This Dosen't Make Any Sense

[Mark Giardina]

I’ve been reading with great interest the number of posts on here about HD radio. Can someone explain to me why these radio stations would pour hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, into a system like HD, test it out, and then turn it off?

Yes I am aware of the interference problem between some of the clear channel 50 kw’s as one of the reasons. But didn’t anyone do research before going to all the bother of purchasing HD equipment?

It seems to me that it’s just a waste of money. Think how many extra employees could have been hired with the money invested into a system that apparently some of the big media owners don’t plan to use.

 

[Element9]

Re: This Dosen't Make Any Sense (sic) Kind of funny in its own right.

It seems to me that it’s just a waste of money. Think how many extra employees could have been hired with the money invested into a system that apparently some of the big media owners don’t plan to use.

Equipment as a capital expenditure can be depreciated over a period of five years. And if you're running a NPR non-com, you can get a grant to go HD. It's a no-brainer. Employees? Pffft. Just another meaningless expense. The answer is obvious.

[/sarcasm]

OK, here's another: Broadcasters are sheep. Managers and CEO's do stupid stuff. Witness Jack in NYC.

OK, here's another. Radio is deperate and will do anything that even remotely appears to have the potential of getting and retaining listeners.

OK, here's another one. It's your turn. Go nuts.

-9-

 

[Bob1370]

HD is actually a fairly small investment, as investments go. If you have a stereo-equipped studio complex (as almost all AM and FM stations do these days), a stereo program feed out to your transmitter, a stable directional antenna system (if you have a DA at all), and your main transmitter is solid state up to the final amp (meaning built within the last 25-30 years), you can convert to HD capability simply by swapping out the exciter in your transmitter. We're probably talking, what, 20 or 30 thou? A small price for a large market, big signal station to pay.

So they experiment to see if it's viable. On FM, where each station has a decent spectrum footprint to run HD program streams without getting in other stations' way, it's technically viable and may even prove financially successful. On AM, though, the system was flawed enough to need a major rework before it was rolled out fully. And we're just finding out now. We'd have been better off forgetting about it for a while and going back to the broad-spectrum hi-fi analog signal they used to let us transmit (in C-Quam stereo, no less) and put a little pressure on receiver makers to capture and reproduce as good a signal as the stations were sending back in 1980.

 

[Savage]

By the time you include the HD exciter, importer & exporter, digital delay to match your analog audio to the delayed/encoded HD stream, etc., the cost of converting a nondirectional 50kw AM (assuming the typical series-excited single stick) runs $80 to $100K. If the station is directional, the cost graph rises like a helicopter. Making sure the ATU networks and phasing system is sufficiently linear and broadband, making sure there is sufficient DA pattern bandwidth and linearity, consulting engineers' fees and so forth, a 4 or 6 tower conversion can run $300K.

I agree, the CFO will just charge this off as depreciation expense over the appropriate period.

 

[Element9]

Witness the KDKA Pittsburgh debacle, where estimated costs of going HD have surpassed budget, reaching nearly $1M. It's like a friggin' government contract with Halliburton. HD on AM is a sorry joke.

Bob Savage is the voice of reality crying out in the wilderness. (Unlike John the Baptist, Mr. Savage probably doesn't wear sandles and a hairsuit, nor does he survive on locusts and honey.) He $peak$ from experience as an independent operator.

Want to improve AM? Get back to the standards that allow true broadbanding from the board to the processing to the transmitter to the antenna. The solid state AM transmitters can and do sound magnificent. This might solve half the problem. The other half of the problem is the cheezy AM sections in most radios that hard-slope roll off audio above 3.8 kHz. That's the hard part.

Music on AM may be a lost commodity, but hell, let's at least do something to make the studio mic, phone and commercials sound decent for talk radio formats.

Otherwise, there'll be more of this:

The AM band's future pondered.
WIBC, Indianapolis is about to celebrate its 69th birthday. And the heritage AM has just given the market notice that it's moving to the FM dial. That follows similar shifts at Bonneville's AMs, like Washington's WTOP where Jim Farley says "When you are on the FM dial, you are in a larger neighborhood. There are people who listen to FM that never come to the AM dial." One advocate says FM talk is a "sales machine.".

"Sales machine." Nice. Wonder if it comes with a warning. "Keep hands and free objects clear of the sales machine, do not operate while on medication, serious injury may result."

Stand clear, y'all, I'm firin' up the sales machine!

-9-

 

[The Voice of Reason]

Radio has been about sales for years. Forget the entertainment and information value radio once offered. If there wasn't syndicated programming, most radio stations would be in serious trouble; which I believe they are already.

 

[webcastboy]

I’ve been reading with great interest the number of posts on here about HD radio. Can someone explain to me why these radio stations would pour hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, into a system like HD, test it out, and then turn it off?

HD Radio is much more of a work in progress than anyone from iBiquity to the programmers to the station owners to the engineers would really like. This is less true on FM, but it's very true on AM...the real problems have been getting used to an entirely different series of tolerances in engineering. Things that wouldn't really matter to an analog plant can wreak total havoc on a digital one. Anyways, the main reason why so many AM's shut off IBOC during the daytime-only phase was that they felt it would be too confusing to listeners and, more important, advertisers. Also some of them preferred the wider audio bandwidth they may have had with their analog transmitters (all IBOC AM transmitters are inherently bandwidth-limited to 5kHz on analog). Others may have decided that it wasn't worth the increased power costs.

And many of them lit up IBOC only to realize that for some unknown reason their installation wasn't meeting spec. That's a good reason to shut down! In a few cases I think the reason for missing spec may have required software updates being written by iBiquity or the transmitter manufacturer, which can lead to extended delays in getting back on the air.

Ultimately, though, radio is about return on investment...right now in many markets there's so few HD receivers out there that it's barely worth the increased operating costs (which can be substantial to do "right"), so you light it up to make sure it works, and then wait until enough receivers come around to justify the extra costs of running it full-time.