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Not such a great day on HD

K

K6JHU

KKGO-HD2 is stuck in an infinite loop. Same 10 seconds over and over. KRTH HD is down completely. Not a great weekend for HD.
 
You lucky people can at least play around with HD. I bought a HD radio and it does not pick up any HD stations in my house, none of the signals are strong enough.
 
I have two. One in the car which works reasonably well. As long as I am not in a high RF environment or where the analog signal normally goes to h***, it locks well. The radio in the house requires me to use the folded dipole that came with it near a window. But then sicnnce the house is made of chicken wire and concrete, I am not surprised, considering the low power of the digital signal.
 
I just picked up the cheap JVC one from Best Buy since it was on clearance for like $20....it comes with this telescoping antenna that only fits on that model. My house is right in the canyon off hwy 39 in Azusa. Reception is bad even with analog although Mt. Wilson is right behind my house. I think i'm right in the shadow of the mountain. My parents live 5 mins away further down and that radio could pick up KRTH HD, KROQ HD, KBIG HD and a couple others. My hope is someday they increase the power so I can play around with it in the house. I thought about adding the HD radio to my pioneer unit in my truck but when I read the reviews, most of the people said their reception got worse after adding HD!
 
HD Radio will flourish if Ibiquity teams up with Apple and Steve Jobs announces the new I-Radio available for a mere $799.99 from your friendly Apple Store.

I might have finally given in and bought an HD-Radio had I not ended up moving to South-East Iowa where there is not a digital station within the reception range of even their analog signal. My projection is that those HD-Radios will become yet another relic in about five years.

Did anyone actually buy into Quadrophonic?
 
Supposed to be a couple of stations in the quad citites. But not enough reason for buying an HD radio there. Even with Minnesota Public Radio, when driving outside of the Twin Cities, I still carry a CD or so with me.
 
K6JHU said:
Supposed to be a couple of stations in the quad citites. But not enough reason for buying an HD radio there. Even with Minnesota Public Radio, when driving outside of the Twin Cities, I still carry a CD or so with me.
Click to expand...

The Quad Cities are too far away. Radio Locator Listing for my town:

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=52501&state=&x=14&y=7

There are no Quad Cities nor Des Moines stations listed, and to be truthful Iowa City on FM is not easy to get.

There is not a lot of HD activity anywhere in Iowa and I would imagine that the whole thing will soon go away anyway. Not enough content, spotty programming, and inflated prices for receivers. I stand by my it being destined for the scrap heap of failed concepts in the not to distant future concept.
 
Before we get relocated to the Iowa board...

When I was living in this type of enviroment before the days of satellite I used to have a 20 foot mast on the roof with a 6 element FM Yagi and a rotor to get anything decent so I can surely sympathize with your problem.

Looking at the Radio-Locator listing, if I were the owner of either of the two combos in town, I would either quick get a translator for the AM side or run the AM on HD-2 (as several stations are doing in LA - KNX, KABC, retro 1260). Whichever station on AM has the High School Football games would then have a good selling point for HD-2.

HD is not all that expensive. I paid $125 for my car unit (including USB, and MP3 CD) and $55 for my home unit.
 
K6JHU said:
Before we get relocated to the Iowa board...

When I was living in this type of enviroment before the days of satellite I used to have a 20 foot mast on the roof with a 6 element FM Yagi and a rotor to get anything decent so I can surely sympathize with your problem.

Looking at the Radio-Locator listing, if I were the owner of either of the two combos in town, I would either quick get a translator for the AM side or run the AM on HD-2 (as several stations are doing in LA - KNX, KABC, retro 1260). Whichever station on AM has the High School Football games would then have a good selling point for HD-2.

HD is not all that expensive. I paid $125 for my car unit (including USB, and MP3 CD) and $55 for my home unit.
Click to expand...

The Iowa board could use the activity but in general I think that HD radio is in a very difficult growth period. The stations that do use it are not doing so all that effectively and the programming as reported on these boards is often dead air or no air at all. Without content the sale of receivers will not be driven and without listeners there is not much incentive for broadcasters to get serious about it. Really a chicken and egg situation.

Also if the FCC approves some kind of power increase that will exacerbate reception issues in the already crowded band in areas like Los Angeles. However in area such as mine the addition of HD to a co-owned AM such as the KLEE/KOTM group would be a good thing. KLEE by the way has recently become the local high school game station and they only have a 17 watt authorization at night. Makes me think that they might be considering a translator or HD.
 
I guess the engineers were working on the Jack-FM HD transmitter, since the HD signal was down for a while and now has come back, but the transmitter seems to have been reset: Instead of it reading KCBS-HD1 and KCBS-HD2 on my radio, it comes up just as HD-HD1 and HD-HD2... sadly, my radio no longer recognizes it as being the same signal, so my KCBS-HD2 preset no longer works. When I hit the button, the main signal comes up and I have to wait for it to lock, then manually change it to the HD2.
 
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