HD Radio Gets Boost From Automakers

The Federal Communications Commission, fearful that new multiple digital stations would interfere with existing analog stations, limited their signal strength to a mere 1 percent of that of the analog station, according to Stephen Baldacci, spokesman for iBiquity Digital Corporation, the company that promotes HD radio.  One percent!

It is a wonder we could pick up the stations at all.  Fortunately, after a few years of experience showing that the HD stations did not knock out the analog ones, the FCC has boldly upped HD power to a whopping 10 percent of the analog signal.

While this still sounds pathetically weak, digital stations don’t require as much power, so at 10 percent the signal could be as strong as an analog broadcast.  “At full strength, you’d be able to hear an HD signal in Moscow,” Baldacci joked to Dan Carney for a story at nbcnews.com.

The receivers are improving too.  The Sony radio in the Ford Focus has a tuner that is optimized for HD reception and it showed solid reception of many HD stations in the Washington, D.C., area.

Many current models’ radios have two annoying problems that make HD radio difficult-to-impossible to listen to.  On the station’s main channel, as the radio picks up the HD signal it switches to that, and then when it loses it, it switches back to analog.  This is good for demonstrating the superiority of HD sound, but bad for listening when the signal switches constantly, because it sounds like someone alternately stuffing socks into the speakers and then removing them.

New radios, Baldacci explained, are designed so that they switch between the two less abruptly, so the change isn’t annoyingly noticeable.

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