How much it costs to go HD ...

From Tom Taylor:

HD Radio aims for new radio station adopters with a new pricing plan.

$10,500 gets you a license to use iBiquity’s IBOC technology for your main signal, if you mail in the check along with the signed contract. If you want to pay on a “30 days net” basis, it’s $11,000. If you prefer to stretch the payments out over 12 months, it adds up to $12,500, or $1,042 a month.

iBiquity CEO Bob Struble says "Radio is now the last entertainment medium to convert from analog to digital." He’s been sounding that alarm for months now (does radio want to be left out?) and he emphasized it to me in a presentation last Summer.

And of course iBiquity and its partners just won a power increase for the digital portion of the radio signal from the FCC, with more perhaps on the way.

Here’s the scorecard – 2,000+ stations are in HD Radio. iBiquity’s Rick Greenhut says “approximately one new HD Radio station goes on the air every three days.” There are more than 1,100 multicast channels, some of them revenue-earners such as Pittsburgh’s “Penguins Radio”, using the HD-2 channel of Clear Channel’s modern rock/Penguins flagship WXDX (105.9).

From the hints dropped at the December Arbitron Consultants Fly-In, CBS has a similar deal brewing in Philadelphia. And Emmis and Bonneville are leasing out some HD-2 channel to ethnic radio services. (Of course after you buy the license, you still need equipment and programming.)

And only God knows how much that'll cost.
 
Using HD reduces the quality of your basic FM channel and each additional HD station squeezes the bandwidth smaller and smaller.  There may be 2000 stations using HDRadio nationwide but there are probably fewer HDRadios than that out in the public. 
 
HDRadio is a bad idea marketed strongly by the company that created the concept and who will always own the licensing of the technology.  Your station may use this, but you will never make a profit from it.