A recent article written by Mike Starling and myself in Current was reprinted here on this blog where it has drawn to date five comments, all critical (well, at least that’s better than the spam comments I have to delete each week).
The most interesting of these mentioned FMeXtra, a subcarrier based digital radio technology offered by VuCast. I think (corrections, please), that the only receiver is offered by VuCast and only a handful of stations in the U.S. and Europe are broadcasting it. It’s had nowhere near the marketing investment of HD Radio, so unless you’re reading the broadcast engineering trade pubs, you may not be aware of it. The technology can apparently co-exist on the same transmitter with HD Radio, does have certain advantages, and is or will be used by radio reading services in Minnesota.
Here is a May 2010 article on it by Stanley Swanson from RadioWorld and here’s another from November 2006 in the same publication. --Dennis
"FMeXtra: Another On-Channel Solution"
"Eventually DRE asked the NRSC to reactivate the DAB subcommittee. Early on, we saw that IBOC was going nowhere as long as there were multiple proponents, and even in the best estimates, it would be many years before there would be any return on investment. So we decided to license our patent portfolio for use in IBOC to USA Digital Radio, which eventually merged with Lucent’s IBOC group to form Ibiquity. We are an Ibiquity shareholder... There is no significant difference in spectrum occupancy between the 'extended hybrid' mode of IBOC today and these earlier systems, which were deemed by the NRSC and others to be incompatible with the host analog FM signal."
http://www.bext.com/RW/RWFMeXtraDec05.pdf
Unfortunately, iBiquity and the NRSC killed FMeXtra. FMeXtra would have died on the vine like HD Radio, trying to sell consumers on "more" radio stations.
Posted by: Greg | Monday, 28 June 2010 at 17:22