Teleidoscope

Mon, Dec 29, 2008

HD Radio

Posted at 5:58 pm MST to Technology

My Christmas techie toy is a new clock radio.

My brothers joined together to get me an HD clock radio for Christmas. It has a separate second speaker for true stereo, good deep bass, up to two alarm settings, and digital tuning and station presets.

This is great: my favorite station, KBCO is at 97.3 and there is a Christian station at 97.5 that grabs analog tuners and tries really hard to interfere even with digital FM, but they don't have HD. My existing cheap clock-radio is annoying and tinny (it cost about $15 several years ago when I was in Boston or Minneapolis in corp housing) and hard to change the settings on. But it has digital tuning, and I found after the Christian channel started up that I could not use my other clock radio that has better sound and get the station I wanted reliably.

The new radio has controls that make sense: I won't need to google for the user's manual every time we go into or out of daylight savings time.

KBCO also has an HD side-channel that has won awards as the best in the country -- it plays all live performances from the station's 'Studio C' programs. And the local public FM station has its classical music feed on a side channnel, too.

I should probably test the AM NPR channels: AM HD with digital tuning might be clear enough to be worth adding to the presets. One problem with being on this ridge is that I have line of sight to so many stations that I get all kinds of strange interference. And which stations get interfered with vary a lot with weather consditions.

I haven't tried recently, but I used to be able to pick up the over-the-air CBS TV station in Cheyenne Wyoming just using half-way decent rabbit ears.

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