"David Eduardo" wrote in message
. com...

If your above statements are based on "facts," I'll stick with
Brenda-Ann's view any time. Brenda-Ann talked about engineering
standards and physics... but we know marketing is the ultimate law in
the universe, not the laws of nature.

No, Brenda Ann spoke about engineering standards that are outdated and
arcane. Interference on first adjacents is irrelevant if nobody in the
interference zone listens to first adjacents. The principles of physics do
not change. It is the way radio is used that has changed, and there are
more than a few Luddites here trying to bring back things that died
decades ago.

Good engineering doesn't become outdated, it simply gets ignored.

Listeners are not irrelevant just because they may stand outside the 'market
area'. It used to be that if a station was being interfered with, one could
complain to the FCC and the interference would be cleared up. That seems to
no longer be the case.

And what of portable radios, of which there are many millions? Many of these
tend to have very wide IF bandpass (some don't even use IF stages anymore,
and instead broadband amplify the signal), and will therefore be susceptible
to cochannel interference from the station that the listener is trying to
listen TO. Add to this that FM AFC will try to lock onto strong second or
third adjacent channels that are spilling over because of IBOC. I know
people living IN New York City that receive interference from IBOC stations
on stations they regularly listen to. This is on both AM and FM IBOC.

This whole thing was ill thought-out, at best. It's as much a boondoggle
(perhaps even moreso) than HDTV.. Most stations don't even run more than a
meager percentage of HD programming, opting instead to run 720i on their
main channel so that they can run extra programming to make more money.. I
don't care what you or anyone else tries to say to blow smoke up my arse,
720i does NOT look as good as standard NTSC analog. HD does look nice, when
you're in a signal area high enough to make use of it. Once you get outside
of a large city, at least where I'm from, if you get far outside of
Portland, digital is just not receivable. I'll take a bit of snow or a minor
ghost over a nice blue screen any day, thank you.

And again, what about all the millions of portable televisions that DTV will
positively make worthless overnight? Is the government going to give us all
tiny convertor boxes so that we can still use those, too? For many, those
portable sets represent a larger expenditure than their living room
televisions, just because of the difference in technology used to build
them.

Maybe us Luddites just don't like the government, or a bunch of stuffed
shirt pencil pushers, telling us what's good for us? Hmmmmm.