Where is my HD radio?

[Woochifer]

Go to crutchfields site, they have answers to your questions.
At newegg a sangean tuner is 179 bucks, hardly a bank breaker, but adding that
to every receiver would be prohibitive.

For a receiver, I doubt that the cost of adding HD Radio capability would be anywhere near $179. Since car audio head units with HD Radio tuners are already available for around $100, the costs on that Sangean tuner would have more to do with how much of the upfront licensing fee (and other component costs) they choose to pass onto consumers than the chipset costs. For example, when Dual added a HD Radio tuner to one of its car audio head units, the revision only added $20 to the list price.

And this is a private project, the govt has nothing to do with it. probably the way HDTV should have been done

The FCC still had to approve iBiquity's HD Radio proposal before it could move forward, and they retain a regulatory role. This is no different than the HDTV standard, which was developed by a consortium of broadcasters and private companies, standardized by the ITU, and approved by the FCC. If you're referring to the mandatory DTV transition, that's a totally different subject than how the HDTV standard was developed in the first place.