Would DXing still be fun if radio was all digital now?

[nd2023]

Imagine if every radio station was 100% HD, no analog, and the HD signals were transmitted at the same power as the analog is now. In other words, the station would be heard in HD dropout free out to the present 40 dBu contour, decodable to the 30 dBu contour, and call letters could be decoded at the 20 dBu contour.

DXing would no longer be a challenge to identify the station, since the call letters would just pop up on the display. There would be a software program to automatically log DX on every frequency without having anyone need to tune a radio.

Would you still think DXing is fun if that were the case?

I personally would think it's not fun anymore, because it's fun to listen to a song on an unknown station and wait for an ID. I don't get the same thrill by listening to a distant station streaming online since I would know what station I'm listening to and it is normal to hear a station 1000 miles away online, but it isn't normal to hear it on a radio. I do remember about 8 years ago when DXing a certain station 100 miles away was the only way for me to hear my favorite type of music since Internet streaming was in its infancy. Now, that station streams and so do many others of its format stream.

 

[Icangelp]

Me? Yes, I would DX in an all digital world. The resourses for validating a reception have increased dramatically since I began in the hobby, and I stll like to DX. Digital would be just one more leap.


I think most of us realize that DXing is a dying hobby. Kind of falls into the baseball category...way too slow moving for modern youth. However, I do believe this. As long as there is over-the-air broadcasting, some DXer will be trying to hear the signal, though he may be 85 and in an assisted living facility...

 

[stormy01]

DXing would no longer be a challenge to identify the station, since the call letters would just pop up on the display. There would be a software program to automatically log DX on every frequency without having anyone need to tune a radio.

Would you still think DXing is fun if that were the case?

Yeah if there was a "band opening" - that would be great to have an SDR (Software Defined Radio) that could allow recording of all 100 FM channels to a hard drive! That way, you would log a lot more stations. The spectrum analyzer display on the SDR would show which are the strongest that you could tune in on and record from a separate radio if you like. So DXing would still be fun in the traditional sense but have the 'bonus' of technology to log a lot of stations that would have been missed if you had only 2 or 3 radios going at once - even with a few 'locals' in a remote area that could be 80 or 90 open channels!

 

[BobOnTheJob]

So many of the tricks we rely on in analog would be gone, counterbalancing the benefits of "automatic DXing". That is unless the state of the art advances to where the "smart DX tuner" controller my two rotors, two attenuators & Bolin phaser to phase out the semi-locals. Somehow I bet that is or will be possible, but the quantity sold would be so low that the cost would eternally remain out of reach. At that point, we'd get as much entertainment from watching the equipment do it's magic as we get from the actual DX.

 

[LibertyNT]

IT would be interesting that's for sure.
It would be easier and maybe just as fun, you still get the thrill of Listening to a Distant signal. Plus it would be crystal clear!
I would still want some form of analog though.

 

[crainbebo]

The thing is...not really. HD signals have less power than analog signals, I think.

-crainbebo

 

[BRNout]

IT would be interesting that's for sure.
It would be easier and maybe just as fun, you still get the thrill of Listening to a Distant signal. Plus it would be crystal clear!
I would still want some form of analog though.

They would only be crystal clear when they are coming in with a solid (near-perfect) signal. Stations that you now dx and listen through fading and static to ID would not decode if they were digital. And, that's assuming that - under your scenario - the digital signals had the same wattage as their analog counterparts do now.

What crainbebo said is true right now in that digital ("HD") signals are transmitted at far less power than the base analog signals are. But, even if they were at the same power, you wouldn't hear the digital signals for the same distance because your reception falls off the table as soon as the signal degrades past a certain threshold. Analog broadcasting is FAR more forgiving of static and impurity than digital is.

To answer the OP's question, dxing would still be fun, but not as fun and not occurring as often as with analog. I hope we never go totally digital.

 

[nd2023]

IT would be interesting that's for sure.
It would be easier and maybe just as fun, you still get the thrill of Listening to a Distant signal. Plus it would be crystal clear!
I would still want some form of analog though.

They would only be crystal clear when they are coming in with a solid (near-perfect) signal. Stations that you now dx and listen through fading and static to ID would not decode if they were digital. And, that's assuming that - under your scenario - the digital signals had the same wattage as their analog counterparts do now.

What crainbebo said is true right now in that digital ("HD") signals are transmitted at far less power than the base analog signals are. But, even if they were at the same power, you wouldn't hear the digital signals for the same distance because your reception falls off the table as soon as the signal degrades past a certain threshold. Analog broadcasting is FAR more forgiving of static and impurity than digital is.

