At the recent Radio Advertising Bureau convention, RAB CEO and President Jeff Haley outlined his vision of radio’s future, which includes audio delivery beyond the traditional transmission systems that we have used for 80+ plus years. Online streaming, podcasting, Wimax and more are part of his vision. Haley also called for broadcasters to work together to ensure that a radio receiver is in every consumer portable device within the next five years.

Read a summary of Haley’s speech at this link.

What caught my attention is that I noted a similar goal for radio more than a year ago (How to Make HD Radio Succeed: Do Nothing, Dec 2006). Haley’s challenge is a broader approach, and it has the correct goal in mind. Listeners have grown and evolved. Radio needs to grow and evolve as well.

It’s been quiet on the subject of towers being the cause of massive deaths of migratory birds — until now. On Feb. 19, a U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the FCC to study the effects that several thousand towers have on migratory birds in the Gulf Coast region.

We have covered this topic in Radio magazine many times before. In my Viewpoint in the January 2007 issue I noted that there is a great deal of misinformation and supposedly factual evidence of the severity of the problem. Many of the studies that are currently referenced point to other studies that point back to the original. There doesn’t appear to be any source data in the first place.

I’m all for protecting the environment and wildlife, but I haven’t seen the undisputed data to recognize the real severity of this problem. Perhaps this court order will produce some factual results.

Read more: Fight Over Flight

The Trends in Technology feature in our February issue explored the use of IP technology for remotes. Read that article at this link. What are your experiences with IP technology and remote broadcasts?

By now you have heard that there is a quiet movement to increase the power level of the digital portion of the HD Radio hybrid signal. You can read something about that in the Feb.6 Digital Radio Update newsletter.

On the surface, increasing the level of the digital carriers sounds like a good idea. More power means a better digital signal. But increasing the power raises other questions, with concerns of first-adjacent channel interference being at the top.

The results of the study have not yet been posted. I’m looking forward to reading them.

What’s your opinion of the power increase?