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WUWF-HD Pensacola not working right

tomservo

tomservo

I mentioned this in a thread back in January but it got lost in the rah-rahs of the HD haters, so I'm giving it its own thread in hopes an HD guru can figure out what's going on.

Pensacola, Florida's public radio station WUWF broadcasts in HD, but my two Insignia portables have trouble with the signal.

The older model will decode the HD (and do so with little issue at 40 miles) but when the digital drops out, it just goes to silence on the main channel. It won't fall back to analog.

The newer model will tune the station and flash the HD icon and show a full signal, but it never switches to digital.

This happens with both radios no matter where I am. Miles away or at the TX site in Navarre. So it's not a signal strength issue, it's a software/hardware issue on their end or with these radios. All the market's other HD stations decode just fine and don't mute when the digital drops out.

It's just WUWF.

Anyone know what they're doing to cause this problem? I've corresponded with the technical department at the station and while very friendly, they were unable to determine why my two radios are not working with their signal. Because the other market signals work fine, I am inclined to think the problem is on their end. But I don't know what to tell them to try or change to make it work like it should.

Any ideas?
 
There have been several instances of HD-FMs where the digital fails to hand off to the analog when signal strength is insufficient. So you don't get the analog backup; the main-channel signal just mutes.

It's some kind of software glitch affecting a certain brand of HD exciter. And from a nearby station here in NY which is afflicted with this, my understanding is they're very frustrated, because iBiquity and the manufacturer are blaming each other while the problem goes uncorrected. The station engineers are driven back and forth between technical-support staffs like a shuttlecock.

I suspect the station knows what's going on but has no interest in getting into a big technical discussion with a listener, so they might be stonewalling you while working on the problem behind the scenes.
 
Thank you for the information, Savage. Looks like I'm stuck, then. It's been this way for the entire 6 months I've lived here. I'd listen online but my home connection is shared and not very reliable, and what passes for 3G from my cell phone carrier is even more unreliable than HD on the move, if you can believe that. ;)
 
Zach said:
The older model will decode the HD (and do so with little issue at 40 miles) but when the digital drops out, it just goes to silence on the main channel. It won't fall back to analog.

The newer model will tune the station and flash the HD icon and show a full signal, but it never switches to digital.

This happens with both radios no matter where I am. Miles away or at the TX site in Navarre. So it's not a signal strength issue, it's a software/hardware issue on their end or with these radios. All the market's other HD stations decode just fine and don't mute when the digital drops out.
Click to expand...

I observed a similar problem when listening to a station in central NY on my JVC HD car radio: no "blending" to analog when digital lock is lost, only muting. I discussed this problem last year with the station's former CE (who recently took a job in a different larger market) and he told me it was due to an unresolved firmware bug in the IBOC exciter. He had purchased new equipment from a reputable Canadian transmitter manufacturer -- but the HD Radio firmware is tightly controlled by iBiquity, so it's quite possible that the manufacturer can't do anything about it, other than wait. Frustrating!

I've also encountered the second problem you described on several other stations -- the HD light flashes, but fails to switch to digital, even when the field strength is well above 70 dBu. My guess is that these stations have some unidentified non-linearity in the transmitting system causing the bit errors to exceed the receiver's ability to correct for them, or else the IBOC exciter needs a reboot.

What a wonderful system we have here.
 
Play Freebird said:
I've also encountered the second problem you described on several other stations -- the HD light flashes, but fails to switch to digital, even when the field strength is well above 70 dBu. My guess is that these stations have some unidentified non-linearity in the transmitting system causing the bit errors to exceed the receiver's ability to correct for them, or else the IBOC exciter needs a reboot.
Click to expand...

Strange then, that two identical radios would treat the stream differently, no? One decodes but mutes the analog, the other doesn't decode at all. I guess that 'feature' can be controlled by software update, since the two radios have different software versions.
 
KB1OKL said:
What we have here is another wonderful "fringe :D benefit" of IBOC.
Click to expand...

Yep. "It's as simple as a software update." But there's no software available on the station's end, apparently, and the HD radios aren't even capable of being upgraded/updated. I swear, computer people should NOT be allowed to create software for the consumer or professional markets in any field unless their software is bulletproof.

A 60 year old AM radio works as good today as it did in 1950, because it's simple and reliable. But HD depends on crappy lowest-bidder software on both the transmit and receive ends functioning properly.

My 10 year old SVHS VCR still chugs along playing 30 year old tapes fine. But I can't get my high-falutin' DVR to consistently record my favorite shows each week without locking completely up and screwing the pooch. The hardware is fine, but the software was written by myrmidons.

There are Swiss made watches from the 1500's still keeping good time, but my high tech gee whiz atomic clock can't decide if I'm in the Central time zone or Dar Es Salaam.

I swear, the smarter things are made the stupider they become.

I've got a expensive Android smart phone that's not good at being smart or a phone. It's got Bluetooth, like my PC, but they can't even get along long enough for me to send a damn picture from one to the other. I'll try again but… oops, an error has occurred in application TwLauncher and must be force closed. D'oh. I've never had any trouble developing film from a SLR. Or making a call from a circa 1998 model 6190 Nokia phone. Still works to this day, actually.

The march of technology is actually walking backwards. And this concludes your curmudgeon post for the day.
 
Play Freebird said:
I've also encountered the second problem you described on several other stations -- the HD light flashes, but fails to switch to digital, even when the field strength is well above 70 dBu. My guess is that these stations have some unidentified non-linearity in the transmitting system causing the bit errors to exceed the receiver's ability to correct for them.
Click to expand...

I notice that the latest RW Engineering Extra has a discussion about that exact subject:

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/rwee_20110216/#/6

Back in the mid-1980's I worked for a company that built solid state retrofit amplifiers for Traveling Wave Tube Microwave systems. The first thing we did when we built a digital amplifier was to examine the linearity and constellation pattern as described in that story. Unless I missed something, this is the first time I've seen this problem even discussed as a performance issue for HD.

Dave B.
 
local oscillator said:
Digital = high capability + low reliability. Seems to be what most folks want these days. I don't get it either.
Click to expand...

I would change the equation to Digital = high theoretical capability + low actual reliability.
 
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