Sony XDR-F1HD Lock Issue during Es

[K3PHL]

I had an issue during the 7/22 Es opening with KCMO in Kansas City (a favorite visitor here). It seems the signal got strong enough to go into HD digital, tried to go digital but the Sony ended up going into mute and it never recovered back to hearing the analog and just stayed muted. Maybe the processor wanted to revert to analog but the signal was in deep null at the time and it didn't know what to do. Either way, the Sony hung for over 2 minutes until I physically changed frequency. I attached the first 45 seconds showing where the mute happened about 38 seconds in. The stereo separation on the portion of the song just before the mute sounded nice.

This is not a good thing for those of us that do unattended recordings with the Sony. Fortunately I was at the radio at the time. I might not be so lucky next time.

It appears that I may be performing the mod mentioned on the net about forcing analog when a station automatically goes into digital. You can cut a trace and wire a switch.

Has anyone else had this issue?

[dlp85x]

Do you mean that, upon tuning in KCMO-HD, the signal muted as heard? I've had that happen with my Sony XDR-F1HD also, but I think it might've been because KCMO-HD was broadcasting silence at the time. It happens a lot on local WMMJ 102.3's HD. The analog would be playing music, but as the HD would decode, the music fade away and I'd just hear silence, just like in your audio clip. Since then I've received WMMJ-HD with music like the analog, but it has been silent a few more times also, and I've noticed it on local 93.9 WKYS-HD once also. I'm not sure as to the radio hanging as you described, but the silent decode sounds just like what I experienced here. Did you see KCMO's calls on the screen the whole time you heard the silence, or did it go away? FWIW, I noticed that my Sony reverted back to the analog signal every time the HD signal was lost the few times I received an HD via Es. I hope I helped!

[K3PHL]

First off David, great website.

What I noticed was that KCMO attempted to go from analog to digital, the audio went silent and stayed that way for over 5 minutes until I manually intervened and tuned off frequency. This was long after the Es signal was lost (checked via a 2nd radio). It never reverted back to analog. The callsign remained on the screen for the entire 5 minutes.

I was concerned about this issue happening again and hanging silence during unattended recording.

[Mike-CT]

Let me confuse you just a little bit more. Recently I had one local HD station that would sound great as it decoded into HD but then would go silent after a few seconds on the HD-1. BUT...the HD-2 was normal. Personally I'm blaming this on the station since none of the other HDs in the area had this type of problem. (This is on the XDR-F1HD).