Exclusive to “The Leslie Report,” Broadcast Electronics says its field trial to test conditional access for real-time traffic-data delivery on a multicast channel at Emmis station WKQX(FM) in Chicago went well.
Of the available 96 kilobits-per-second, the station used 48 kbps for its main digital channel and 38 kbps for its supplemental channel, leaving 10 kbps to test conditional access.
“We were passing real-time traffic data…pulling it from Navteq and running it through a formatter for HD and then through the HD-R importer,” BE’s Ray Miklius tells me. He and a crew from NDS, Ibiquity, WKQX and BE drove around Chicago, to spots where the station had had reports of reception issues, to see how the NDS conditional access system would affect the reception of traffic data.
In all cases, the conditional access worked well, with a robust delivery of data, Miklius said. Testers listened to the HD-R signal on both the main and the secondary channels, with no perceptible change in audio quality, he said.
The tests began May 22 and are slated to run through this month.
Patrick Berger is chief engineer of Emmis Chicago stations WKQX(FM) and WLUP(FM).
