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April 9, 2008
IBOC signals as currently regulated can't cover same area digitally as their analog counterparts: Despite what the industry has told me for years, a not-very-secret bit of information has come to the fore. The FCC limits IBOC (digital AM/FM as approved in the U.S.) to 1/100th the signal strength of analog. If you have a 100,000-watt analog transmitter, you can broadcast 1,000 watts of digital signal. I have been repeatedly over three years that this provides nearly the same footprint for digital coverage as for analog.
Not so.
The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) is split over a proposal to ask the FCC for a 10fold increase in digital power. Some stations are concerned that portable devices with HD Radio built in, when they finally start to appear, will be unable to receive strong enough signals.
Critics of the notion, which is still being tested by major networks and NPR, are concerned that the power boost would simply cause interference with adjacent or distant stations' analog signals. Many stations may lack the setup necessarily to power the higher signal, too.
April 8, 2008
The Clear Channel network is now sending out HD Radio tags that work with special digital receiver and iPods: Over 340 of Clear Channels stations are transmitting the information that receivers made by Alpine, JBl, JVC, Polk Audio, and Sony can pick up and hand off to a docked iPod when a special tag button is pressed. That information is that synced with iTunes the next time you plug the iPod into its associated computer. The idea behind tagging is to let people note songs they're interested in and, apparently, buy them.
Of course, if there were any portable recordable HD Radio receivers, then you could simply record the song and listen to it later. The recording industry has had long-standing complaints about digital terrestrial broadcasting, wanting to impose a broadcast flag that would overlay every song with information about whether it could be recorded, on what devices, for how long, and how many times it could play.