CategoriesOpinion

Time to Let AM Radio Evolve — Why All-Digital May Be Its Only Future

The recent debate over mandating AM radio in all new cars has brought fresh attention to the AM band. Industry voices, like Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Technology Association, caution that such mandates are costly. These mandates will even stifle innovation. Instead of fighting to preserve AM in its current noisy and analog state, it’s time to consider new possibilities. What if AM didn’t have to be the scratchy, staticky, afterthought in the dashboard? What if AM sound clean, deliver metadata, and offer a compelling user experience again?

That’s not a pipe dream—it’s already possible through all-digital AM broadcasting.

CategoriesEpisodes

Unraveling the Puzzle: When HD1 Drops But HD2 Doesn’t

The Mystery of HD Radio Dropouts: When Digital Isn’t Always Better

In the world of broadcast engineering, few technical challenges are as frustrating as intermittent audio problems. Recently, we encountered a particularly perplexing issue with our HD Radio transmission that left us scratching our heads for weeks. Our HD1 audio signal would randomly drop out for brief periods—anywhere from 0.3 seconds to 3 seconds—while the HD2 signal continued operating flawlessly. This contradiction immediately caught our attention because conventional wisdom suggests that if there’s an issue with the transport stream or the exciter, all HD channels should be affected. But that wasn’t happening in our case, making this technical mystery even more intriguing.