To answer the OP's question, dxing would still be fun, but not as fun and not occurring as often as with analog. I hope we never go totally digital.

It may take a good signal to decode HD completely, but for just the call letters to show up, the signal just needs to be there for a second or two.

This would be great in a meteor scatter event. Instead of hearing bits and pieces of songs, we would get the call letters.

 

[gar hi]

While I like HDTV, I have no interest in getting an HD radio.

I think analog radio with a digital tuner is perfect, especially for AM. The one thing I certainly don't miss about the old days was the old style tuners where you had to determine the frequency you were on going by known frequencies and then counting up or down by tuning past frequency after frequency.

Digital tuners are a DXer's good friend, IMO.

 

[vibe]

if radio were all digital now, I'd get sat. radio for certain. I wouldn't DX because I wouldn't listen.

 

[ddsparxx]

This is an interesting topic here. So what happens to radios that receives only analog signals when all stations are 100% digital and no analog? What would we hear from these radios? I was thinking maybe tiny FM local signals and AM DX overseas...

 

[BRNout]

My guess is that you'd have hiss on the full frequencies; hiss that would basically sound like amped-up static. As far as dxing goes, the frequencies that your local signals occupy would still be full (theoretically), so you'd have no more opportunity for international dxing than you would now.

I suppose the only exception to that one comment would be that present-day IBOC stations which now encroach on adjacent channels wouldn't need to do that in an all-digital world, so those who live near the borders would be better able to dx those adjacent channel international signals from places like Toronto, Vancouver, etc. Better to listen to Canada and Mexico, bad for listening within the USA.

On the whole, I'd consider it a nightmarish scenario where local radio as we know it is truly dead. Let's hope it never happens.

As it is, God help us if there's ever a national emergency because digital TV service would be very easily lost. Can you imagine how bad things would be if all radio were digital? Remember, when things go bad, the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) corollary goes into effect. The more complicated a technology is, the more likely it is to be disabled under tough conditions. For this reason, AM radio is the best in a truly bad situation.

 

[pianoplayer88key]

(bleeping browser forgot what i had typed when it did a back/forward button press when I was trying to use an alt+number code)

How would you compare the coverage of a full digital signal to an identical full analog signal? (By identical, I mean both are transmitting from the same stick, at the same power level, on the same frequency. Of course both would not be on the air simultaneously, though, although they COULD be in a digital system I would prefer to use.) Let's assume your analog and digital radios both use the exact same IF filter (or DSP chip) and antenna. If a HD system works like I think it should, you would be able to be at the place where a seasoned ham with a gold ear would only have a 1% or less chance of even detecting a trace of a signal on the analog station.... and the digital radio is getting perfect copy as if you were almost right next to the station. (Make that... even if you WERE right next to the station - even if your radio's antenna terminal was physically touching the 50kW transmitting antenna, the digital shouldn't overload.)
A few other things with what I would think of a good digital system, too....
You should be able to pick which station you want to listen to when there are multiple signals on the same frequency. That goes for the graveyard channels and TIS channels at night when you're using an outdoor beverage antenna, for example.
Also, with digital, any reason stations need to splatter any wider over the dial than their analog stations do? I would think the skirt selectivity should be able to be vastly improved at the transmitter. Sure, I'd like receivers to have better selectivity, too, but if you're standing next to a 50kW transmitting antenna putting out a 10kHz bandwidth (+/-5kHz) signal (which is used for the audio -- and I'm not sure how to convert bandwidth in kHz to bandwidth in kbps - is it a 8:1 ratio (80kbps/10kHz) or 10:1 ratio (100kbps/10kHz)?), you should be able to hear an adjacent (+/- 10kHz) distant station for which you are at the threshold of detectability.
And in answer to ddsparxx's question... under the type of HD system I'd want to see, the analog radios would only receive dead air, even if you were sitting right next to the 50+kW digital transmitting antennas.

