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AM HD TURNOFF PACE ACCELERATES
- Thread starter Savage
- Start date
So for most existing AM broadcasters, they need a new antenna system to go HD? Sounds expensive.
How about if stations go straight digital? That's a 20 kHz versus 30 kHz. Would that make a difference with the older antenna designs?
Two problems.
First, a station would start with nearly no audience. The are nearly no HD home radios, and people are not buying radios at all. Average car is 11 years old, so more than a decade to get to even half of the cars if all come with HD.
Second, older antenna systems... phasers and ATUs... are pretty sharply tuned. Most would need to be broadbanded... many don’t have flat audio at +/- 10 kHz.
I get that broadcasters running analog AM would probably not ditch their existing audience to go completely digital. On the other hand though, I'm curious if there is any HD Radio demonstration money looking for a home?
Where I live, the daytime AM band is pretty quiet. There is one local station that lost their tower location so they don't have current audience and they will need to rebuild anyway. Maybe public radio funds that sort of thing. I don't really know. Most of the HD radio that I've experienced in the smaller market is public radio. Maybe there are some opportunities for building new audiences, and experimenting with the technology in a market where there is some room on the dial.
A couple points: The vast majority of publicly-funded stations are already FM. Spending money trying to digitize AM for the purposes of driving an audience toward an antiquated medium, would be a foolishly expensive suckers bet. Now that CPB funding, which originally helped push the HD radio movement for public FM stations has mostly dried up, that ship sailed about fifteen years ago.
Is AM HD that antiquated yet as a technology? It seems more like it's finally ready to scale up in production. As for the CPB funding, I didn't know that had run its course. Too bad.
It isn't that digital (HD) on AM is antiquated, it's the entire Medium Wave (AM) band that's become irrelevant, if not non-existent to most listeners below 50. Just because you come up with a different way of modulating in the AM broadcast band, it's still on AM. Heck, most millennial's don't even know the band exists, and would be repelled by the noise floor and poor quality of it anyway.
Something that the radio industry found out when they (sort of) rolled out the concept of In Band On Channel (HD) broadcasts, even on FM, is most listeners didn't understand the upgrade, let alone care.
I think the HD operation would help with the perceived quality issues of AM. It's also a little simpler than FM from a user standpoint, because there are no sub-channels. As the deployment of HD radios in cars expands, a digital station will be just another station on the dial that happens to sound better.
Another thing about radio in automobiles is the noise from the car. The road noise can really mask the quality of the audio. I'm not really sure that AM HD quality would be an issue on the road as long as the signal didn't drop. I don't really expect table and portable radios to win back much of their audience, but I think car radios can survive.
Yes, it would help from a technical standpoint. The problems are, as already mentioned:
1. Consumers don't buy new radios.
2. Fewer and fewer even know the AM band exists.
3. Broadcasters don't want to actually pay to promote anything new.
4. No existing broadcaster can take the potential losses of shutting down their analog content to promote digital.
5. Broadcasters are generally risk adverse.
6. Even digital modulation on AM is affected by the ever-increasing noise floor caused by consumer electronic devices and noisy, aging power grids. With the digital 'cliff effect', in the event of electrical noise, cars going under overpasses and bridges will just go silent. Consumers find that concerning, and will tune away.
There are some on this very discussion board, that feel AM stereo could have been the salvation of AM music listening. For various reasons, that option came way too late. Unfortunately, HD Radio for AM falls into the same situation.
As for 1 and 2, I think that auto radios are the toe-hold on consumer demand that can make the difference. As for 3-5, that will be driven by consumer demand. Small players that can't make the capitol expenditures in updating their broadcast equipment will fade out with their audiences.
Number 6 is more insidious. Urban areas are just going to be tough on AM. I used to walk to work in San Francisco. There was all kinds of RFI that killed everything, broadcast radio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, you name it. It was very frustrating. I'd listen to podcasts with wired headphones when I was walking down 2nd street to the office. Maybe AM can become more of a rural thing if the costs can be brought down into the reach of smaller broadcasters.
I think the smaller broadcasters are really important. Some of the most important things in life revolve around local land use, schools, public safety, and infrastructure. If there isn't a local newsroom to keep the local government honest, there are going to be more problems.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add #6: Rural or small market radio broadcasters, don't have, or aren't willing to spend the kind of capital dollars to do things like HD radio. As David and I mentioned prior; very few AM stations would have the antenna system which could support the bandwidth to do hybrid, or full digital. To small markets, doing HD would be like buying solid gold toilets for the office. It would be nice, but doubtful it ever would make them a dime. Certainly not in an owners lifetime.
Unless you've been in the business, it's hard to understand the way things work. Especially when it comes to AM, experimenting with ideas to resurrect a fading medium have little or zero upside.
I just keep thinking that unused spectrum will attract users of some kind, even if it means a radio service that isn't broadcast radio.
CTListener
Walk of Fame Participant
Amateur radio operators (hams), I suppose, would enjoy a new playground, but knowing that the FCC is in this game to make money and ham licenses cost very little, that's unlikely. There are also those pesky international treaties to deal with -- everyone else in both hemispheres would also have to declare that frequency range dead for broadcasting in order for the hams to move in. Another problem: ham radio isn't exactly a growing hobby, and many hams of more recent vintage spend little time on the HF bands or analog modes, so how many would welcome the chance to gab about the weather, their antennas, fishing, etc. on MW?
And of course (one of my favorites) talking about their health maladies.
The problem is the Ham's left hardly use very much of the spectrum allocated to them now, not just because of propagation of certain bands, but because there are less and less active ones. That being said; if there is spectrum, doesn't mean it has to be used. The AM/MW band isn't a very good chunk of radio real estate anyway for many of the same reasons the popularity of the AM broadcast has suffered from, including: terrestrial interference from consumer devices and aging utility infrastructure. Because of the size of said real estate, it's useless for any digital use like PCS/Cellular, 3G, 4G, and certainly not, 5G. 500Mhz and up is the new digital promise land.
Holding a license is one thing, using it is another. I've listened for hours on Wires-X rooms with over 100+ nodes or repeaters in a single room, yet not even a peep. Same with DStar and other VHF-UHF analog repeaters and frequencies. Ham's need to understand the use-it-or-lose-it principal.
WWVB has survived with a 60 kHz carrier. I have one of those watches, along with some clocks. NAVTEX operates on 518 kHz or 490 kHz, and I don't see that changing, at least from what I've seen published about it. Obviously these are low bandwidth services and the spectrum that supports them can't do any more than that.
I realize that IBOC AM won't impress any audiophiles, but many consumers aren't really audiophiles anyway. They happily use MP3 compression and earbuds on a regular basis. I'll add that I appreciate not having to extend an antenna for AM stations, or use one of those headphone wire antenna arrangements. I can't count the number of telescoping antennas I've broken over the years.
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