[BC] A new digital band

[Rich Wood]

------ At 11:42 AM 10/23/2005, Barry Mishkind wrote: -------

>         This raises an interesting question:
>         How does IBOC do in the ducting zones?

Good question but I've only encountered one regular ducting situation 
- Florida to Massachusetts years ago with TV. I would often receive 
Florida stations with reasonably good quality in Cambridge, MA. The 
interference was in the video, not audio. I've personally never 
encountered it anywhere else. I didn't find it in FM probably because 
I had highly directional antennas on rotors pointed West rather than South.

I think we have to begin specifying time periods. Analog and post 
analog. The general consensus is 12-20 years of "compatible" mode as 
receivers get replaced. 1.5 billion receivers. Let's compromise on 15 
years 0r 2021. Since this will be a monopoly situation the FCC can't 
specify an AM analog shutoff date without lawsuits that will drag us 
through several decades. We still haven't determined what recourse 
stations will have if their signals are damaged by another station. I 
can't emphasize strongly and often enough that listeners aren't going 
to stick around for more than a week (probably less) waiting for the 
noise to go away or their favorite station to come back. They'll 
settle somewhere else. Getting them back is one of radio's most 
difficult challenges. They won't wait for lawsuits or FCC mandated 
corrections at the interfering station. Other than an immediate power 
reduction any antenna changes will take too much time. If engineers 
and the NAB actually believe that nighttime AM operation is safe, 
let's go for it. The sooner we get the lawsuits in motion the sooner 
they'll be over.

>         While most engineers hate that thought,
>         as they see good "solutions" ... the reality
>         is that the regulators and the politicians
>         behind them have no reason to "reopen"
>         anything. They certainly have had no
>         compelling pressure from any
>         organized group.

What organized group is there? The NAB has already weighed in in 
favor. Listeners don't know what they're in for, so "SOS" (Save our 
Stations) hasn't been incorporated, yet. Again, the listener time 
frame of less than a week's tolerance will have kicked in and the 
process will be too late. I doubt there is one of us here in the 
business who hasn't experienced the Management, Sales and Programming 
panic that results from being off the air. A recent thread dealt with 
management calling an engineer every 10 minutes to see when they'll 
be back on. He's in panic mode. He sees listeners lost, angry 
advertisers and make-goods he may not have room to make good. In the 
early days of Limbaugh listeners saw any interruption as a commie 
pinko liberal plot to silence him. If IBUZ had been implemented when 
Limbaugh was at his peak you'd live in fear of being targeted for elimination.

As I've said. The fix is in. It's going to happen and we'll have to 
figure ways to reconfigure the industry. Before reconfiguration can 
begin we have to know exactly what damage will be done. We won't know 
that until everyone is operating, 14/7. It'll happen much faster than 
receiver penetration does. We're dealing with about 14,000 potential 
hash generators and 1.5 billion expensive receivers. So, let's get on 
a major campaign to equip stations who are going to use it to get it 
operating. I'm impatient. I want it done tomorrow. Anything 
programmers do now is purely on speculation. Until this came along we 
could predict the probable result of what we were doing, based on 
experiences in other markets and what caused ratings to follow. There 
are now too many variables to have any confidence. I think we'll even 
see JACK suffering premature eradication. Pfiezer is working on iAgra.

Strangely, we can only imagine the nighttime AM interference 
consequences, yet we already have BMW's FM experience that doesn't 
bode well for FM. That might be a more practical situation when 
receivers are perceived as defective when they're operating as 
designed. These are issues that have no relation to the actual audio 
quality compared with analog. I haven't heard "good quality" FM IBUZ, 
yet, so I can't compare analog with digital, yet.

I have to ask Michael how Kenwood will deal with customers who want 
to return a receiver that's working properly? The customer disagrees. 
There will be many more of them than BMW will encounter. I realize 
many of the problems will be the fault of the stations. Will the 
customer care? It's far better for a dealer to simply agree with the 
customer, replace the factory IBUZ receiver with a standard one and 
be left with routine maintenance and repair the customer pays for.

Rich