This year Clayton “Argilo” Smith offered me an opportunity to provide one of the challenges for the GRCon capture the flag event (CTF). I was quite eager to do this since we had recently finished implementing a multitude of changes to the gr-nrsc5 transmitter and nrsc5 receiver. And by We, I really mean mostly Clayton, but I technically did contribute some code that he rewrote later ;).
In case you’re not familiar, NRSC5 is the spec that defines the U.S. terrestrial VHF digital broadcast radio standard. I.e. HD Radio. I personally find this commercialized name to be a bit deceptive since it would imply a higher level of audio quality which is generally just not the case. The maximum throughput of the hybrid standards is around 125kbps which could actually make for fairly decent audio. Unfortunately, this is never seen OTA. This is because this rate is for the MP3 mode which is actually composed of two logical channels split into about 100kbps and 25kbps. See the table below for the defined modes and associated data rates.
So the maximum possible audio program quality is 100kbps. In addition to this, there’s a considerable amount of overhead that limits the practical codec rate to around 96kbps. Some of this overhead comes from the almost hilarious amount of meta-data being sent by the transmitter. Things like FCC ID, exciter version, and even things like time with leap-second corrections. Fortunately, some of this overhead space can be used to send a multitude of content such as ID3 tags, station logos, album art, and even weather maps. Though this last portion is not yet explicitly supported by gr-nrsc5. So all-in-all 96kbps audio wouldn’t sound too bad, but the standard actually supports up to 8 audio programs! Most stations thus opt to have at least two channels, so practically speaking, bitrates of 40-70kbps are pretty common. I find that at this bitrate the analog signal sounds noticeably better at high SNR. Although at lower SN ratios one might find the lack of any hiss a more pleasant tradeoff.
Earlier I alluded to something interesting, I mentioned hybrid modes. HD Radio is actually a hybrid digital/analog waveform consisting of a ~230kHz wide analog FM carrier sandwiched in between two ~73kHz QPSK modulated OFDM carriers (MP3). See the graphic below.
The standard actually does define fully digital OFDM modes, but these have yet to be used by any station on the air, as far as we know. The page below shows what a typical FM station with an HD transmitter might look like on your waterfall.
Okay okay, enough geeking out over NRSC5, let’s talk about the actual challenge! Earlier I mentioned the dubious nature of the “HD Radio” moniker, thus partially inspired by last year’s NTSC challenge by Clayton, I opted to call my track Not Really Superior Clamor V i.e. NRSC5. This signal is a fully standard-compliant (more or less) stereo WFM signal with RDS, SCA, and the MP3 HD mode. The HD signal carriers 8 programs with 8 associated station logos. This required a minor modification to the L2 PSD size in gr-nrsc5 to make this possible. I was very much pushing the limits of the waveform.
Driving in Tempe at the crack of dawn,
The challenge text
for it was the first day of GRCon.
I turned the dial in my car
to hear the voices near and far.
The sound of pop and news fills my cruise,
but this is not the muse I choose
For there it was on ninety point seven,
the place with the bass that would take me to heaven.
What’s more is the fact that the signal audio was pulled live from my personal radio station VladFM. This was actually done via a rather elaborate bash script I call “themaestro.sh” which calls an ffmpeg instance to pipe audio from the internet, python scripts to update the HD1 metadata, HD8 logo, and run the flowgraph itself.
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