I spent a little time this week listening to WWFD while driving around. I am in the lower Southern edge of WWFD’s fringe area according to this:
https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WWFD&service=AM&h=DMy receiver was the factory radio in my 2017 pickup.
First of all, I was surprised at how well it worked. I expected dropouts (and there were plenty) but they were far fewer than I expected. As is normal with digital radio, everything was either perfect, or non existent. When the signal was there, sound quality was markedly better than the normal AM radio I listen to. In fact it sounded much better than our local 22kW station.
Looking at the spectrum on my SDR at home, I realized that this is a much better “neighbor” than stations running the hybrid analog/digital mode. WWFD’s entire carrier is contained +/- 5 kHz of their assigned frequency. The analog stations have their digital carriers on the adjacent channels. Granted, their digital carriers are 30 dB below their carrier power, but they do interfere with stations on those adjacent channels.
So I have mixed feelings about this. As a DXer, I abhor this as the digital carrier effectively wipes out a channel. You can’t hear anything through this. Last night I saw three strong hybrid stations that effectively wiped out the channels above and below them - and that was with them running the digital signal at -30 dBc. A digital carrier will lock up a channel for DXing purposes. You can’t hear anything thru it. It is a white noise jammer.
But as a consumer, I would listen to digital AM radio for local listening. The sound quality is significantly better. And whatever range problems the current hybrid system has will get much better if they can up the digital power by 30 dB! WWFD was “listenable” in my fringe area-I imagine it is very usable where Chris lives.
This could gain steam.
The bright side is that if you replaced a local hybrid station with a pure digital station, you will probably get the adjacent channels back for DXing.
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