FCC Supports Neighborhood Radio

RevMike writes "According to this story from the Associated Press, the FCC is recommending to Congress that restrictions on low-power FM stations be relaxed. The FCC found that low-power FM stations can be operated in the gaps of spectrum between major stations without substantially interfering with those major stations. If Congress adopts the FCC's recommendations, it will loosen the stranglehold that companies like ClearChannel have on the airwaves."

Comments

About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome! About time. i've been running a great community station for several years without any interference!

here here

[ahuimanu]

Let us not forget how powerful and important college radio can be. College radio certainly falls under this category and has been here for awhile. I was a program director at a college radio station in Hawaii in my college days (KTUH) and, in balance, I believe we offered more to the community than any other station (Public Radio excepted).

Re:here here

[ahuimanu]

I am talking about the late 1980s. I do think our culture is far more stiffled by commerce and capitalism than even then. Our was a quasi-hippie/radical/anarchist/liberal/cerebral/in tellectual/rock-n-roll experience. However, we let ALL KINDS on, so we had a conservative or two on and it was FUN!

Sorry to hear that people who go to college now have non-representative college radio. Ours was run by for and of the students. Oh yeah, did I mention we were only 100 watts? What was interesting (and the subject of debate with the FCC over the years) was that we were allowed FAR MORE POWERFUL booster repeater stations to get our signal to elsewhere on the island and, on a good day, to other islands)

Neighborhood radio

[ak_hepcat]

This seems like it would be a no-brainer, but I'm glad they're finally waking up to hear the radio.

I played around with broadcast back in my college days, and had some fun, especially knowing that the odds of somebody actually listening in were fairly remote ("free pizza to the next caller!" ... tick...tick...tick..)

And with the size of my CD collection (as well as free MP3's from various places) I think it would be fun to set up a random genre station. Or, as my friends and I have talked about, a mobile station, for when we're taking long road trips.

Re:Neighborhood radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile station? Did that, several times.

TV production company I worked for used to take the mobile production truck on long trips. We bought a stereo FM transmitter, used an existing mixer, had headsets, and played our personal MP3 collections. We'd put somebody's cell number on a poster on the side of the truck with the frequency we were broadcasting on, and took requests. We chattered like (bad) DJ's, sang along, and talked to those around us listening. We even put a wireless mike in the chase car, so we could all play along.

Our range was typically about 1/2 mile, so we rarely had more than 3 or 4 cars listening. I tell ya, though, it was a real hoot getting that first request!

Posted anonymously to protect the guilty.

Awesome!

[da3dAlus]

If this works, small stations like WGHR would have a chance to get back on the air. Yes, I'm plugging my old college radio station that just got forced off the Atlanta airwaves in the past year, due to the lack of spectrum real estate. It was one of the last remaining Class D stations, but due to recent purchases of several new stations in the area by Susquehanna and Clear Channel, there has been no place left to go. But now the internet has become the only home for the station. Please help support them!

And for taxpayer incentives

[drachenstern]

"After significant expense by the taxpayers, the scientists have reported on the same laws of physics that have always existed," deputy director Cheryl Leanza said. "These tiny radio stations are no threat to the current broadcast system. It is now time for Congress to take action based on that analysis."

anyone else notice this portion? makes you wonder who actually expected the laws of physics to bend to the whims of lawmakers and lobbyists?

okay, now flag me as a troll

thanks

Sure they do....

[tiwason]

As they continue to shut down stations and refuse to give out licenses ??

FCC sues to shut down rfb

http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102%257E886 0%257E1965359,00.html

Radio becoming obsolete?

[polv0]

With narrow bandwidth, limited geographic reach and poor sound quality, why haven't the alternatives to FM radio caught on? There is satellite radio, cable radio, internet radio, yet all combined the size of their audiences pale in comparison to those of good old FM, a technology that hasn't changed for decades.

While advancing leaps and bounds in personal mp3 players, are we skipping the next generation of broadcasted music?

