[BC] Another HD radio closeout...

[Jeff Carter]

I bought one of these, out of curiosity.  The following is my
experience with it.

It was delivered by FedEx, and reasonably well packed.  Everything
needed to operate it was present.

I set it up on a power supply on my bench, as is my habit with
anything before I put it in a vehicle.  My first observation is that
this thing runs *hot*.  It's not uncomfortable to the touch, but after
it's been on for a while it feels as if it's been left in the direct
sunlight in somebody's car all day.

It needs 12V.  If you bring it up at 12 and drop it down to 9 it will
still run (I wanted to see if it would run off a 9V battery) but it
won't re-initialize at 9V if you happen to turn it off.

I hooked a set of PC speakers up to it and played it all day in the
shop.  When I went home, I put it in the truck and turned on the FM
transmitter.

When it was stationary, it did okay with digital sync and was pretty
stable.  When I took it mobile, however, it would lose sync and fall
back to analog.  Sometimes this was flawless except for the very
obvious (to me, anyway) audio bandwidth change.  You can really,
really tell the difference between the analog and digital modes
because of this, it sounds like someone flipping a switch and putting
a 11Khz rolloff filter in and out of the line.  When it fell back to
analog, the general effect was to make the audio sound muddy.  Worse
for me were the stations that didn't have good sync with the two
streams, because in addition to the audio bandwidth change you ended
up with an effect like a record skipping.

Now, I didn't have an external antenna, so I don't know what would
happen if someone did a professional install of one of these things.
I would imagine that you'd still have the issue if you lived a good
distance from the metro area as I do.  For my purposes, it's unusable
for mobile use as it is, but it makes a dandy little bench radio if
you need one, and you can read the display across the room if you put
it in full size mode and control it with the included remote.  In my
market, a couple of the big talkers on AM have HD streams on co-owned
FMs, so it's a way to listen to that inside this building if I wish.
Prior to this I couldn't get AM signals in here very well.

It was sort of worth the money, but would have definitely been worth
it if I'd been given a way to disable the automatic analog/digital
switching that I found so annoying.  If I could turn that off, I'd
probably use it in the truck.

Your mileage may vary.

Jeff/KD4RBG

---- Original message ----
>From: Mike Erickson <wirelessmedia at gmail.com>
>
>Now it's only $10 overpriced.
>
>=Mike Erickson=
>
>On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Dana Puopolo <dpuopolo at usa.net> wrote:
>
>> This is for an HD radio 'converter' that broadcasts on FM-twice the
>> spectrum
>> pollution-once when it's transmitted and again when it's received!
>>
>> http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=211411586&adid=17653&dcaid=17653
>>
>> They can't be making more then a couple bucks here-just trying to dump 'em.
>>
>> -D