The dreary daily commute for most people is enlivened by as many distractions as possible. For most of us this means "pot luck" on AM/FM radio with a side order of cassettes or possibly CDs. But stacks of cassette and CD boxes make a mess, and regardless of how many recordings you can cram into your car, you eventually get tired of everything. The farther you travel, the more tedious this all becomes. Most radio stations are out of range after an hour or two (at the most), and many areas of the country seem to have outlawed music formats that aren't religious or country.

However, two years from now, your daily commute or cross-country trip may be altogether different. Imagine cruisin' down the highway and tuning into up to 50 channels of CD-quality audio with a changing line-up of music including niche formats not available in even the biggest city markets. No fading, no static, no adjacent channel interference. It's satellite-delivered radio and there are only two companies in the U.S. licensed to deliver it.

The steady, but little known, progress of this new technology began in 1992 when the FCC allocated spectrum in the "S" band (2.3 GHz) for nationwide broadcasting of satellite-based Digital Audio Radio Service (or "DARS"). Oddly enough, only four companies applied for a license. It took the FCC another five years to award two licenses, to CD Radio and American Mobile Radio, in a spectrum auction that cost both companies 83 and 89 million dollars respectively. And that's just for the privilege of using the spectrum space! Hundreds of millions of dollars will be poured into this fledgling industry by both companies who'll be duking it out for a share of the tens of millions of potential listeners trapped in their cars for several hours a day.

To accomplish this feat of broadcasting, an entirely new technology had to be invented. New S-band satellites had to be constructed, entirely new reception antennas and receivers--capable of receiving digital data streams from the satellite while traveling up and down hills and turning left and right on the road--had to be designed and built. For final FCC approval, all this gear had to be tested and proven workable in the real-world. And finally, all this had to be boiled down to a price which would attract long-term customers willing to pay $200 for the hardware and $10 a month for the service.

CD Radio's approach was to develop technology that was both off-the-shelf and refreshingly innovative. CD Radio's signal will be uplinked from a state-of-the-art broadcast studio currently under construction in the Big Apple. The building will house the company's music libraries and facilities for programming and satellite uplinking. The satellites, acting like repeaters, re-transmit the signals in the S-band to a coverage area of the Earth encompassing all of the continental U.S. The sats have a designed lifespan of 15 years. Attached to the windshield of your car will be a small, flat, 2" disk antenna which receives the satellite signal. Using through-the-glass technology similar to that used with cellphones, it will down convert the signal to 900 MHz and relay it via a tiny transmitter to a CD Radio card designed to slip into the cassette slot of your car stereo. The windshield antenna electronics will be powered by a small rechargeable solar cell.

Satellite reception requires line-of-sight between the satellite and the intended receiver. CD Radio's two sats will transmit identical signals and be located at 80 and 110 degrees west longitude above the equator. This is done so that there'll be a strong signal easily "seen" by your car's CD Radio antenna regardless of where it is on the U.S. mainland. In addition to its two satellites (and an on-ground spare), CD Radio will also maintain a nationwide network of terrestrial-based repeaters which will simultaneously transmit the data stream of the satellites. This is intended to answer the technological question of how the satellite signal will get to your car when you're traveling downtown or in areas where the signal will likely be blocked.

CD Radio plans on delivering 50 channels of programming, only 30 of which will be music oriented. According to David Margolese, Chairman and CEO, CD Radio doesn't intend to originate any of the 20 non-music channels. It was recently announced that Bloomberg would launch a 24-hour news and information service on CD Radio. According to the press release, both companies will also develop custom programming for an additional channel. More recently announced was an agreement to carry the C-SPAN 24 hour radio service with yet another additional channel of C-SPAN/CD Radio custom programming. A complete list of CD Radio's music channel line-up, including types of music to be offered on each channel appears on the CD Radio website.

Unlike DMX, the digital music service designed for terrestrial reception whose channels are DJ-free, most CD Radio music channels will have disk jockeys. They'll provide live chatter on the music and "depth and character to the channel" according to Margolese. There will also be no commercials on the music channels. The out-sourced channels will be commercially supported and nationwide distribution on CD Radio will provide additional revenue for the company. Channel numbers 34 through 50 are still undecided but will likely include several all-sports, all-news, all-chat programming produced by other companies and rebroadcast by arrangement with programming originators.

You may be wondering at this point, "Hey, what about the company that won the other license?" American Mobile Radio (AMR) is a subsidiary of American Mobile Satellite Corp.(AMSC) which is owned in part by Hughes Electronics Corp., which is a subsidiary of General Motors Corp. (Whew! Does that graphic of the big fish eating the little fish eating the littler fish, come to mind?) AMSC, (AMR's parent) has been an industry leader for the past 10 years in a host of mobile sat telecom services including maritime satellite telephony, portable and fixed satellite telephony, land mobile telephony, satellite paging, data, duplex telephony, delivered voice dispatch services, and (if you can believe it) more. The AMR division is, dare we say, a small fish in their pond, and as such, hasn't gotten nearly the publicity that CD Radio has. In fact, the AMSC website gives scarce mention of the fact that they're even in the DARS business.

AMR will use DARS technology developed by WorldSpace, Inc. for their satellite service. WorldSpace is a privately held company, located in Washington, D.C. and founded in 1990. They specialize in multimedia digital satellite delivery to third world regions. Their wares will first be tested in Africa with a project known as Afristar to be launched in 1998 with service scheduled to start in January of 1999. WorldSpace hopes to have inexpensive portable radios equipped for AM/FM/Shortwave/DARS broadcasts available shortly after launch. WorldSpace has a 20% equity stake in AMR, along with options for future investment.

It would seem that these two companies have been handed the proverbial license to print money. The closest thing to this new industry was recently seen in the small dish world of Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS). Here, in just four short years, DirecTV went from 0 to 3.5 million customers and continues to add them at a rate of 75,000 per month. These are the kind of numbers CD Radio and AMR want to rack up, because for every million customers they can sign, they'll rake in another $10 million a month. But, as we all know, in the world of hi-tech, hi-stakes finances, anything can happen. Launch vehicles can blow up on the pad, satellites can malfunction in space, and more mundane matters such as the uncertainty of acceptance in the marketplace--or the fact that the FCC has yet to approve their terrestrial repeater network--are real concerns.

Meanwhile, both companies have their work cut out for them. CD Radio needs to finish building their broadcast center, set up the terrestrial network and prepare for the launch of their satellites which is slated to occur between August 1, '99 and March 31, '00. Once launched, the clock on their eight year FCC license and 15 year satellite lifespan starts ticking and the rest of us will be introduced to yet another technology we may wonder how we ever did without.

- Ken Reitz [5/1/98]