On Aug 29, 11:30 am, IBOCcrock wrote:
"Ibiquity's "Gag Order" on engineers"

This was documented in another thread. I've encountered this before
in my career. Usually - it was to protect some "golden boy" - maybe
the boss's nephew or something. Anybody daring to demonstrate that
golden boy was incompetant was ushered out the door in short order.
Or - when golden boy inevitably goofed up - the one who pointed out
his mistakes was deemed the one to blame.

Other times, a gag order is because there is a lot of money to be made
- by somebody powerful. Everybody knows the project will fail, but
they are told to keep quiet until somebody has cashed in their stock
options and left. I have heard of cases where physical harm was
implied to anybody who spoke out too soon.

HD radio has all the earmarks of the second scenario. Since there was
a gag order - you can bet there are technical issues we haven't even
heard about yet. Ibiquity - you can stick a fork in them, they are
DONE. At some point, the people in the company with the most to gain
financially are going to sell their stock and retire somewhere exotic,
out of reach of US law. Their legacy? Broadcast bands in shambles,
radio manufacturers with warehouses full of unsold HD radios, stations
with an orphan system that is unsupported. Listeners with buzzing in
their ears. But - it will have made a few people very rich.
Shouldn't we all be happy about that?!

http://www.radio-info.com/smf/index....c,79682.0.html

Well, here are the "other" technical issues:

HD/IBOC Spectral-Regrowth and Other Issues

"NPR story on HD radio startup"

"Problems with the system that pervade the entire HD/IBOC data and
codec from beginning to end, all the way to the signal on the air
persist. The codec, by today's standards, is grossly inferior on FM
and literally unspeakable on AM (gee, I had no idea). Since they're
hardwired into the receivers, they won't be changed anytime soon, if
ever."

"But it goes beyond that. There were bad choices of network layer such
that reliability is compromised. The code used in exciters has a
severe memory leak, so the exciters crash routinely. The receivers can
be locked up solid by malformed packets, requiring a power cycle to
restore operation. The list goes on and on and on."

"Will any of this get fixed? Probably not, since all the money right
now is going to promotion, not to technical bug fixes. This is a
system that has been in development for a decade and a half, and it
still has problems from beginning to end that range from audio
encoding, through the transport layers, to the encoding, and now, with
the spectral regrowth problems, to the broadcast bands themselves; you
know...that which is supposed to be serving the public. I would love
to be implementing digital radio. But this is garbage."

-- John Higdon +1 408 ANdrews 6-4400