NAB Seeks to Outlaw Low-Power FM, Fakes Evidence

This is not totally on-topic for YRO, but interesting enough that we'll run it anyway. 1010011010 writes "Read the "Not Easy Listening" passage in the "Notebook" section of the latest New Republic; it talks about the National Association of Broadcasters' efforts to kill the FCC low-power radio initiative:" (more)

"So, as part of its efforts to kill the FCC's low-power radio initiative, the NAB recently flooded Capitol Hill offices with copies of a compact disc that purportedly demonstrated the type of interference that would occur on listeners' radios if the low-power stations were to go on the air.

[...]

"To generate the annoying cross talk, the NAB simply took two previously recorded radio programs and mixed them together in a sound studio; the result was, according to the NAB, a "simulation" of what would happen if a low-power radio station were placed close to another station on the FM dial."

"... kind of like MSFT's faked video 'evidence' during its anti-trust trial. Except that, instead of a smart cookie like Jackson, the audience is the bunch of suckers the voters of this fine country sent to D.C. The NAB has a section on "Low-Power FM" at their website, including "examples of real-world interference" ... faked? I don't know. But the 'examples' they sent to Congress were. They have provided an 8MB mp3 file -- that notoriously high-fidelity format -- as 'proof'. It's packaged into a self-extracting .exe zip archive, for some stupid reason. Maybe someone could run a little fidelity test on it; find out the sampling rate, frequency cutoffs, etc. If there's music clips in it, perhaps compare them to the original source from CD? Call your congressmen and sentators! Let them know this is a sham! Tell them we'll force Christian Slater to star in "Pump Up the Volume 2" unless they back off and stop pushing the "Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act," a.k.a. the "Government Protection for NAB Weenies Act of 1999" -- that states right at the top: A BILL To prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from establishing rules authorizing the operation of new, low power FM radio stations. "

Comments

Re:YRO means...

[Detritus]

There's actually a name (which I can't remember just now) for this effect, and it's in at least 2 or 3 of my electronics texts and references that're all packed up somewhere, so I'll let someone else come up with it and get the mod points.

Capture Effect

Shocking!

[www.sorehands.com]

I'm so shocked! I would never imagine that a large company or association would make misrepresentations or flat out lie to the public, government, or court.

Why would they do something like that? Just to try to keep their monopoly? Naahh.

NAB station interference tests

[cosmol]

The NAB has http://ww w.nab.org/newsroom/issues/lpfm/responsetofcc/techn icalrecord.asp as an example of "real-world" interference caused by adjacent stations. The thing that strikes me is that all of these interfering stations are said to be at least 32 times stronger. When is one of these low-power stations ever going to be 32 time stronger than an adjacent commercial station. I mean come on! a 100w (max) homebrew versus a 50,000 watt station on a huge ass tower! Thats 1/500, not even close to the 32/1 ratio of these tests.