Your point was that there is no interest in radio, hams are in radio because they like it and are interested in it.
"There is no passion for anything radio....not just AM/FM SWL, Scanners, CB, Ham,"
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- Thread starter Savage
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Your point was that there is no interest in radio, hams are in radio because they like it and are interested in it.
"There is no passion for anything radio....not just AM/FM SWL, Scanners, CB, Ham,"
Did I say "no interest"? No I said....apathy and lack of passion.
It's one of the main topics in 'letters' to QST every month! ;-)
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JohnnyElectron
Leading Participant
Technology is making our radio 'passion' very difficult these days. Our local police and fire decided to go 'low-fi' digital, requiring a $500 scanner; if that wasn't bad enough, it is a simulcast system from a dozen towers, so the $500 scanner can't decide which tower to lock-on and all you get is a digital blurb 'crash and burn' for audio - so that hobby is shot, at least locally.
DXing could still be a hobby if switching power supplies, plasma TV's and CFL/LED bulbs go away - but that's not likely.
Disasters, natural or manmade, or about the only thing that does drive the masses back to RF AM/FM/SW radio.
Hams still have a passion, but you need to buy a radio built over 20 years ago if you want to be able to work on it as surface mount technology has made repair and mods next to impossible without a significant investment in tools/hardware.
The obscene cost that the cell company robber barons charge for data usage is what is keeping me using Satellite radio and terrestrial radio as I can't afford their expensive 'data' plans since they limit you to 2GB as the cheapest level, and even that will smoke you for $70 a month on top of $40 / phone too (plus 16% taxes!!)
PS: Verizon sucks - I hope they can't buy ANY HDTV spectrum as I'm willing to bet that the price of data won't go down - it will go UP as they have to build-out more towers and transmitters for their repurposed TV spectrum. And...why can't they turn the mutha firkin FM chip ON in my phone??
DXing could still be a hobby if switching power supplies, plasma TV's and CFL/LED bulbs go away - but that's not likely.
Disasters, natural or manmade, or about the only thing that does drive the masses back to RF AM/FM/SW radio.
Hams still have a passion, but you need to buy a radio built over 20 years ago if you want to be able to work on it as surface mount technology has made repair and mods next to impossible without a significant investment in tools/hardware.
The obscene cost that the cell company robber barons charge for data usage is what is keeping me using Satellite radio and terrestrial radio as I can't afford their expensive 'data' plans since they limit you to 2GB as the cheapest level, and even that will smoke you for $70 a month on top of $40 / phone too (plus 16% taxes!!)
PS: Verizon sucks - I hope they can't buy ANY HDTV spectrum as I'm willing to bet that the price of data won't go down - it will go UP as they have to build-out more towers and transmitters for their repurposed TV spectrum. And...why can't they turn the mutha firkin FM chip ON in my phone??
Keep in mind the cost you DON'T see is the huge digital music royalty fee, which is killing internet radio. The royalty rate keeps going up every few years, and get passed on to the consumer for satellite, but not internet. At some point, it will simply be too expensive to distribute music digitally.
Have you ever listened to the audio quality of XM, its not much better than AM HD. From Wikipedia, XM uses the CT-aacPlus (HE-AAC) codec with a bitrate anywhere from 4 to 64kbps. HD Radio uses the HDC codec (based on HE-AAC) and most AM stations use 40kbps. Based on this FM HD is actually better than XM's sound quality if they don't add subchannels since they get around 100kbps. I would actually consider subscribing if the audio quality didn't sound like crap.
Verizon bought 700Mhz spectrum that was formerly used for analog and have rolled out their LTE network using it. That was supposed to address data congestion issues on their network, but prices are still going up.
The thing about FM radio in phones is many smartphones have FM capability. Qualcomm supplies the SoCs for a lot of smartphones and they include FM as a feature. But the manufacturers never wire it up or purposely disable it in hardware. I suspect this is by request from the cell carriers since FM radio won't eat up data. They'd rather have you stream the station.
JohnnyElectron
Leading Participant
CQUAM beats Sirius, XM and HD
Spunker, you are correct, the audio quality continues to deteriorate on Sirius XM (Sirius is even worse with music than XM) as they add more and more crap channels. What I want to know is why the heck they don't merge the two bandwidths into one 25MHz chunk and use a single decent encoding algorthym and then all the channels have twice the audio bandwidth, so instead of the 32kps junk they can go back to near-CD quality 48kps quality like they had back when I first subscribed in 2003.
