I will give the podcast a listen. But the idea brings up a slew of questions for me:
 
-Would anyone buy a new radio just to get these additional and better sounding signals?
 
-How long would it take to get them into the all-important automobile and what would that add to the cost of a car? Would buyers be willing to pay for that?
 
-With Millennials reportedly abandoning traditional radio and older demos purportedly set in their ways, would there be a big enough audience to actually make this worthwhile?
 
HD on FM already exists and hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. And other countries – especially in Europe – have opted for DAB, so they wouldn’t necessarily go for the idea, either.
 
And finally – and this is the most important thing to me – would an AM HD signal propagate the same way as a regular station does on the AM band, traveling hundreds of miles at night so we could hear them as a new kind of DX?
 
All in all, it’s an interesting concept, but I just can’t see broadcasters ponying up the bucks for what is likely a limited concept.

Fascinating stuff. But I still wonder if it will ever really get off the ground. I suppose the real question isn't how many people have HD-capable radios in their car but rather how many actually use them?

That said, the possibility of being able to get these signals at long distances - and I assume they would come in with perfectly quality, because generally a digital signal is either there or it's not - would certainly make me consider buying a new radio. But there would have to be enough stations to justify the expense and I'm definitely not the normal audience for this kind of thing.

Last edited by RadioActive (March 27, 2019 10:27 am)

Chuck99 wrote:

I, too, am skeptical about the future of AM radio in HD.  I owned two different cars back in the eighties that could receive AM stereo and yet the concept was not successful.  You also have increased interference on adjacent channels.   And I doubt many people would purchase HD home radios because the sound is very good when you stream an AM station off the internet and data is fairly cheap when you use a cable or DSL connection.
 

This is basically a science project. Because the AM facilities are already sitting there as sunk costs, and because the tuners are already in the cars, a few broadcasters are asking "so what if we tried something with these otherwise useless signals?"

There's no real-world expectation that this will lead to home receivers being sold; that market is pretty much dead even for analog radios. This isn't going to be the shiny savior of anything - just an interesting experiment along the way. 

And because it's all-digital, it's very different from the failed hybrid AM system ("MA1 mode") that we all remember unfondly from a few years ago, and that's still wheezing along on a few signals. By eliminating the analog signal, the digital carriers move to the center of the AM station's spectrum and do not cause the same kind of adjacent-channel interference that the hybrid system did. You kind of have to forget everything we knew about the hybrid system and treat this as something new and different, because it is.