One of the big misconceptions about HD radios is that you have to buy a subscription but HD radio is broadcast for free, there are no subscription fees (like satellite radio) and all you need is to do is get your car HD ready. All that is takes to do this is get an HD tuner and you have several options available to do this. One option is to buy a new in dash receiver that is HD ready and replace your factory radio. Another option is to purchase an HD ready head unit with an add-on HD tuner. The final option is to keep your factory or non-HD aftermarket receiver and get its corresponding HD radio kit.

Besides just higher quality radio signals, HD radios have a few other really cool features. One of these features is called iTunes tagging. ITunes tagging allows you to “tag” songs that you are listening to with the push of a button and then the HD tuner will same the name of the song, the artist and the name of the album that version of the song was on. It then goes a step further and allows you store that information on your iPod/iPhone/iTouch and then the next time that you sink it with your computer it will find those songs on iTunes. Another really useful feature is that it besides just scrolling across all of the information about the song it can also scroll useful information such as traffic and weather updates or sports scores and local news updates.

HD Radio also provides multicasting which give you access you hidden radio stations that are behind the stations you listen to everyday. These hidden stations offer different varieties of music or genre specific programming. For an example of this lets say that you usually listen to country music on 100.7 FM but with an HD tuner you can switch over to 100.7 HD2 and listen to rock or possibly 100.7 HD3 and listen to rap. It can also allow you to get more AM radio options for instance, on a sports broadcasting station you might be able to switch between different teams by switching over to the stations HD2 or HD3 channels.