What if WBZ had gone 500KW???? (car antennas)

[Aaron Read]

It was indeed car antennas.  Around the late 1990's/early 2000's, many 
car manufacturers made a real push to reduce or "hide" radio antennas in 
response to negative consumer feelings towards them:  they often break 
or bend when run through a car wash, and the motorized ones that 
automatically go up/down also have a lot of moving parts that break, too.

That said, I think you'll find that virtually all of the HD Radio 
receivers for the auto have remarkably good FM and AM sensitivity.  Even 
if you don't care about the HD part, I highly recommend trying them just 
for regular analog listening.

For example, I used to have the "gold standard" of FM listening: the 
Blaupunkt Casablanca CD-51 with SHARX DSP I.F. filtering.  I thought it 
still was until I swapped out my "old" Kenwood HTC-HR100 and the 
sensitivity dropped like a brick.  Granted, the Kenwood is quite good 
overall in FM/AM sensitivity, but it's not the best...and it still blew 
the doors off my old beloved Casablanca.  I have a JVC KD-HDR1 these 
days and I'm quite happy with it for both analog and HD listening.

BTW, appropo of nothing, I wonder if WBZ and the other "super AM's" had 
remained at 500kW ERP...IBOC might never have happened.  I'm not all 
that familiar with IBOC for AM, but it strikes me that it'd be bastardly 
difficult to figure out how to run IBOC injection at power levels like 
that...especially with the technology available in the 1980's.  So much 
so that Lucent and USA Radio might've deemed it impossible at the start...?

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Read                  |  Finger Lakes Public Radio
friedbagels@gmail.com       |  General Manager (WEOS & WHWS-LP)
Geneva, NY 14456            |  www.weos.org / www.whws.fm



At 8:43 PM -0500 11/12/08, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
 >
 >Something seemed to happen to car radios around 2001 or so.  It
 >doesn't seem to matter what make car, they all are pretty dreadful
 >now.  Since most auto makers offer factory satellite radio, I'm
 >wondering if they intentionally crippled the terrestrial portion to
 >make satellite look better.

Is the real problem the receivers or the antennas?  Most cars these
days have either an in-glass antenna or a short stubby one.
-- 
Larry Weil
Lake Wobegone, NH