[BC] IBOC DX and the short est day of the year

[Bill Harms]

Since skywave is so prevalent on the AM Band, and it does serve a
reasonable purpose by extending the broadcast range of many stations
at night, doesn't it argue that maybe IBOC, even all digital/non-
hybrid, might not be the way to go on the AM Band?  Remember that
many station still have skywave listeners at night.

The best solution IMO remains to find another segment of the spectrum
to use for digital broadcasting and leave the AM band alone, and as
stations move to the new band, the AM band would become less
cluttered.  Among other strong points, the remaining AM stations
could take even more advantage of skywave.

BTW, my local on 1190 WBIS is beat up by WOWO at sunset, and WBZ
kills my local TIS on 1040 at the BWI airport.  There are other
examples that I could cite.

Bill Harms
Elkridge, Maryland

On 22 Dec 2005 at 0:33, Dan Dickey wrote:

 > In general AM IBOC is not intended to work over skywave.  The guard
 > interval between OFDM blocks is not really long enough to handle the delay
 > spread that can happen with skywave hops.  I'm not saying that someone
 > somewhere cannot decode IBOC after a hop or two but reception won't have
 > enough probablity to be significantly useful.  DRM on the other hand is
 > easily decoded after several hops because it was designed that way.
 >
 > But when either IBOC or DRM are decoded from skywave paths they sound
 > great. Which is the one of the main points of the DRM system.
 >
 > Best regards,
 > Dan Dickey