Glen, your comments are not without errors. Canada, where the Eureka-147 system has been a total failure, has given the OK for stations to adopt HD Radio. So far, none have. But the door is open to them. There are no digital broadcasts from the Bahamas; the government has yet to approve any form of digital broadcasting, either for radio or TV. Mexico has given stations within 150 miles of the US border authorization to broadcast HD Radio. I don't know if any have adopted the system yet.

Two problems crop up before you even look too closely at HD Radio:

1)HD radio is a closed-source, proprietary technology. It is approved for use NOWHERE but in the US!
People living near the Canadian or Mexican borders or in parts of South Florida where a Bahamian station will come through will hear those stations broadcasting in other digital formats that an HD radio can't process, and will be unable to purchase radios able to process those digital broadcasts.

2)It also means that is is the technology, not the market that is setting the price. The radios are priced about like satellite TV receivers and don't receive as many different things.

Another problem that seems to have arisen is that the coverage was supposed to be equal to the station's analog coverage. This, so far has not proven to be the case! The reliable coverage has proven to be about half that of the station's analog coverage, leaving many listeners in the outer suburbs of the major cities, and in the suburbs of the smaller cities out in the cold. I suspect, but can't prove that this is a result of trying to kluge the digital signal and analog signal together. It would mean that, since most listeners are still on analog, the modulation on the HD side is deliberately set low to prevent background noise in the analog signal!

Also, the transition to digital television is occurring during times of a slowdown in the economy, this means that purchase of an HD radio is just another strain on the already tight budget! There is not, and never has been, a fixed date when all FM broadcasting will go digital, as there is for TV, so, what money is available goes into television.

Another problem is simply the poor quality that most HD radios exhibit when used in the analog mode. Since not all stations are HD, and every market has some non-HD stations, it is important that the analog reception be at least as good as the HD reception. Few people are really willing to pay $150 or more for a radio that performs like a $20.00 Dollar General special! I tried what was supposed to be a good HD radio in it’s analog mode on a station that did not broadcast HD. It’s reception and sound quality proved far short of a non-HD radio costing 20% as much!

The way radio is headed, with the corporate types having much more control, and the real radio people having less control than ever before there just is not enough good radio out there for people to spend the bigger bucks on a radio receiver!

As a lifelong radio hobbyist it hurts me to say this, but over-the-air, local radio does appear to be a legacy technology at this point, and unless there is a change in philosophy in the whole recording industry, radio will never resume its former place as a source of new music for the everyman!

Radio is, for the short-term at least still a viable way to get into places that satellite and cell-phone signals just don't reach, but how long can they live on that?

Along that same line, how many of these "extra stations" differ materially from what is available for audio streaming over the Internet? woxy.com has been an internet radio station for years, they started doing it while they were still a local FM station in Ohio. When the FM station was sold out from under them, they continued as internet-only radio. They recently also added the HD-2 channel of WVXU!

Internet radio has finally found enough audience to make it worthwhile. Took a while, until most people had broadband, but it did happen.

It is time for the radio industry to re-think the conversion to digital. Some digital format is inevitable, but are they going about it right?

Radio will at some point in the not-too-distant future migrate to the Internet. To a certain extent, it already has. The biggest barrier to Internet radio right now is that outside certain “hot spots,” most of them in the major cities, you have to be “wired” to receive it. Over-the-air radio has always done well in cars. Satellite radio solves this problem for now, but it has problems among the tall buildings in the big cities. Like satellite television, it tends to “skew” toward rural areas and outer suburbs, where, now most Over-the-air stations do not have interference free secondary coverage areas, as a result their coverage is spotty and HD radio is all but impossible! Whether the satellite radio business model is workable this way remains an open question.

Why waste 350,000 dollars to boost power for HD, when consumers have long rejected it at any power? 350K is still a lotta dough. Why not instead use it to greasze off bureaucrats, boost power to the moon, jam signals from Mayberry to Saskatchewan, and blame the mess on 'defective laws of physics' which can only be cured by a 'massive BigGov spending'?

Gots to be practical, after all, right?

Does this sound like "Let's continue the farce, Chapter 289384?" Does to me, too.

Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasota Key, Florida
02 April, 2009