miguell2

In the DC area, the radio is really awful (though WIYY in Baltimore has gotten a LOT better lately).  Whenever I go to the beach, I spend the entire time on WZBH in Georgetown, quite possibly one of my favorite radio stations anywhere.  I'm really hoping the new ownership doesn't ruin it.

 

Regarding "HD Radio," transitioning over to it full time would probably accomplish nothing except killing off radio for good.  It works poorly and doesn't live up to any of its promises, really.  The "HD Radio" name originally didn't mean anything; they came up with it to ride on the hype of HDTV.  (Only later did people figure out it could mean "Hybrid Digital.")  It was called "IBOC" before then, meaning "In Band On Channel" but in reality, it was more like "In Band Adjacent Channel."  For a station on 107.7, for example, the analog signal consumes roughly 200 kHz from 107.6 to 107.8.  The HD sidebands each eat another 200 kHz from 107.5 to 107.6 and from 107.8 to 107.9, meaning that if you have an adjacent channel FM, that station gets stepped on.  (In the DC area, there are quite a few of these.) 

 

In the event the analog is turned off, the IBOC spec essentially calls for the now-freed 200 kHz in the middle to become a secondary and much weaker expansion of the digital signal.  As best I can tell, the IBOC spec contains no way to take what are currently the two 100 kHz sidebands and turn them into a single 200 kHz carrier in the middle of the channel if the analog was killed off.

 

Ibiquity claimed the system would operate successfully at -20dBc (1% of analog), but in practice, that turned out to be way too weak.  They sought a power increase to -10 dBc (10% of analog) but that would have caused so much interference that the FCC only granted a power increase to -14 dBc (4% of analog) with a complex waiver process to go up to -10 dBc.  Of course, it means that they will have to rebuild and install new transmitters and other gear to make it happen--practically starting over from scratch to get that relatively small increase in power.

 

On top of all that, the delay on the transmit side is a huge issue.  One of the few places where radio seems to continue to be in decent shape is with sports broadcasts.  Well, if you're broadcasting live sports in-market, you have to turn the IBOC off because the delay is so bad that in a baseball game, by the time you heard the audio of the ball being hit on the radio, the play would be over.  A lot of people bring radios to sporting events to listen to the live broadcast while it's going on, and because you have to delay the analog audio to match the delay of the IBOC, you have to turn the IBOC off and kill the delay if you want it to be usable in that case. 

 

Can you tell I don't like it much?

 

- Trip

I haven't experience bleeding, can give a station suffering from interference in DC?

The FCC office doesn't have the man power to mandate and enforce all of their rules. In Houston alone, there are 2 pirate radio stations that I know of which have been running for a very long time in the FM dial.

 

If they can't nip 2 little pirates, what makes you think the field officers are going to check into the sound quality of an HD main channel? And sync problems are still there believe it or not. Not every station has the budget to replace 1st generation HD Radio equipment, so the problems will continue since its not a priority.

You have a recourse, call the radio station to complain, they usually will fix it, if they don't a call or letter to the FCC can do the trick. It does take time but it does get addressed.

iHeartMedia is trying to be more Spotify like with thier streaming app so they will likely remain competitive for the next 5-10 years.

 

What is everyone's thoughts on XM - I love the channel variety but the sound quality is no good. Going from FM to XM I have to turn up the volume by 10 just to hear the music. I had read that XM compresses thier bit rate whenever there is a lot of congestion...but no matter what time of day I think it sounds muffled...like listening to a 28kpbs sound file downloaded off Napster.

SiriusXM is actually from 64kbps to 128kbps AAC encoded. The quality issue might be related to your receiver. The best way to connect an external receiver is to use an AUX cable. FM modulator is just FM quality.

Xm/Sirius is a pretty good alternative. The only time I bought subscriptions from them was when I would make a road trip throughout the U.S. or Mexico. Believe it or not, they can be heard all the way deep as Central Mexico (and maybe even farther south...didn't drive down that far to find out).

 

My problem with XM is that, just like traditional AM/FM radio, its only a one-way mean of communication. As customers, we are only receivers and have no say in the music selection.

 

But with internet, all of that changes. Of course, no company has a robust nationwide data network or spectrum to handle a full listener transition from FM/AM/XM radios to internet radios, but one can only hope that with technological advancements, we can get close to it.

SiriusXM Coverage

Its a hit and miss as far as reception goes. HD Radio actually stands for Hybrid Digital, so don't let the "HD" fool you. Hybrid Digital only has the bandwidth to have one CD quality stream, so when a station multicasts an HD1 and HD2 channel, the quality degrades to slightly better than FM.

 

Most major cities have FM radio stations broadcasting HD but because of the low availability of HD radios, most engineers don't bother to maintain their HD streams properly. For example in Houston, KBXX and KMJQ's HD main channels actually sound worse than their stereo analog counterparts. Also, KROI-FM spent an entire week once with a dead feed coming out of their HD carrier. Another big problem is engineers do not properly sync the audio from their analog feeds to their digital feeds. HD Radio by default delays the digital audio by (I think) 7.5 seconds, so engineers have to purposely delay their analog feed in order to have a radio sync smoothly from analog-to-HD (and vice versa). This leads to many stations suffering from audio lag when a receiver is in the fringe area of HD Radio coverage. Overall, nice concept when inside the -70 dBu contour of an FM radio station, but crap when outside of it.

 

As far as AM HD Radio, not many stations adopted it nationwide, and those that did turned it off soon after due to the main analog channel suffering from interference.

 

In all honesty, the only reason most companies are using HD Radio now is to skip through FCC loop holes. Since most companies have a limit of the # of stations they can own in every market, many of them are buying small translators and using the HD2 channel as the parent station in order to have more stations. One example is the Austin radio market. Most of the local translators rebroadcast a local HD subchannel rather than an actual FM station. This has resulted in Austin gaining 5 extra commercial FM radio stations.

