[IRCA] The sky is not falling, and the hobby's far from dead

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Now that the FCC has done its thing today, I fully expect the DX lists 
to get very full, very fast, of more of the same doom-and-gloom posts 
that we've been seeing in earnest for the last few weeks, predicting the 
death of the DX hobby with what sometimes seems (to my eyes at least) 
like an unseemly glee.

My two cents amidst the noise, if I may:

I watched the FCC hearing this morning. The commissioners spent almost 
no time talking about the AM nighttime authority for IBOC. Their 
interest is in FM HD multicasting, and particularly in how that affects 
their pet issues - programming diversity, sponsorship identification, 
political advertising, obscenity, etc.

I spend a lot of time traveling the country, visiting radio stations 
large and small and talking to radio people, from small station owners 
all the way up to the engineering VPs at the big groups.

Here's what I'm hearing: multicasting - *FM HD* multicasting, which is 
the only kind there is - is where all the action is. The original idea 
that "improved" digital audio would be the big selling point for HD 
Radio has fallen largely by the wayside.

For AM HD, that "improved" audio was the only selling point, and without 
it, converting more stations to IBOC will be a tough sell. Just because 
24-hour operation is now legally possible does NOT - I can't emphasize 
this enough - does NOT mean that we'll suddenly go from the current 
couple of hundred AMs with HD to thousands of AM HD stations, overnight, 
or probably ever.

Based on what I'm hearing and seeing in my travels, I don't think the 
lack of 24-hour authority was the factor that was holding most AM 
stations back from converting to HD. There are plenty of other drawbacks 
that are well known within the engineering community: nighttime 
interference, questionable audio quality on the current codecs, and 
limited reach of AM HD signals (of the three HD AMs in my market, I can 
only hear two of them at all reliably, and I expect that the third, 
which is already iffy by day, will be entirely unusable in HD at night 
where I am.)

Bottom line: will HD Radio be a failure? No - but whatever success it 
achieves as a niche medium will be as a result of FM multicasting and 
the new options it opens up to broadcasters in a position to take 
advantage of them (like public radio, for instance, where an average 
station has access to much more programming than it has airtime on its 
main signal). AM HD may go the way of AM stereo and fade into oblivion, 
or at worse it may show up on a few hundred stations and cause us, as 
DXers, some new interference headaches.

But to predict that somehow everyone on the dial will suddenly turn on 
the buzzsaws just because the FCC says they can is to ignore a market 
reality in which AM HD has already become an afterthought.

No, this is not a happy day for AM DX, but neither is it the end of the 
hobby, not by a long shot.

s

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