Your radio bloggers got super busy and haven’t managed to post over the last several days. Our apologies!
Radio-Info.com reported earlier this week that dual format station WMFE in Central Florida is considering dropping the music from its FM side and going all news/talk. They do have a 24/hour HD stream. The rumor came from the Orlando Weekly, but I couldn’t get into the site, because my security software said it was an infected site.
From Tom Taylor at Radio-Info.com:
The Orlando Weekly notes that WMFE radio missed its latest fund-raising goal and had to extend the effort. I’d add that all-news and information pubcasters tend to out-perform classical or mixed-bag stations in membership dollars. The Orlando Board is chewing over the secret plans for a change at WMFE radio.
We’ll keep you posted.
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The trend is clear that mixed use stations will move classical to HD 2 unless somebody pushes back.
Those involved in classical music programming must bring up significant facts about HD multicasting to the board member if the are to save classical music on the main analog channel.
First have the board members got to:
http://www.hdradio.com/
and have them look at the prices of HD radios for the home and car. $80 is a starting price for table radios and it goes much higher fast, Car conversion kits are $250 if the radio in an old car was supplied by the company that made the car (not aftermarket).
Purchasing all the equipment to listen to HD 2 in a home and car is a significant expense. A large number of the current listeners will be lost from this economic barrier or the technical one I will discuss below.
If you are going to save your analog classical segments on your stations analog signal you need to bookmark the following:
http://www.nprlabs.org/research/drcia.php
Then click and read
http://www.nprlabs.org/publications/reports/200807151044-DRCIAFullReport-ExecSummary.pdf
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
Final Report to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Digital Radio Coverage & Interference Analysis (DRCIA)
Research Project
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Yes it is a lot of tech talk but the conclusions with respect to reception of HD 2 indoors is clear. For HD 2 to work the HD 2 signal must be locked in at all times. HD 1 can fall back to analog if a signal characteristics changes and the listener will hardly notice they lost HD. That is not the case for HD 2. When the signal fades they go from Brahms to Car Talk. The NPR lab report makes it clear that the coverage area for a solid HD 2 signal inside a house, with a table radio that has no external antenna, is much smaller than the coverage area for a stations local analog signal.
The board needs to understand what these conclusions are and they need to hear it from the folks responsible for producing and presenting the classical
programming. Nobody else at your station is going to be presenting this information to the board.
Every board member should be given one of the $80 HD radios and told to report if they can receive HD 2 from all areas of the house they live in and in those of friends in the stations covered area. Only by this process will they come to understand the systems HD multicast system simple does not work over a wide part of the stations analog local coverage area indoors.
Some hope can be found in a proposal to increase the HD signal level that is about to be presented to the FCC but any approval from the FCC will be a long time in coming and this may not apply to your station at all dependent on the characteristics of the signals adjacent to the one you are transmitting.
http://www.radioworld.com/article/88500
The danger is this can be used as a smoke screen by the board to say better performance for HD 2 is coming soon even if it is not working well now. You need to be prepared to fight this by having a detailed understanding of what the technical issues are now, the chance they may change, and the very high cost to convert to HD radio in the home and the car.
How many of us first learned to listen and love classical music by listening over the air? For the classical music fan that grew up with classical music on over the air radio using the internet to listen to an HD -2 broadcast provides a fine, low cost, work around but without new listeners hearing classical over the air for the first time the whole thing will grind eventually grind to a halt.