[Elecraft] OT: radio broadcast commercials

[Thom LaCosta]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2007, David Wilburn wrote:

> For those hams that help with emergency communications, an XM satellite radio 
> can be a great help whether or not your subscribe to their service.

Somehow I can't imagine too many folks having an XM radio who don'st subscribe 
to the service....unless they happened to by a radio that has XM in addition to
FM.

There's a move afoot by the non-satellite broadcasters ... HDRadio.  Some 
stations are offering that mode to reach other audience types.  In Washington 
DC, WAMU has their normal NPR and other high-minded local progamming on the 
regular FM channel and channel 1 of HD radio.  One of the other channels appeals 
to the "new" music folks and rebroadcasts the signal of a Public Radio station 
on Towson, Maryland, while the thrid channel on HD radio rebroadcasts the 
content from www.bluegrassradio.org

I wouldn't call the service commercial-free...it has the obligatory twice-yearly 
begging week, and quite a few of the "institutional" announcements for 
"contributors", which might be called low-key image advertisements by sponsors 
on the commercial frequencies.

The hardware side of things is truly amazing....you'll need to drop around 175 
bucks for an HDD tabletop that could kindly be called "mid-fideltiy"....and near 
400 bucks for an upscale component system that ain't that much to write home 
about.

I'm hoping that some enterprizing compnay will come out with a tuner/convertor 
that would allow one to receive the channels and pipe them into whatever audio 
system a listener has.

Thom

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