereo.)

So not only do we have some major differences in the the licensing schemes, as Bob points out -- but the approach to the technology itself is much different, and flawed.

Put the digital carriers outside the medium-wave band and these interference problems would be solved.

 

[R.F. Burns]

"Keep in mind that both NTSC color TV and FM stereo provide their supplemental information within the bounds of the assigned channel, using "interleaving" techniques."

According to the FCC so does IBOC.

 

[Chuck]

Never-Twice-The-Same-Color required much higher signal quality a fact we dicovered when we bought a set in fall 65 and attempted tp use our building's antiquated master antenna. Mild ghosting and slight noise turned into Picasso-like patterns, poor color fit and confetti. I remember hearing out neighbors complain that after having bought an "expensive" color set they now required a new roof antenna, cost= $75-90 w/out rotor. Sound familiar?

True, but once they got that antenna (not everyone needed it) then a color TV gave the viewer something very rewarding that was a huge benefit: Color! And even though we joke about NTSC meaning "Never Twice The Same Color," most people liked it anyway.

I remember being invited over to friends' houses to see a show in color. People actually had dinner parties based on watching Perry Como, Dinah Shore or Bonanza in color. It was a big deal. At least the benefit of buying a color TV was real and easily definable. It's a product that gave the buying public something they wanted. So far HD does not seem to inspire that kind of consumer desire.

Maybe it will some day, but I think it is too little, too late.

 

[Savage]

No question about it. People were fascinated with early NTSC color TV. Our neighborhood would convene on the one house (not ours, sadly) ca. 1958 that was lucky enough to have a CTC-5 round-tube color set, jockeying for position to be able to see the color image, a real thrill and a novelty.

The first color set I saw in operation was at about age 6, at the appliance dealer's in my small home town. It was that Westinghouse set that came out at the same time as the RCA CTR-100 "Merrill." The showroom was packed on that winter night, all eyes glued to the 14-inch screen, as heat poured out of the chassis packed with scores of vacuum tubes. If you got close enough to see the images, and squinted hard, every once in a while - you COULD detect some pale colors! Every few seconds, someone would blurt out: "THERE!!! On her dress!! Did you see that? PINK, I swear!"

There was enormous early interest in color TV. The limiting factors were the vacuum-tube technology - early color sets required monthly convergence and CRT degaussing - and cost. Early sets were $500 to $1500 plus the service contract, when the median annual household income in the USA was $3500. And there were only a very few hours of color programming to see. mostly on NBC.

There is no similar demand or interest to drive HD Radio - even if we were to assume, arguendo, that the system worked even as well as early tube-type NTSC color, a point I for one am not willing to concede.

 

[Play Freebird]

"Keep in mind that both NTSC color TV and FM stereo provide their supplemental information within the bounds of the assigned channel, using "interleaving" techniques."
According to the FCC so does IBOC.

So much for the current Commission's technical expertise. I refer not to everyone employed by the FCC, but to the "8th floor", which directs the staff and votes on final rulings, like IBOC.

Back in the '50s, we still had a few Commissioners who understood the technology they were appointed to regulate, for example George E. Sterling.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Sterling (who had long since retired from the Commission) while I was in high school; his grandson worked at our high school station and invited him in for a tour. Compare Sterling's bio with any of the current bunch and you'll see there's no comparison:

http://users.erols.com/danflan/sterling/df3a.jpg

http://users.erols.com/danflan/sterling/dfhistory.html

And how did Kevin Martin get the job as Chairman? He was Deputy General Counsel to Bush-Cheney 2000, on the Bush-Cheney recount team in Florida.

 

[radiopilot]

"Keep in mind that both NTSC color TV and FM stereo provide their supplemental information within the bounds of the assigned channel, using "interleaving" techniques."
According to the FCC so does IBOC.

So much for the current Commission's technical expertise. I refer not to everyone employed by the FCC, but to the "8th floor", which directs the staff and votes on final rulings, like IBOC.

Back in the '50s, we still had a few Commissioners who understood the technology they were appointed to regulate, for example George E. Sterling.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Sterling (who had long since retired from the Commission) while I was in high school; his grandson worked at our high school station and invited him in for a tour. Compare Sterling's bio with any of the current bunch and you'll see there's no comparison:

http://users.erols.com/danflan/sterling/df3a.jpg

http://users.erols.com/danflan/sterling/dfhistory.html

And how did Kevin Martin get the job as Chairman? He was Deputy General Counsel to Bush-Cheney 2000, on the Bush-Cheney recount team in Florida.

Quite a contrast to Kevin Martin which had NO broadcast experience whatsoever!

http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/martin/

Yeah... his and Powell's reason why we have this IBOC crap!