Nope, AM HD is a thing, even has resulted in a small number of new AM receivers that can do C-QUAM stereo.
It wrecks the band around the stations that use it, as it spills either side of the core analogue AM station, which I believe delivers in the range of 40kbps usable, so essentially you can only broadcast a “digital” version of the AM service, rather than any multichanneling.
So it’s poor quality audio that’s not a huge step up over a good AM analogue signal, wrecks the band around it, and is marginal to receive, so people fall back to analogue a lot anyway.
There’s a number of AM stations that are already retransmitted on FM anyway (not sure what percentage).
And with the ownership rules being a lot looser, whereby stations across both AM and FM bands have the same owners, the AM station could be carried as a HD only station on FM.
Thanks @anon71206228 it was definitely during SCA network programming, and the tempo changes during Titanium was obviously throwing out the AGC and limiting. I have not heard the issue during local programming since the problem was resolved.
Thanks for following that up for me. At the moment 99.5 is the only available signal into Sydney as 107.9 is blocked by a TCL.
Went to the Sydney Royal Easter Show today. Didn’t see much radio presence other a couple of KIIS sponsored rides (pics below).
I know WSFM and I think maybe KIIS and Triple M did have showbags in previous years, but I couldn’t see any. I probably would have bought a WS or MMM one.
TV wasn’t any better, just a few Channel 7 billboards
The only station I could see with any presence was also KIIS. Their sponsoring of the haunted house is “bang on” with some of their target audience as it’s in Sideshow Alley and packed with under 25s (and their parents)
I visited the Heritage Pavilion. They displayed a bag that was given to everyone who entered the show in 1979. It contained a map and a few vouchers. It was sponsored by 2UE and no doubt would have allowed Personality Radio to have owned the Show in 79.
Move FM 99.5 & 107.9 have some studio automation problems at the moment with two stream sources frequently being put to air concurrently.
BTW what happened to Show Radio (Sydney) on FM this year?
It appears that the Islamic stations may have snapped up Sydney’s vacant FM channels prior to Show Radio making representations to ACMA for this years broadcast?
ARN Metro use MPEG2 (256k from memory), which is standard for Nexgen, however this will probably change to PCM as they move to Zetta. Nova and SCA are PCM WAV.
