FM signals to rival CD quality

How HD could change the world of scholastic radio

by Gary Clites

Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Adviser Update, Summer 2007

According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, the average American adult spends more than three hours a day listening to the radio. It is a huge audience, but one that has eluded the reach of scholastic journalists.

It has always been hard for teachers to find an outlet for secondary school student radio work. Students could produce the material, but where was the radio station to run it? A handful of high schools were granted low power student station licenses, but these were few and far between, and many were only allowed to output one watt, enough to blanket a small neighborhood in the city, but useless anyplace else. Some schools broadcast to their hallways or cafeterias, but even this had limited appeal to students easily discouraged by the lack of real broadcast channels.

Over the last few years, all that has changed. The availability of streaming media over the Internet has made it possible for any school to broadcast a live or recorded signal inexpensively to whatever audience they could develop over the Web. More recently, the abundance of Ipods has made podcasting an easy and inexpensive way to reach the student population with audio material.

Still, both forms of broadcasting require effort to find and develop an audience, and in the truest sense, neither is really broadcasting.

It would be great if students could gain access to their own broadcast channels, but in a world where the number of stations is finite and major corporations are competing to control them, what hope do scholastic journalists have? Thanks to new advances in High Definition radio, that equation may be permanently changing.

More than a decade ago, as CDs replaced records, DVDs replaced videotapes, and HDTV gained approval to replace the analog broadcast television signal, it became clear to the radio industry that they needed to find a pathway to digital transmission or they would face extinction. The FCC allowed several corporations to test digital broadcast systems, eventually choosing HD Radio In-Band On-Channel (commonly, IBOC) developed by a company called iBiquity Digital Corporation as the standard.

Today, iBiquity is working with broadcasters across the country to switch the industry over to HD Radio. The process is actually moving along quickly with broadcasters embracing digital in large numbers. At press time, there are HD stations in every major city, with National Public Radio stations leading the way. (For a list of available stations and more information, visit iBiquity's public site at HDRadio.com.)

Put simply, High Definition (HD) Radio replaces the traditional analog broadcast with a digital one. Why should you care? As a radio listener, HD offers a marked increase in quality, with iBiquity promising FM signals to rival CD quality, and AM signals without any of the traditional AM pop and static. The technology also allows stations to send mounds of text information, things like traffic reports, weather or sports updates, to read out on your dashboard screen.

As a journalism educator, however, HD Radio offers much more.

As an information stream, old fashioned analog radio required a lot of bandwidth to deliver its signal. Digital audio can be broadcast in a much more compressed form, allowing every radio station in America to send not just one channel of audio, but a number of channels over the same bandwidth. For the time being, stations will continue to send an analog signal to traditional radios. Even with that signal, every HD station in America can now send three to four channels of audio over the space that previously carried one.

That means that when every station in the nation switches to HD, the number of commercial and educational AM and FM radio channels in the U.S. will increase from 13,486 to at least 40,458. Moreover, in a decade or so when stations stop broadcasting the analog signal completely, each station will be able to carry seven to eight channels, increasing the number of available signals to something over 100,000.

All that increase in usable bandwidth should make great opportunities in scholastic radio. That's already happening on the collegiate level. WAMU 88.5, a top public radio station in Washington, D.C., (they produce the nationally syndicated Diane Rehm Show) recently went HD, and handed their HD-2 channel over to nearby Towson State University's WTMD student-run station. Across town, at Howard University, the campus station went digital and created a second student channel, WHUR-WORLD featuring all African-American produced music and content. In Port Arthur, Texas, when public station KVLU switched to digital, they handed over their HD 2 and 3 channels to the students of Lamar University.

Secondary teachers need to begin grabbing some of this new bandwidth opportunity for high school students. The first step is creating programs at all of our schools in radio broadcasting and journalism. The Radio-Television News Director's Foundation (RTNDF) has worked to make this easier by producing a model four-year radio curriculum (with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation) which is available free for download from their High School Broadcast Journalism Web site (hsbj.org).

Next, we need to band together, maybe with help from professional journalism organizations, to build systems that will allow our students access to a small portion of the new HD bandwidth. Some schools may have large enough radio programs to sustain their own day-long channels, but most of us would be thrilled to gain access to an hour or two a day to see our student's work hit the airwaves.

What if we set a goal to grab one channel of HD radio in every city and large town in America to broadcast secondary student work? Student broadcasters from schools around each region could share the channel to hear their work over the air. With public-minded NPR stations committed to being the first to switch to HD, it doesn't sound like a hard sell. Yes, it would cost a little for the stations to operate the student channels, but nothing that a small grant in each city couldn't cover.

HD should secure the future of broadcast radio as we head into the future. It is only right, then, that it help provide the channels that we can use to train the broadcasting professionals of the future. As journalism educators, we need to be the ones to make it happen.

© Gary Clites, 2007