Yes, but since the FCC has been in bed with big money interests for quite a 
while, it was predictable.  They don't care if the band sounds like crap 
(which it already does, anyway).  At least they haven't decided that in two 
or three years, you'll have to throw away every radio that you have and go 
digital, although I suspect that at some point not too far off they will 
start requiring all new radios to be digital capable.

On the other hand, it will be interesting to see what skywave and nightime 
selective fading does to their nice digital signals.  I suspect that even 
for the 50kw stations, at the upper end of the band, nightime digital will 
be fairly unusable at distances greater than 30 miles because the signals 
will just periodically break up from propagation fades and other such 
aberrations.  It will probably be much less of a problem at the bottom end 
of the band.

I am basing this on the observation that even in their primary loab, WWKB 
starts to show major significant selective fading effects at night at about 
30 miles, which is tolerable on a analog signal, but I bet it won't fly on 
digital!

73, de Lou K2LKK




At 08:32 PM 4/4/2007 -0600, you wrote:
>Crap.  What a bummer.  That's all I need.
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>Phil.
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>K0NX
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Louis Kim Kline
A.R.S. K2LKK
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