HD Radio Power Boost Compromise Draws Wide Support

“It looks like a reasonable effort to give stations the power they need,” said Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner of Emmis. “It gives us a reasonable minimum level” of a 6 db increase for almost all FM stations “and some authority to apply for a higher level,” he said. “It puts some controls in place to move forward cautiously.” The agreement helps the Broadcaster Traffic Consortium, which he’s president of, show auto makers interested in using the group’s mapping services “that there is an end in sight,” Brenner added. “The next part is will broadcasters invest the capital and the expense to make this happen.” One of Emmis’ stations is what’s called a grandfathered super-powered Class B station that may have to turn down its analog power to increase it on the digital side, which may not be a good tradeoff, Brenner said. There are 58 of the stations in the U.S., said CTO Mike Starling of NPR.

Using technology to run at different power levels on multicast digital channels, two-thirds of the country’s FM stations could increase power beyond the 300 percent, Starling said. “It does not necessarily mean that after a year or more from now after the commission has considerable experience for how these rules might work, they wouldn’t necessarily come back and say further changes are warranted.” Media Bureau meetings Thursday with NPR and iBiquity went well, Starling added. “The compromise was well received, they were appreciative of it and they are going to take it under study and I think they indicated there could be action on this in the near future,” he said. “It would appear that this is well under the category of delegated authority,” so a vote of FCC members wouldn’t be needed. IBiquity executives weren’t available to comment by our deadline.

Increasing power up to 10 db seems possible in many places outside the East Coast and Southern California, where stations are spaced very close, said Vice President Milford Smith of Greater Media. The compromise didn’t seem to raise hackles among the consortium of stations and broadcast gear makers that sought the 900 percent increase, which Greater Media and Emmis belong to, Smith said. “I have not encountered anyone associated with the joint parties that was not happy with the way this has turned out. It is hoped going forward that as we get more experience with this stuff that there might be hope to get further power increases.” It’s “critical” that the “logjam has been broken and there has been a substantial power increase” agreed to, he said. Smith is also chairman of the National Radio Systems Committee, which set the U.S. standard for in-band on channel digital radio, known as IBOC.

“As an interim solution it’s an elegant solution that gives broadcasters what they're looking for at least on an interim basis,” said Steve Lerman of Lerman Senter, an attorney for the consortium. “The increase will certainly be meaningful to broadcasters and based on the record there is very little prospect of analog interference.” The agreement is “a good thing for the folks who might live in less urban environments, but even for the folks in urban environments there will be a lesser increase,” an NAB spokesman said. “We think it was a reasonable compromise.”

“I think that anyone who has not yet adopted IBOC would probably be quite concerned about this,” said Executive Director Pete Tridish of the Prometheus Radio Project. “There really is no benefit to those who have not yet adopted IBOC, and there really isn’t that much benefit to stations that have adopted” the standard, because there are so few HD Radio receivers, he added. “There are certain problem cases where a 6 dB or even 10 dB increase is OK, but we think it should be individually engineered.”