HD Radio: Is This the Salvation AM and FM Need?

HD ("hybrid digital", not "high-definition") digital radio promises better sounding signals and more of them, but will that save radio as we know it (or knew it)? I've mentioned previously that commercial broadcast seems to be doing a pretty good job of committing suicide. Slowly. For someone who spent a lot of years in and around commercial radio, it's painful to watch. HD radio may provide more signals, but if those signals contain nothing more than the slop that passes for broadcast on many stations these days, why bother?

Sometimes I recall my days at a small radio station in Eastern Ohio, WOMP in the Bellaire/Wheeling market. At the time, we had more hours of news than any other station in the state: Two and a half hours in the morning and 30 to 90 minutes in the afternoon (it was a daytime-only station, so the sign-off time sometimes cut into the news block). In those days, we listened to WTVN and talked about how much we wished we could sound like The Friendly Giant. Thirty years later, we got our wish, but not exactly the way we'd hoped. WTVN is still on the air. WOMP is still on the air. Much of the time they sound alike because they run the same satellite-based programs.

WTVN has more local programming than a lot of stations these days (Clear Channel has apparently realized that local programming is helpful and now has real live local talent on the air from 5am until noon and again from 3pm until 7pm), but stations in medium and small markets have virtually none. If I have the choice of listening to satellite programming on local radio or listening to satellite signals direct, I'll take the direct route every time. That's why XM and Sirius are growing.

Terrestrial radio's answer is HD and for the past several months I've been experimenting with a Radiosophy HD100 set. It's a nice enough radio, but my choices are somewhat limited. Here's the list provided by Ibiquity, the company that sells HD technology to stations, along with my notes (in parentheses):

AM Stations

610 WTVN-HD AM Nws/Tlk/Spt, Clear Channel Radio (can't hear)
820 WOSU-HD AM News/Talk, The Ohio State University (can't hear)
1230 WYTS-HD AM Prgvs/Talk, Clear Channel Radio (can't hear)

FM Stations

98.9 WXMG-HD1 FM R&B Oldies, Radio One Inc.
89.7 WOSU-HD1 FM Classical, The Ohio State University (unreliable, but improving)
89.7-2 WOSU-HD2 FM News/Talk, The Ohio State University (unreliable, but improving)
94.7 WSNY-HD1 FM Lite Rock, Saga (no second channel)
100.3 WCLT-HD1 FM Country, WCLT Radio, Inc. (not interested)
100.3-2 WCLT-HD2 FM News/Talk, WCLT Radio, Inc. (not interested)
100.3-3 WCLT-HD3 FM Nws/Tlk/Spt, (WCLT-AM) WCLT Radio, Inc. (not interested)
107.5 WCKX-HD1 FM Urban, Radio One Inc. (not interested)
107.1 WNKK-HD1 FM Rock, Wilks Broadcast Group (not interested)
107.1-2 WNKK-HD2 FM 90's Alternative, Wilks Broadcast Group (not interested)
105.7 WBWR-HD1 FM Rock, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
105.7-2 WBWR-HD2 FM Full Metal Racket, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
97.9 WNCI-HD1 FM CHR, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
97.9-2 WNCI-HD2 FM Stevie's Boom Room, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
96.3 (analog now, digital coming soon) WLVQ-HD1 FM Rock, CBS Radio
96.3-2 (coming soon) WLVQ-HD2 FM Deep Rock Tracks, CBS Radio
103.5 WJZA-HD1 FM Smooth Jazz, Saga (bad signal)
107.9 WODB-HD1 FM Oldies, Saga (bad signal)
92.3 WCOL-HD1 FM Country, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
92.3-2 WCOL-HD2 FM New Country, Clear Channel Radio (not interested)
95.5 (analog now, digital coming soon) WHOK-HD1 FM Country, CBS Radio
95.5-2 (coming soon) WHOK-HD2 FM Christian Country, CBS Radio

Click for a larger view. I would listen to jazz if the signal was good enough. I would listen to classical if the signal was good enough. I'm not at all interested in Rush Limbaugh, rap, full-metal-racket, or '80s disco music. The Ibiquity list is a bit out of date: The 1230 signal has morphed from progressive talk to regressive talk that's even further to the right than WTVN (Where's all this "liberal media" I keep hearing about?) and one station's alternate signal is all '80s disco. Big market for that, I'll bet.

