[BC] SCA ON TRANSLATORS

[Schardin, Hal (DEED)]

Dana,
A minor correction. While their stock FMeXtra equipment came with AAC, they were willing to work with all other coding schemes. For example State Services f/t Blind in Minnesota is using AMRWB+ with our rollout of FMeXtra. And you can use one type of coding for one channel, and a different type of coding for another.

Plus you can assign as much or as little of the total available data stream to any channel. State Services can squeeze 2 mono voice channels of good quality in the space taken up by a 67 kHz analog subcarrier.

FMeXtra encryption was free, whereas other digital venues had been courting NDS RadioGuard.
 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070416005254/en/NDS-Announces-NDS-RadioGuard-TM-Conditional-Access
I was told RadioGuard cost $15,000 per station. NDS has now been bought by Cisco.

Hal Schardin

-----Original Message-----
 
I think we can put a final rest to this by an FCC decision involving FM Extra.
That system used AAC coding on SCAs and provided a stereo digital audio program channel with quality and coverage superior to IBUZ - with no adjacent channel interference, no coverage loss and an average installation time of 15 minutes, and a cost of well under $5000.00. The FCC ruled that SCA is  still a private broadcast service and essentially banned public reception of FM Extra.
In essence, Ibquity's lawyers got to the FCC, and stuck it to FM Extra. To put it simply, *corruption* ruled the day! Beaten down, FM Extra put themselves up for sale. They were bought (and killed) by: Ibquity!

See how it works in America? The ones with the biggest lawyers win, especially when the FCC is involved.

One more reason why the FCC needs to be eliminated and replaced with something run by engineers, not lawyers.

Lyle Henry can give us more details I'm sure...

-D