BTW Spunker, are you close enough to receive WIRY from Plattsburgh? They run a really wonderful sounding CQUAM stereo music format when the Yankees aren't on the air. WIRY is one of the last 'live and local' stations in country that I can think of. Tons of vinyl there too.
Spunker, you are correct, the audio quality continues to deteriorate on Sirius XM (Sirius is even worse with music than XM) as they add more and more crap channels. What I want to know is why the heck they don't merge the two bandwidths into one 25MHz chunk and use a single decent encoding algorthym and then all the channels have twice the audio bandwidth, so instead of the 32kps junk they can go back to near-CD quality 48kps quality like they had back when I first subscribed in 2003.
BTW Spunker, are you close enough to receive WIRY from Plattsburgh? They run a really wonderful sounding CQUAM stereo music format when the Yankees aren't on the air. WIRY is one of the last 'live and local' stations in country that I can think of. Tons of vinyl there too.
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My understanding is that most of the installed receiver base can get either the XM or the Sirius piece of the spectrum, but not both. Otherwise, it would have been very cost efficient to move all the subscribers to one band or the other and discontinue planning to eventually replace both systems of satellites. The last number I saw indicated a cost of nearly $400 million to replace each system when their useful life runs out. Consolidating would be a huge saving. But there are apparently over 15 million receivers that can only get one or the other, so they'd lose half their subscribers if they did that.
Putting half the channels on each system would reduce most of our receivers to getting only half the channels in total.
With the necessary caveat of skepticism, here is the wiki "XM and Sirius use different compression and conditional access systems, making their receivers incompatible with each other's service. A condition of the merger was that Sirius XM would bring to the market satellite radios that can receive both XM and Sirius channels within one year. The interoperable radio, called the MiRGE, was made available beginning in March 2009. As of April 2013, Sirius XM offers portable, vehicular and home/office radios."
You'd think that after Sirius and XM merged they would have created a plan to merge their bandwidth and phase out one company's receivers over the course of a few years.
WIRY's signal doesn't make it out very far to the west due to WMSA in Massena, NY being on the same frequency. A weak WMSA is what I usually pick up on 1340 during the day. If I had a decent enough CQUAM receiver and gas wasn't so darn expensive, I'd take the drive up to Plattsburgh just to record some airchecks in CQUAM. All I have right now that can receive CQUAM is a Ford car radio from 2000.
The problem is that nearly all satellite receivers are OEM devices inside vehicles. So as long as the care is in use, and there are subscribers in those older cars, they have to maintain the full service on each satellite system. They can eventually transition to one satellite system as the oldest cars go out of service, but in the meantime the emphasis is going to be on transitioning to streaming rather than satellite distribution as that is the direction that dashboards are going.
WQEW 1560's IBOC appears to be off tonight, I say appears to be off because conditions are bad tonight and it is fading quite a bit and not very powerful. When it fades I can hear the hash grinder effect you hear with a wideband tuner normally on IBOC AM stations. If it is off, could Disney be trying to cut costs or trying to make the station sound better(Or both?) for potential buyers?
JohnnyElectron
Leading Participant
Now if WFME recaps their CQUAM exciter and fires it up, that would be sweet.
ContinuousWave
Star Participant
To run HD means paying royalty fees to Ibiquity....that FR wont do with an AM.....no ROI....Why DISNEY did it was beyond me.....kids were not buying HD radios, no portable "walkman" style HDs were out and the analog audio at 10kHz b/w sounded a hell of a lot better in any radio!!
Yup, an exercise in futility at best.
pianoplayer88key
Star Participant
I totally don't expect them to turn it on either. I'm on the west coast, but I remember when they bought Philly's 950 which had been running the hissmonster, they shut it off shortly after they took over the station, according to reports I read here and elsewhere.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Why would you want them to run AM stereo? They are an anachronism, totally outdated boring programming. Ratings will probably go from almost nothing to even more almost nothing the moment they come on. AM stereo on a boring station wouldn't make me listen.
Nothing like the Gates of Hellfire! in stereo.
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