So while the Radiosophy HD100 works just fine, it doesn't provide any signals that I'm ready, willing, or able to listen to. Some of the problems may be signal strength. I talked with Jim Ary, who used to be WTVN's chief engineer and now fills that function for the WOSU stations. He reminded me that HD signals have just 1/10th the power of the analog signals. That's why WOSU-FM's signal (delivered from from a transmitter on the south side) doesn't reliably reach my north side home.

What is HD radio?

IBOC (in-band on-channel) technology was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2002 for terrestrial digital broadcasting. IBOC technology was developed by Ibiquity Digital Corporation and makes it possible for stations to simulcast MP3-quality compressed digital audio and traditional analog audio in the same frequency spectrum they use now. There are two options: HD (hybrid digital) and AD (all digital).

More than 1200 AM and FM stations use HD technology and more than 550 FM stations offer multicast channels, which doubles or triples the number of signals available. As you can see from the listings above, most of the stations that have converted are FM. AM stations have been slower to adopt the technology. HD Radio programming is free and supported by commercial advertising, the same as traditional radio.

In hybrid mode, the HD signal is a tiny fraction of the station's analog signal. Because of this, the HD signal can become so weak that the receiver reverts to analog mode. When I attempt to listen to WOSU's second HD channel, for example, the signal can drop and, because there is no analog backup for the alternate channel, the radio plays the primary channel's analog signal. Although this behavior exactly follows the HD specification, it's annoying because it has the effect of changing the channel at random times.

So HD provides more signals (when I can hear them) but the signals contain much of the same stuff I don't listen to regularly anyway. And they contain 20 to 30 minutes worth of commercials, traffic, weather, and other blather that I don't care about. Traffic reports are invariably at least 10 to 15 minutes behind what I need to know, so why bother? If I want weather information, I can get it from the National Weather Service broadcast or online. I'd rather pay $10 per month for 100 non-commercial stations on XM (of which I listen to maybe 5) than to spend 10 to 15 minutes per hour listening to the same repetitive, badly produced commercials that are hawking questionable mortgage lenders, pills for diseases I don't have, and other questionable products or services.

Radio has a chance to make a difference with the alternate channels, but I can predict with certainty that programs on those alternate channels will just be more of the same, and piled higher.

Today we have more options than we've ever had before: There's the previously mentioned satellite (XM and Sirius) signals that are readily available and largely free of commercials (yes, you have to pay a monthly fee). There are podcasts by the thousands. Streaming audio. CDs and MP3s. Services such as Pandora. For news, organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have realized that the dead-trees version of their product won't last another generation and they're morphing into 24/7 operations and top-flight news operations such as the BBC make their World Service available online. Given those resources, why should I try to depend on an understaffed and overworked local news operation?

The Industry View

Click for a larger view. Ibiquity says that 90% of Americans are within the reach of an IBOC signal. Click the map at the right for a larger view.

In the February 1 issue of Radio World, contributing editor Skip Pizzi wrote about the state of HD following the just concluded Consumer Electronics Show. He noted "small but steady" improvements in the number of products being issued, but he also pointed out several critical issues the industry will have to deal with.

A still small but vocal group of AM station operators who plan not to adopt IBOC have filed enough complaints with the FCC citing increased in-band noise from IBOC stations that some of the early adopters are pulling the plug on their HD operations. For example, http://www.stopiboc.com/.
HD is moving too slowly and "the concurrent development of other media devices and services only deepens the gloom here." He specifically cites streaming media and wireless broadband devices.
The potential for increased music licensing fees as radio stations transmit digital selections. The music industry hasn't sought fee increases from analog-only operations, but that is likely to change. Forty years ago, owning a radio station was like owning a press that printed money. That's no longer true and the industry has already had to degrade services to remain profitable.

4 cats Bottom line on the Radiosophy HD100: Nice radio at a good price.
The HD100 is a nice enough radio for about $100 with 5 AM presets (I can't hear any AM stations) and 5 FM presets (10 would be welcome). My primary question is whether broadcasters will provide signals worth listening to, or will we just listen to their final death throes? Either way, the HD100 will give you a front-row seat.
For more information, visit the Radiosophy website.