FCC spacing rules

[nerw]

A few critical points to consider here:

1. What the FCC is proposing - allowing low-power FM stations to locate just three channels away from full-power signals, instead of four channels as is now required - is status quo in most of the world. In Toronto, for instance, a high-power CBC transmitter on 94.1 at the CN Tower coexists just fine with a newer signal on 93.5 just a few blocks away at First Canadian Place. In other parts of the world, spacing is even tighter and yet it still works. London has signals stacked up at 105.2, 105.6, 106.0 and 106.4 with no problems.

2. What the FCC is proposing is already status quo in the U.S., albeit with a catch. Translator stations - signals of up to 250 watts that are only allowed to relay other stations and cannot originate their own programming - are governed by a different set of rules that allow them, in some cases, to nestle up as close as second-adjacent to (0.4 MHz away from) full-power signals. And the FCC recently had a filing window in which it received several thousand applications for such translators, the vast majority of them from a small handful of religious broadcasting networks that will feed them by satellite from Idaho and California. How does this benefit local listeners? You tell me...

3. Very little of what the FCC does is about engineering. Everything the FCC does is about politics, even the engineering parts. It has always been thus.

Scott Fybush - NorthEast Radio Watch

Re:FCC spacing rules

[zentec]

Adjacent channel interferrence of any sort of concerning magnitude isn't going to be caused by WXXX's transmitter being too close to WYYY's. These days, many broadcasters share not only the same tower facility, but many dump their power into the same antenna.

Yes, if you drive your vehicle by a large community antenna site, you're likely to hear all sorts of hash on your receiver. But that's a rx desense problem, not one of adjacent channel interference.

Adjacent channel interference of an FM signal at 100% modulation (where all the energy is in the sidebands and not the carrier) is a result of the discriminator of an FM receiver. The sidebands of the adjacent station are spilling over into the passband of the receiver trying to tune another channel. The preferred method of keeping this under control is indeed distance; but it's a distance of 80-120 miles, not just a few blocks! That's why you'll see nearby markets having their channels "interleaved" (like Detroit and Toledo).

You're correct in that the FCC tightly controls the channel spacing between communities because adjacent channel interference is very hard to correct without directional antennas (which induce multipath) or power restrictions, or both.

The instance of where having WXXX's transmitter location many city blocks away from WYYY's is in intermodulation product mitigation. But even then the perferred method is inserting notch filters to keep the mixing products out of the PA cavity of the transmitter.

Ironically, the installations I've seen and worked on that have the least amount of intermod problems are the ones dumping as many as 4 stations into a single antenna. The hybrid-combiner systems all use bandpass filtering that pretty much kill anything but the desired signal going in the desired direction. But again, these are intermod problems, not adjacent channel interference problems.

Another Alternative

[Winkhorst]

Not to even mention internet radio, but you can rent time on WBCQ shortwave (transmitter located in Maine) at ridiculously low prices and broadcast to the entire planet. And you can say virtually anything you want, though your listeners are limited to those with enough perception to own a world-band radio. The funny thing is that the owner started out in pirate radio.

High School Radio pushed off the air

[Anonymous Coward]

To make room for yet another hip-hop station owned by the same company that already has two hip-hop stations in the same market -- Philadelphia

The sounds of silence? - Haverford High's WHHS, around since 1949, must vacate its spot on the FM spectrum.

Editorial | Haverford High Radio -- In the wild, big eats little - or tramples it without noticing. In the world of broadcast radio, the existence of community and student-run school radio stations can be just as brutish and short.

Giving a shout out...

[MsGeek]

Perhaps KBLT, one of the best damn radio stations ever to broadcast in Los Angeles, will be able to legitimize and go back on the air. KBLT was a pirate radio station, but it was much beloved by the folks in Silverlake, Echo Park, Hollywood and Downtown LA who were within range.

At this point the only hope for good radio in Los Angeles is KXLU 88.9 out of Loyola Marymount University. KROQ sucks and has sucked for most of its lifespan, and Indie which holds the space Mars FM and Groove Radio used to take up is a Clear Channel station.

Maybe with low-power radio licenses *finally* making it out there, we might hear a little diversity. Maybe Valley College's station KVCM might even get some people listening to it. It's been on Adelphia Cable for years now but you can't listen to cable radio in your car or on your Walkman.

I wonder how much it costs to set up one of these low-power radio stations? I mean, KBLT wasn't exactly run by rich people...