Australian Philco radio

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by AndrewM

The Australian AM broadcast band is similar to the American one ranging from 525 kHz to 1606 kHz.

As we have only a relatively small number of stations in each state, manufacturers used to print the stations call signs on the dial as it was easier for listeners to find their favorite station.

Packard Bell (was an old radio manufacturer, not the PC marketer) used to do that on their radios. As they were a West coast company, the stations were the ones in California, Oregon and Washington. Stations must have rarely changed callsigns back then; today you couldn't print callsigns on radio dials as every other week someone changes theirs.

Multiband radios included one or more shortwave bands for listening to international broadcasts. As VHF FM broadcasts did not occur until the 1970's, all our tube radios did not have this band.
... instead Digital radio will be a third service that will take over the frequency bands of our soon to be shutdown analog TV service.

IBOC (in band on channel) digital radio seems to cause no real problems for FM, but it impacts AM more severely. Some AM stations use their FM brothers' HD secondary channels to broadcast in digital the AM programming.

I have had Sirius satellite radio in rental cars, and the compression artifacts sound awful (like overly compressed mp3's). XM sounds better, but has no Howard Stern... Haven't heard IBOC HD radio.

Broadband and cell phone providers are eyeing our TV bands, wanting to get rid of over-the-air TV broadcast. Claiming that most everyone has cable or satellite TV. My mom doesn't...

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by wa2ise

Broadband and cell phone providers are eyeing our TV bands, wanting to get rid of over-the-air TV broadcast. Claiming that most everyone has cable or satellite TV. My mom doesn't...

Your mother must have an analog TV with a DTV box and an antenna. Is her reception reasonably good, or does she have problems receiving some channels? Just curious, as the DTV age seems to be creating an awful lot of reception problems for some folks miles away from their area's TV transmitters, as well as some viewers who are quite close to the stations and who never had any problems whatsoever when it was all NTSC analog. The downtown areas of major cities here in the US are bad news for DTV because of the sheer number of signals in the air, from AM/FM radio, television stations, pagers, police radio, name it--not to mention the problems with multipath that used to cause no end of trouble with stereo FM radio, back in the early '60s. Multipath causes echoes in FM radio reception but can absolutely kill DTV, because the phenomenon can and does cause live and dead spots; given DTV's all-or-nothing nature, this means viewers may have the dickens of a time finding a spot for their antennas that gives a picture at all.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

Your mother must have an analog TV with a DTV box and an antenna. Is her reception reasonably good, or does she have problems receiving some channels? ... Multipath causes echoes in FM radio reception but can absolutely kill DTV, because the phenomenon can and does cause live and dead spots; given DTV's all-or-nothing nature, this means viewers may have the dickens of a time finding a spot for their antennas that gives a picture at all.

She has a rooftop antenna for channels 7, 11 and 13 (these reclaimed their old analog allotment for digital) (this antenna feeds a house wide cable system) and a rooftop UHF antenna for the main set in the living room (via a converter box, the Zenith one) (we are 14 miles north of the Empire State Building, where most NYC signals are transmitted from). We get better reception of a Long Island PBS station (Channel 21) with digital than we used to get with analog with that set.

NYC already uses channels 14 to 17's frequencies for police and fire radio