Bottom line on the HD Radio: Unfortunately, the service may be fatally flawed.
The available signals, in terms of selection and listenability, is still nowhere what is required if HD radio is to become a success. Despite Ibiquity's talk about how fast HD is being accepted, radio stations (particularly the AM stations) are slow to adopt the technology and most consumers have never even heard of it.
For another view, visit Ibiquity's website.

Stupid Spam of the Week

In cryptography, a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is a ruse in which the attacker is able to read, insert, and modify messages between two parties without either party knowing that the link between them has been compromised. The attacker must be able to observe and intercept messages going between the two victims. The MITM attack can work against public-key cryptography and is also particularly applicable to the original Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, when used without authentication. (Source: Wikipedia) This is the latest approach being taken in phishing attempts. Let's look at how it works.

In this case, it started with a message from PayPaI (not PayPal) that claimed to come from "securesite.net". That was enough of a clue to tell me that it was a fake. PayPal always spells its name with a lower case L instead of an upper case I.

Click for a larger view. So I opened the message and found many instances of PayPaI.

Where does the link go? Certainly not to a PayPal site. This one goes to a site in France.
I decided to use Sam Spade to see what the site would like to serve me, but by the time I got there, the bogus content had been removed.

Click for a larger view. I wondered who the compromised site was owned by. The registrant record is at the right.

This is a French site for the open-source Joomla product. To their credit, the site's operators noticed the problem promptly and removed the bogus content.

How Man in the Middle Works

I arrived at this site too late to see the process in operation, but it's a clever and sophisticated ruse that works this way:

The victim visits the site, which appears legitimate, and logs in.
The rogue site sends the user name and password to PayPal. Assuming the victim provided an accurate user name and password, the login is successful.
The rogue site then accesses the user's profile page, which includes a phone number and other information. The site feeds this information back to the victim.
The victim sees that the site knows his or her telephone number and assumes that the rogue site is a legitimate PayPal website.
The rogue site then requests additional information to "prove" the user's identity.
Thinking that the site is legitimate, the victim provides the requested information.

To eliminate this kind of ruse, it's important to never click on a link provided by an e-mail that claims to be from an financial institution. You should have bookmarks for the financial institutions that you patronize. Use these instead of links in e-mails. Sadly, even this isn't 100% certain. If your computer has been compromised, you may be redirected to a bogus site even if you type the appropriate URL.

Geeze! Be careful out there.

Which Computer Should I Buy?

I recently responded to a question about buying a computer to be used by someone who works for a trust company in Los Angeles. There were several requirements, which made the process interesting:
1 No proprietary components.
2 Store and play music.
3 Work with photographs.
4 Be in the $1500 to $2000 price range.
5 Ability to exchange Word and Excel files with the office system (Windows).
6 External hard drive for backups (grab and go in an emergency).
7 Tech help available for several years.

Requirement 1 seems to eliminate all Apple computers and all notebook computers. Based on requirement 6, I assume that this will be a desktop computer. I wonder, though, how important requirement 1 is. As much as I enjoy the wide variety of peripherals that are available for Windows machines, Apple's solution may be worth paying a premium for. If you want to perform a task with an Apple computer, Apple will have a solution. One. You will pay more for it, but it will work. You can get an Imac (the computer is in the monitor) for as little as $1200, but it has only 1GB of RAM. Figure at least $1500, plus software. All current Macs run on Intel processors and can be set up to dual-boot either OS X and Windows. If the need to share documents is limited to Word and Excel, Windows would not be necessary. That covers requirement 5 and fits within the range of requirement 4.

Any computer with the appropriate software will handle items 2 and 3 with ease.

To be assured of technical assistance for several years (requirement 7), you'll need to stick with HP, Apple, Dell, or Lenovo and you'll need to purchase an extended warranty. My preference is to deal with a local company such as TCR, where most computers come with a 3-year warranty. I presume that Los Angeles has computer builders as talented as TCR, but I don't know the LA market.

That leaves requirement 6. As you probably know from my earlier statements about backup, a backup that's on a device in the same room with the computer isn't a backup. If a fire or earthquake destroys the computer, it will destroy the backup. In this case, where a "grab and go" option is desirable, I would recommend having TWO external backup drives. One of the drives would be at the office while the other is at home and the drives would be swapped daily. (Take drive A to work in the morning and bring drive B home at night, use it to backup the critical data, and return it to work in the morning.)