However... I'd rather see the improvement made in the receivers, while the transmitters continue broadcasting analog. (Of course, if it's possible to get better audio quality with digital while using the same bandwidth that an analog signal uses, AND have a sudden ~240dB drop (or whatever would take you from full signal, measured at the tower, to no signal at all) in the signal once you get outside the necessary bandwidth, then I would think it could be something to try.)
Commenting on BRNout's comment that AM radio is the best in a truly bad situation... I was thinking of a possible scenario. So if some disaster wipes out ALL current communication modes on the USA west coast, for example, what do we fall back to? I've heard of people hearing AM stations 1,000 miles away in the daytime with a good antenna, so with the other stations off the air, I suppose people in L.A. could listen to KOA maybe, if they had good receiving antennas... or, if the disaster was on the east coast, people in NYC could listen to WBBM, I guess. And, if it happens at night, if nothing else is on the air, even a lowly TIS should be able to have nationwide coverage. I've heard of someone picking up a 5-watt station from across the Atlantic ocean, for example. (I don't think that would happen in most major cities in the U.S. today, though.)
But then... we get into the problem with man-made noise that ISN'T generated by stations. This is another area where I think the FCC has fallen asleep on the job. In my opinion, manmade noise has been allowed to reach a MUCH too high level! I personally would rather have it no higher than about 90dB below the atmospheric or galactic noise, as measured at the inside surface of the exterior enclosure of the noisy device. (Having the level that low, measured there, I think should allow for being able to run the device with the cover off.)

I really do NOT like the current "digital" AM/FM system, as you can probably tell by now.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

(bleeping browser forgot what i had typed when it did a back/forward button press when I was trying to use an alt+number code)
You should be able to pick which station you want to listen to when there are multiple signals on the same frequency.

If they figure out how to do that, they need to extend it to HDTV. In the warm weather months in the midwest, a 40 mile "local" on channel 9 is unwatchable every morning (even with a huge Channel Master yagi aimed at it) because there's another channel 9 DT at 110 miles in the opposite direction. In the afternoon, the local comes in fine on rabbit ears. The slightest amount of co-channel interference brings digital TV to it's knees. In my mind, there's no reason to believe that digital radio of any currently known flavor would perform any better in the face of co-channel interference. Digital works very well in interference free environments. If they can get it to get it to work like FM does with capture ratio (a few db stronger signal totally obliterates the interfering signal) and produce perfect quality with just a few microvolts, then I'll be ready to call this progress.

 

[Tom Wells]

It's already no fun now that it's HD. (Half Digital)

In Arkansas, there are many people dead and missing in the wake of flash flooding in a recreational area, where
campgrounds were in a low-lying area. The news story related that cell phone coverage is very poor due to terrain.
FM probably has a hard time, too.

In the "old" days, someone would have been listening to a local AM, which worked fine in rugged terrain,
and there would have been someone awake (teenagers), "partying", listening to said AM radio, which would have had live people, and able to alert others. Even with a station that were automated, on an AM radio, the radio tells you there's
a thunderstorm on the way with lightning crashes.

I have seen patents on devices that used lightning crashes, along with barometric pressure to determine storm proximity and issue a warning.
Obviously they never saw the light of day, and we got NOAA weather radios as "progress".

This is not "progress". Not much fun either.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

the radio tells you there's a thunderstorm on the way with lightning crashes.

In the 70's (when we played music on AM & it sounded good--no, it sounded GREAT), the real live jock in the real live on-air studio listening to the real live air monitor could hear the lightning static. At that point, he (or she...this was in an era when some real hotties wanted to work in small market radio) walked over to the remote control, turned on the backup generator & isolated the entire transmitter site from the AC power mains, greatly reducing the odds of lightning damage & 30 seconds of downtime when the power failed (this was in an era where 30 seconds of dead air could cause heads to roll). My mind was already thinking of having a radio at the transmitter site tuned above 1600, feeding a silence sensor & being able to trigger the generator. I left the station before that idea ever reached fruition, but the concept was with me 30 years ago.

 

[QCA USA 1]

I seriously doubt it. Dx'ing ATSC Digital TV signals is quite difficult as it is. IBOC HD Radio isn't much if any better. For DTV Dx'ing, you need an excellent outdoor antenna and probably one with high-gain as well. With IBOC HD Radio, you'd need a similar setup for FM Digital Dx'ing as you would for ATSC DTV Dx'ing. For AM Digital Dx'ing (nighttime skywave, sunrise/sunset skip, or oceanside Dx'ing like our friend gar fla likes to do at the beach) you'd probably need a giant AM loop antenna tuned specifically for the mediumwave band and possibly with high-gain as well.

 

[fybush]

I seriously doubt it. Dx'ing ATSC Digital TV signals is quite difficult as it is. IBOC HD Radio isn't much if any better. For DTV Dx'ing, you need an excellent outdoor antenna and probably one with high-gain as well. With IBOC HD Radio, you'd need a similar setup for FM Digital Dx'ing as you would for ATSC DTV Dx'ing. For AM Digital Dx'ing (nighttime skywave, sunrise/sunset skip, or oceanside Dx'ing like our friend gar fla likes to do at the beach) you'd probably need a giant AM loop antenna tuned specifically for the mediumwave band and possibly with high-gain as well.