 

 

Its slimy, but legal.

The delay used to be a problem back in the early days but the newer equipment makes the sync a whole lot easier. All stations that buy in to HD have to provide at least similar quality on the HD stream as their Analog stream by FCC mandate or face fines. The reception is purely based on the quality of the receiver. I bought one of the better (as far a sensitivity goes) in 2010 and I have few issues within 40 miles of the transmitting antenna which is somewhere in DC.

The quality is definitely improved when listening to music, definitely higher quality than satellite radio.

I don't understand why this is a bad thing. Did another source indicate they were immediately shutting down equipment manufacturing for the Alcatel side of the house? My assumption (while probably incorrect) is that nothing will change in the near term other than AP/AR header information saying Nokia now instead of Alcatel - and the back office updates to make that happen. Did I miss something that indicated Alcatel was going to be effectively shut down?

I seriously doubt that. Also they can't just shutdown equipment, they deployed it and it is run by whomever and ALU simply supports it. Sprint could ALU equipment forever as long as they keep paying for support. It will be ALU equipment regardless of who owns them, its just who you call for support that will change.

I am not so sure how I feel about this right now.  I mean Nokia seems to be doing pretty well with its network equipment but I just don't know how much impact this has on LTE deployment especially in markets that use their equipment for B25/B26/B41 LTE.

I don't imagine it would have any impact in the short term. Legacy equipment will remain for as long as they are in their useful lives. I imagine that interoperability between ALU and Nokia equipment will be improved over time.

Uhhh, no.  Network Vision still continues.  In fact, there are some internal conversations about a push to finish up LTE to remaining sites via microwave.  We also have seen some evidence of this in Grand Junction, Colorado where permitting recently started to microwave all the remaining sites in that area.

 

Sprint is being much more aggressive in completing existing work as well as adding more scope.  This is all good news, no matter where you live.  Also, i expect some iDEN sites to replace some sites in rural locations like yours, too.

I have been hoping that they would do that, all this waiting around while equipment is ready to go has been really frustrating. Do you think they will just use microwave in the long term or just short term until the fiber is secured?

I had that happen to me last night as well.

Ive tried outside up on the roof not mounted, but it just makes the sprint evdo/LTE data not work

I don't know what might be the problem, mine works just fine and I get LTE just fine through it.

Make sure you mount it and ground it with the appropriate hardware. As long as it is outside it will get much better reception than what it can get inside, on the pole and pointed to a tower will work best.

Make sure that the antennas point to opposite directions to avoid oscilation (much like a mic and speaker) which will cause the unit to shut down.

Hope everyone has a safe and Happy New Year! Any one have any fun plans for tonight? Wish I was going to Disney for their firework show because it's going to be out of this world, but perhaps next year! Might just head to the bar down the street for their new years festivities. 

I just was there, it is definitely a very packed. It was challenging for Sprint's network as well. I had a terrible time getting data through during Christmas day and the day after. There is band 41 enabled in the area so that might made a difference. In all fairness my girlfriend's AT&T phone had similar issues with data. Regular calls and texts went through without issues to either of us.

I have been using vonage for many years. works with my fax and it worked with my older satellite box when I had satellite. It seem compatible with all my POTS devices.

Perhaps a building repeater?

I love fiber.

The unlocking law also doesn't help anyone who uses CDMA carriers, since nothing actually forces CDMA carriers to allow non-branded/unknown devices on their networks.

This is true but with my recent experience activating a Nexus 5, adding a IMEI to their white list is a fairly trivial process, if you know who to call.

If the inside antenna is also directional as long as they are both outside of each other radiation area they should not oscillate. A simple example would be a outside antenna and an inside antenna on the same pole with at least 3 feet of separation one pointed in one direction and the other 180 degrees in the opposite direction, they should not oscillate as they wouldn't radiate on each other to oscillate.

With an onmidirection antenna everything on the plane parallel to the base of the antenna and opposite to where the antenna protrudes would free of radiation from the omnidirectional antenna as long as the directional outside antenna is pointed away from the radiated area.

My understanding on antennas and radiation is limited but that is what I have found in my experience. If you can find a radiation map for each antenna it should help you with placement somewhat. Please anyone correct me if I am wrong.

Geez it isnt even a sprint article and the haters are out in full. 

Haters will hate. Its as if they live in the past.

I knew it'd be talked about somewhere, I just didn't know where. It'd be cool for a general discussion though.

 

Do you think that it'll eventually be brought to phones once carriers get people off of 2 year contracts (if that ever happens)?

Apple said no in the fierce wireless article. They have to be bought unlocked full price from Apple.

If that were true, how could so called "world phones" or international roaming exist?  Think about it.

 

AJ

Then why don't we have one SKU instead of two?

Again, though, explain how the FCC would have any "regulatory" hand in the decision to have separate variants for North America and the rest of the world.

 

AJ

I figured since the FCC regulates bands in use here, they may not want devices that will be able to transmit in bands not licensed here? or other similar entity in other country may not want a device that uses certain incompatible tech (ie CDMA in europe) be sold within their borders? Please enlighten me. 

Uh, why would the FCC be a "political reason"?  That sounds like thinly veiled rhetoric.

 

AJ

A more appropriate word would have been regulatory.

Is that Carrier Aggregation that I see?

Only two models in the world.

 

(XT1103) for the US and (XT1100) for the rest of the world. 

Is there a technical reason for not having one model for the whole world? FCC might be the political reason.

http://www.androidheadlines.com/2014/10/lg-g-flex-2-sprint-outed-leak.html

 

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