In this situation, because the intent is to have a device that contains all current work in an immediately usable format, I would use an application such as Beyond Compare (Windows only) instead of a standard backup program. This is similar to the process I use at home. In addition to several overlapping backups, I have an external backup that sits beside the computer. Should something go wrong with the desktop unit, I can plug the backup drive into any computer that has the appropriate software and continue working. Earlier this year, when the desktop experienced some serious problems, it took less than a minute for me to start the notebook computer, plug the USB drive in, and continue working. This kind of solution would also be available for the Mac, possibly via Time Machine or by using Rsync on the command line. Somebody probably has a graphical interface for Rsync (a Google search confirms that) and Rsync is open source.

Because the user works for a trust company, requirements of the Gramm Leach Bliley (GLB) Act will come into play. This law deals with how customers' private information is safeguarded. Carrying drives with unencrypted data between home and office would not comply with the act. Nor would leaving that data, unencrypted, on a home computer. The trust company's IT department probably has guidelines for safeguarding data that leaves the building. For an example of what Arizona State University does to comply with GLB, see http://www.asu.edu/privacy/security.html.

Nerdly News

Goodbye HD-DVD

When I said last week "There are 2 high-definition formats for DVDs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Or, were. Blu-ray has won the battle. Wal-Mart has announced that it will drop HD-DVD gear in favor of Blu-ray. End of story," I wasn't expecting to be able to follow up this soon with a story that says "there is 1 high-definition format for DVDs." If you've been waiting for the final shot, it has been fired. Instead of a bang, though, it was more of a whimper. Toshiba was outflanked by Sony.

Sony opted to go with more expensive blue lasers, but the DVD Forum, led by Toshiba, selected a less expensive option. Early Blu-ray discs were also fragile and required protective caddies (remember early CDs?). By early 2002, the DVD Forum approved a system that compressed HD content onto dual-layer DVD-9 discs. This is the technology that became HD-DVD in 2003.

It wasn't until 2006 that Toshiba released the first HD-DVD player in Japan. It cost nearly $1000 (remember $500+ CD players?) and Blu-ray followed with a player a few months later. By the time HD-DVD players came to the United States, the price had dropped to as little as $500.

The end: Warner Brothers said it would stop supporting HD-DVD format by mid year, Netflix opted to go only with Blu-ray, but the real killer was the decision by Wal-Mart to support Blu-ray and drop HD-DVD. You can still find HD-DVD players in retail stores and Toshiba says that it will provide spare parts for at least 8 years.

Phishing and Smaller Banks

When you think about phishing, you probably think about Chase, CitiBank, American Express, Ebay, and the like. But the creeps who run these scams aren't stupid. They know the areas served by local banks and for at least the past year, they've mixed fraudulent messages that claim to come from smaller banks in with those from the giants. In many cases, they can also identify where the potential victims live, so those are the people who receive phishing messages that mention banks in their area. These messages can be most effective for the crooks.

This week I received a message from Jeff Garringer, who described a phishing e-mail that claimed to be from Greenville Federal, in Greenville, Ohio. "Not having an account with them I thought it odd that my services would be deactivated and deleted if I didn’t respond!" Jeff wrote. "I called Greenville Federal to report this and they said that have been receiving calls from all over about it. Goes to show that it’s not always the other guys that this happens to."

Indeed it's not.

As usual, the bait looks more or less legitimate and contains a warning: "This is your official notification from Greenville Federal that the service(s) listed below will be deactivated and deleted if not updated immediately. Previous notifications have been sent to the Billing Contact assigned to this account. As the Primary Contact, you must update the service(s) listed below or it will be deactivated and deleted."

The service listed is "Greenville Federal and Bill Payer" and the expiration date listed is just a few days in the future. Legitimate sounding? Of course.

But the domain the link you're supposed to click takes you several levels deep on a server owned by a company in Victoria, British Columbia. Chances are that a small bank in a rural Ohio town will not have its server in Victoria, British Columbia.

The standard rules apply here: Never click a link in a message that claims to be from your financial institution, type the URL yourself to ensure that you go to the right site, and never give any site information that they already should have (account number, security questions, and the like).

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