IBOC on AM Band

[John Ebeling]

Maybe some one can give me a good explanation as to why AM stations would desire to use IBOC during the daytime hours. Here in the Mpls/St. Paul area, we have two IBOC stations so far: WCCO-830 & KFAN-1130. Both are talk stations, which I would think require no great audio, as the AM band is limited to the 5kHz bandwidth and most AM radios are pretty poor as far as AM reception is concerned.
Seems to me that they have been led down the expensive path by iBiquity, who, for all the stations using IBOC, reap many dollars in royalities from the stations.

John Ebeling
Bloomington, MN

[Mike-CT]

Well it's not for CD quality sound because it's not CD quality. The newest scheme is multiple streaming, where they hope to compete, more or less, with satellite radio. What I've read says that so far there are no HD radios capable of decoding multiple streams. Good luck finding any HD radios.

If the multiple-stream idea doesn' fly with consumers, what then?

[Kaimbridge]

Plenty of opportunity for (subscriber) subcarrier/SCS business——who knows, if consumers turn a cold shoulder, maybe they'll try to get the FCC to allow the other HD channels (AM/FM & TV) to be used for cell phone/internet type transmissions (which could be their—at least the Big Boys—whole underlying scheme to begin with!))? P=/

~Kaimbridge~
(now active in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kaimbridge )

[KC0LTV]

They probably just want to say they have "HD Radio" (which is ridiculous).

Thankfully we don't have any of that garbage up here in Duluth (yet!), AM or FM.

Now they're pushing for the right to do IBOC at night on AM! Imagine that..

[w9wi]

"Now they're pushing for the right to do IBOC at night on AM! Imagine that.."

I think it was Fred Vobbe who was pushing for just that.

If everyone authorized to run IBOC-AM ran it all night for a week or two, there would be so many interference complaints it'd be a race between Congress and the FCC to see who could get IBOC-AM quashed first...

Unfortunately I don't think the interference problem on FM is nearly as bad, I don't think it'll be enough to get Congress' attention. But the radios aren't selling, nobody's distributing them, the prices are ridiculous. For the price of a HD radio you can get a Sirius or XM and two years' service - and a WHOLE LOT more channels.