The good news is.................................................
There is no good news. This will be a disaster.
Small mom and pop operators ( think under 10 kw ) won't be able to afford to abandon what analog listeners they still have to chase a handful of BMW owners with digital receivers.
For the AM band , it's Don Meredith singing, "Turn out the Lights, The Party is Over". ( for you old timers )
This from a broadcast engineer who has been lovingly caring for AMs since 1968. End of an era. Sad.
Don W4DNR
I have nothing against digital radio or digital audio. But IBOC, even at its best, is very BAD digital audio. What a useless turkey, vastly inferior to the analog AM it killed. It sounds bad, bad, bad. Think Real Audio files from 1996.
The (undisclosed) true design goal of IBOC was to PREVENT the adoption of a new digital broadcast band in the US. This was not wanted by the big-money boys, because it would have leveled the playing field and made all stations equally excellent in audio quality and signal to noise ratio. It would have made the Mom and Pop operations just as listenable as the big-money blowtorches. Can't have that!
IBOC is a total turkey from the word "go," and almost no one listens to it or will ever listen to it.
73,
Kevin, WB4AIO.