Engineers Oppose AM Receiver Standards as Fix for AM Band
Engineers who work with AM stations are divided over a proposal that the FCC mandate AM receiver standards. The proposal was submitted to the FCC this year in a letter from Tom King, president of Kintronic Labs. Some AM radio professionals cautioned that establishing such standards would deter receiver manufacturers from building AM receivers altogether.
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The receiver standards likely won’t do anything positive for AM radio, said Lawrence Behr, CEO of LBA Group. AM receivers are very inexpensive and low-end, he said. “They don’t have very good fidelity even on FM radio.” Improving them “would add a great deal of cost,” he said. It would require a number of fixes, like putting in better speaker systems, “to realize any actual improvement,” he said. Time and money would much better be spent trying to improve the interference environment, he said. “No matter what is done to the AM band, it would never be treated as a hi-fi medium.”
Some receiver manufacturers may decide to eliminate AM, rather than go to the extent of retooling to produce a higher-performing AM station if the standards were to be mandated, said Steven Crowley, a consulting engineer. “It’s the lesser listened-to band.” BMW’s decision to remove AM radio from its i3 vehicle (see 1408140050) is an indication that a manufacturer won’t hesitate to do so if it thinks there’s a cost issue, he added.
The proposal for receiver standards is a “non-starter,” said John Garziglia, a radio lawyer at Womble Carlyle. The CE industry “wants nothing to do with government mandated receiver standards,” he said in an email. He said King neglected to acknowledge that HD Radio brings parity between AM and FM receiver reception. Having the FCC dictate “more stringent, expensive, electrical noise limits on millions of manufactured devices, so that the public can listen to AM radio stations, is ludicrous,” Garziglia said.
A Cohen Dippell engineer supported the proposal's potential to lead to new and improved equipment. It’s similar to how the Advanced Television Systems Committee has established minimum standards, said Donald Everist, president at Cohen Dippell. That resulted in six generations of new chips, he said. “While there was a minimum standard for the TV receiver, it was improved over time.” The receiver inherently incorporates new techniques to AM radio “that would update the quality of the reception to be possibly comparable to FM,” he said.
Crowley also took issue with making the receiver standards mandatory instead of voluntary. Voluntary standards, like the standards produced by ATSC or the National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC), have worked well, he said. Standards generally should be consensus-driven and a multistakeholder process, he said. The proposal would probably be better off in the hands of the NRSC “because there will be feedback from the consumer electronics side,” he said.
Experts were generally supportive of the letter’s other proposals for the FCC to enforce regulations for interference, and to authorize AM synchronous boosters, they said. Authorizing synchronous boosters is “a helpful piece,” Everist said. The method laid out in the letter would help achieve synchronous operation, he said. The FCC should be encouraged to take more steps to reduce noise or increase enforcement, or launch a consumer education campaign, Crowley said.
AM synchronous boosters may or may not revitalize some AM stations, Garziglia said. “Unless Kintronics is referring to a very low power synchronous booster to improve an AM station’s coverage in a particular building or factory, any such AM booster would almost certainly require a directional pattern with a multiple-tower transmitter site which is a prohibitive cost to most AM broadcasters,” he said. “I doubt a business case could be made for most AM stations in favor of building a second or third AM booster tower array.”
Shifting to an all-digital format will probably be “the salvation of the band,” Behr said. That would help the band overcome the noise problem, he said. An FCC proposal to open up an application window for AM operators to obtain FM translators “obscures the issue of fixing the AM band,” he said. “That just adds activity in the FM band.” While it fixes the commercial operation of some stations, it doesn’t fix the fundamentals of the band, he added.
King met with FCC staff last month and he is continuing to push for the proposals he has advocated, he said in an email. The proposals "have been well received by all of the FCC Commissioners and staff to whom we have made our presentation," he said. "We now need to move to Capitol Hill for support at the Congressional and Senatorial level via the respective Energy and Commerce Committees.”