In the context of public radio, I take issue with Bob's blanket assertion that "it doesn't work."
Take, for example, my market here in upstate New York. 25 years ago, the local public broadcaster, WXXI-FM (91.5), had more content than it could fit on its one FM signal. Money was raised from listeners, and a failing commercial AM signal on 1370 was purchased to become WXXI(AM). The FM signal was freed from its "all things to all people" mish-mash of classical, news, talk and jazz, and became an all-classical, all-the-time outlet, something the market had been lacking for a decade at that point.
The AM took on its own identity as the home of news and talk in the market. But from the beginning, there were problems: because the 5 kW DA-N signal on 1370 was designed and built in the 1940s, it covers the market as it existed in the 1940s. Much of the market's population today is in areas east and west of the city where the 1370 signal disappears at sunset - before 5 PM in the depths of winter - in order to protect older co-channel signals in New Hampshire and Ohio.
How do you solve that? Moving the 1370 towers would cost millions of dollars, would require monumental zoning fights to get new towers built, and still wouldn't provide a usable full-market signal in some parts of the market. Buying another FM at full-market prices would run north of 10 million dollars.
Or...you could leverage the full class B FM signal on 91.5, broadcasting from a transmitter site neatly centered on the market and delivering 70 dBu to most of Monroe County. After 30+ years of use, the original FM antenna was due for replacement anyway, so the incremental cost of putting an interleaved analog/HD antenna in its place was nearly zero.
So put yourself in the shoes of station management: you've got content that your audience is telling you it wants to hear, and will go to some effort to hear. Do you spend millions on a new analog signal, or a few tens of thousands on a new digital signal? In that context, do you see why public radio has embraced FM HD multicasting wholeheartedly?
You assert "it does not work." I'm telling you, from here in the trenches (I am a part-time employee of WXXI, but have no decision-making responsibilities where HD is concerned, and do not speak for them here or elsewhere), that
within the particular, narrow context of public radio, it's working.
No, the big box stores don't have radios readily available...but because public stations have such close contact with their audiences, we can direct interested listeners to the locally-owned retailer that is carrying them, or we can offer them as pledge-drive premiums.
You assert that "no one listens to nor cares about" digital radio in a public radio context. Come answer the phones here when our HD signal goes down for maintenance and the very real, very engaged listeners depending on 91.5-HD2 for their news-talk signal have to go without for a few hours. I don't think they'll appreciate being told that they don't exist.
On Bruce's engineering points, I'd simply note that NPR Labs has been in the forefront of research on making the technology work in the real-world morass of the FM dial. We're lucky here in Rochester in that we have a nice, full-market FM signal to host our HD subchannels. Within the core of our coverage area (Monroe County and a few surrounding towns), we're not hearing complaints from listeners about difficulty receiving our HD signal. Not everyone is so fortunate, and the researchers at NPR Labs have been diligent about sounding the warning about the dangers of an across-the-board 10 dB increase, a move they're on record as opposing.
On Bruce's comments about NPR's funding and programming, well...
it seems slanted towards one political position
I don't want my tax dollars going to political programming I don't agree with.
I think there's an inconsistency among those three statements...can you spot it?
As for "your tax dollars," if you'd be kind enough to PM me with a mailing address, I'd be delighted to send you two crisp United States dollars to reimburse you for not only this year's portion of your tax burden that goes to all of public broadcasting (including the 20 cents or so that goes to radio), but a good chunk of next year's, too.
In fact, I'd bet that there's less impact on your taxes from the tiny fraction of a percentage point that goes to CPB than there is from the tax exemptions that allow those big, profitable broadcasting companies masquerading as "religious" broadcasters to be able to...well, why don't you tell us:
religious broadcasters will also increase power, and they have deep pocketbooks for fast upgrades.
Indeed they do, and they do in large part because they're able to get away with open advocacy for particular political positions while still enjoying the benefits of near-complete exemption from paying taxes for any of their multi-million-dollar business activities. I wonder how much lower
my taxes would be if I weren't also carrying the burden for those organizations?
Many of them also enjoy the government-sanctioned benefit of main-studio waivers that allow a network of hundreds of stations to be run entirely from a "main studio" in California or Idaho or wherever, without those pesky expenses for local managers, public files, or even local EAS in some cases.
Pray tell, remind me again who's getting the cushy government subsidies here - because I don't think it's nearly as cut-and-dried as you'd like to make it out to be.
