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Doug Smith W9WI · October 24th 06, 02:11 PM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

wrote:
The FCC is currently investigating closed caption radio for the hard of
hearing. WGBO and NPR are working on this project. Any thoughts? Is
it pretty easy for stations to convert their sound stream into
captioning.

Actually, I think this would be the hard part. Most radio programming
isn't scripted; you'd pretty much have to have a "court reporter"
following the discussion & typing up the conversation. The situation
where two or more people are speaking at the same time is not well handled.

There is now speech recognition equipment available for captioning
television programming but it's VERY new. Still, that might be a
solution. It would be cost-prohibitive for most stations.

I wonder if anyone knows what kind of changes in receivers
we would need. The newer radios already type song titles and station
id's.

"RDS". On FM stations subcarriers could deliver enough data bandwidth
to easily handle this. (I don't think the RDS system has enough room in
the RT field but you could use a different subcarrier for the
captioning. )

AM stations don't have this capability. IBOC-AM stations do have a
small program-associated-data field but I doubt it can handle much more
than the station's call letters.

--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com