They have AM HD? I only noticed it on the FM side. I need to check this out. I did notice one of the sub channels has the NOAA automated transmission. For some reason my wife loves it
Sheesh. If she loves NOAA's automated voice, you should get her a real NOAA "All Hazards" radio for home and set up the SAME decoder for your area. Ha. She'll love you. LOL.
(And yeah. I remember when they had real announcers and some of those guys and gals had some pipes and were a joy to listen to. The computerized stuff isn't nearly as human as the big baritone voice that used to be the daily voice of NOAA when they were still broadcasting from the NWS office at Stapleton Airport...)
I found a web page to report a problem I heard once with one of the digitalkers actually. It was stuck and was speaking a few words every minute or so. I got a really surprised call from a tech in another State who wanted to hear it to confirm his remote reset had worked. Haha. I turned the receiver back on and then after he heard it asked him if there was a power output problem on another transmitter because it sounded weak. He laughed and said, "yep. Repairs are scheduled for that one next week. Thunderstorm season is coming." Then he asked why the heck I was even interested in the stuff. As soon as I said I was into radio since I was a kid and was a Ham, he started laughing and said, "You guys are always the folks who let us know when they break!" We chatted for a couple more minutes and he thanked me for the report and hung up.
There's wasted potential with HD radio.
On the AM side, it's nearly worthless in most places. In Denver, the Bay area, and Houston where the ground conductivity is fairly good, it should work OK on AM with big, high-power stations (like KOA).
KOA isn't playing. They had complaints about it degrading the audio of their signal at super long ranges at night in other States, or so I was told. They don't really have much adjacent to them near here, but the adjacent problem you mentioned really messed with them at night.
The only AM stations doing it here seem to be the significantly lower power ones that aren't stretching for a multi-state audience after dark.
On the FM side, no, on both sides, the potential is generally wasted. Very few places are transmitting additional content (beyond what's available on the main channel or another broadcast outlet). Some stations are using it as a substitute for the old SCA services, some are retransmitting their AM stations on FM/HD, and some are retransmitting other, lower power stations. The educational stations tend to be the ones putting additional content on.
Actually the best use of it here is KRFX-FM has KOA-AM's content simulcast in a sub-channel and the audio quality is far superior to KOA's AM 50KW "blowtorch". It's lovely to listen to sporting events on even the mildly compressed sub channel of the FM station than on the AM.
Only problem with all of it is each digitization step adds more delay and the old days of dumping the TV announcers and playing audio from KOA during Broncos or Rockies games, is an exercise in timing futility now. HDTV has one delay, AM another generated by the digital feed from the stadium to the studio and a second digital feed from the studio to the transmitter site, and the subchannel on KRFX-FM is delayed an even different amount.
When it was all analog transmitters from the stadium all the way to your house, any time/propagation delay was minimal enough you could ignore it and the plays on the TV were close enough in sync with the radio audio that you only noticed it if you turned up the TV a touch and listened for a time marker like a referee's whistle at the end of a play. Then you could hear that they weren't exactly in sync and how far what direction the video was, but generally it worked.
Now it's virtually impossible to even attempt to watch the TV and use the local announcers for sound.
I rented a car last spring for a trip down the east coast from DC-Georgia. It had HD radio and Sirius. I listened to the HD radio most of the way, and found that (at least by the time the radio receiver was done with it) the HD signals were generally no better than the FM main signals. The AM stations that were simulcast on the FM-HD sounded better, but had substantially less range (to be expected). In the end, there was nothing particularly compelling to make me want to listen to HD... in fact, I went over to Sirius for part of the trip.
Nate, the time-delay thing shouldn't happen. IIRC, most of the HD equipment is designed with a time-delay built into the box - more likely that the engineer didn't avail himself of the circuitry or is operating some kind of transmitter system that requires an oddball audio feed.
I have XM/Sirius in one of the vehicles. I really dislike the audio quality from the channeled that are highly compressed. They seem to highly compress some channels and others are better. Probably by popularity or something.
Time delays: See above. Yup understand that they can sync things better. Have a couple of SBE buddies who get it and their stations sound pretty good, but many of these broadcast conglomerates are stretching the engineers pretty thin. One guy has something like 30 transmitters to take care of in a very large region of you include translators, and he's with a "small" conglomerate. (e.g. not ClearChannel - haha)
Interesting recent development here is the TV conglomerates have started simulcasting channels on other transmitter subchannels to fill in coverage gaps that digital TV created. Especially the two major networks that erroneously chose to stay on VHF. The UHF transmitter on the same site completely kicks the VHF signal's ass, so both networks paired up wit sister stations in UHF and out their main VHF channels onto the sister station's subchannels on UHF to fill in the coverage holes.
Had a nice email chat with one of the engineers when it popped up that I could revenue his station and couldn't before. He confirmed all of that and shared that I literally live right in the contour line of expected coverage on VHF. It crosses the road about two miles from here. So I'm the very definition of "fringe" coverage for his transmitter. The UHF pounds in here nicely from a lower site and lower power transmitter. Just too much other man made noise at VHF.
One of those here in OKC as well. Car won't let me keep HD off so every time I change stations I have to press the button for HD to toggle it off to avoid hearing the sa hearing the same parts over again.