There are many members of the Worldwide TV FM DX Association (www.wtfda.org) who actively DX FM HD. You can do it with a car radio if there's significant e-skip, but most of us have fairly substantial outdoor antenna setups. It's interesting sometimes - it's not uncommon to have a local analog signal suddenly flip into HD from a different co-channel station somewhere else, since the HD signal is on the adjacent channels.

ATSC TV DX has become pretty common in the last few years; just today, for instance, our WTFDA mailing list contained several reports of low-band ATSC DTV signals decoding via e-skip. (The mailing list is free, and I recommend it highly; there's a lot that many of the relatively new DXers here could learn from the very experienced DXers there!)

AM IBOC DXing is probably the biggest challenge. The AM HD signals don't decode well with all the phase shifting that happens in skywave propagation, for one thing - and even if they did, there are so few stations actually running AM HD at night these days that target stations are relatively limited. They're also not very exciting - once you've heard WFAN or WBZ decode once, the thrill goes away pretty quickly. There was some initial brief excitement in the DX community when the text IDs on AM HD signals were first received over skywave, but I don't know of any prominent DXers who bother to try to DX AM HD these days.

 

[pqgeorge]

I seriously doubt it. Dx'ing ATSC Digital TV signals is quite difficult as it is. IBOC HD Radio isn't much if any better. For DTV Dx'ing, you need an excellent outdoor antenna and probably one with high-gain as well. With IBOC HD Radio, you'd need a similar setup for FM Digital Dx'ing as you would for ATSC DTV Dx'ing. For AM Digital Dx'ing (nighttime skywave, sunrise/sunset skip, or oceanside Dx'ing like our friend gar fla likes to do at the beach) you'd probably need a giant AM loop antenna tuned specifically for the mediumwave band and possibly with high-gain as well.

There are many members of the Worldwide TV FM DX Association (www.wtfda.org) who actively DX FM HD. You can do it with a car radio if there's significant e-skip, but most of us have fairly substantial outdoor antenna setups. It's interesting sometimes - it's not uncommon to have a local analog signal suddenly flip into HD from a different co-channel station somewhere else, since the HD signal is on the adjacent channels.

ATSC TV DX has become pretty common in the last few years; just today, for instance, our WTFDA mailing list contained several reports of low-band ATSC DTV signals decoding via e-skip. (The mailing list is free, and I recommend it highly; there's a lot that many of the relatively new DXers here could learn from the very experienced DXers there!)

AM IBOC DXing is probably the biggest challenge. The AM HD signals don't decode well with all the phase shifting that happens in skywave propagation, for one thing - and even if they did, there are so few stations actually running AM HD at night these days that target stations are relatively limited. They're also not very exciting - once you've heard WFAN or WBZ decode once, the thrill goes away pretty quickly. There was some initial brief excitement in the DX community when the text IDs on AM HD signals were first received over skywave, but I don't know of any prominent DXers who bother to try to DX AM HD these days.

I truly enjoyed DX'ing in the analog world for these past 40 years, both TV and FM. And of course the thrill of hearing skywave reception on both AM and SW really lit up the eyes of this long time DX'er since 1968. But in the digital world, DTV DX'ing really doesn't interest me as much as analog did. The "cliff effect" of DTV really limits the possibilities of getting those rare E-skip catches. And the fact that most TV stations are switching to UHF, really makes it even harder to enjoy TV DX. So, I've pretty much written off TV DX'ing (sorry to say). The nice thing with analog was that you could have a rather modest antenna setup and still get those Channels 2 through 6 with any E-skip opening. I looked at my TV DX catches from the early 80's, when I was simply using a Sylvania TV with dual antennas for VHF and a "bow-tie" antenna for UHF. Daily E-skip was the norm in 1980 (thanks in part to a very strong Solar Index at the time). I was so excited getting stations like KTVO/3, WSB/2, WPBT/2, KTEW/2 (now KJRH) and so many more. On UHF, I got stations up and down the coast using the same TV on the third floor of our apartment building in South Weymouth, MA. If I'm lucky now, I can see Hartford and Springfield on a good tropo opening.

TV was fun to DX, but no more for me. Now, I'm concentrating on FM DX, in spite of the HD hash. Nothing will ever beat good old fashioned analog. *sigh* :/ .

 

[nd2023]

I believe HD at 100% analog power would be decodable out to the 30 dB contour. HD at 1% is decodable out to the 50 dB contour currently. A 30 dB signal can barely be heard in analog but can be heard perfectly in HD (may not be reliable but all we want are the call letters).