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Canada May Allow HD Radio
iBiquity could score a big win if Canada opens its airwaves to in-band, on-channel (IBOC) digital radio: The Canadian spectrum regulator, the Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission, will allow broadcasts in HD Radio format over Canadian airwaves if another agency, the Department of Industry, also approves of the format. This would be an enormous benefit to HD Radio equipment makers, which would require relatively little tweaking--beyond, perhaps, ensuring bilingual compatibility--of receivers already for sale or designed for the US market. CBC has been testing IBOC.
There's a large suspicion that while FM would go the route of IBOC, that AM would perhaps choose Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), which is a path that some in the U.S. believe will occur here as well. DRM has a somewhat different approach and different encoders. AM stations in the US have had little interest so far in HD Radio, which cannot be broadcast during night time hours, due to FCC concerns over interference. (The ionosphere changes its reflectivity in its lowest layer when it is dark out, increasing the skipping range of AM signals.)
Canada allowed satellite digital radio in Dec. 2005. Before then, a kind of gray market existed in which Canadians purchased receivers that were illegal to operate in their own country, but which could receive XM and Sirius signals.
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