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FCC Move Could Shut Down High School Radio Station
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "This probably has been happening all along, maybe just not in my area. A broadcasting company bought an FM radio station in The Dalles, Oregon (a little hick town east of Portland), and wants to move it to a much choicer market in Seattle, Washington. The FCC has given the green light for the move. Problem is, the frequency in Seattle is being used by a station owned by a local high school, Mercer Island High School. The school has appealed, saying the decision ignores the FCC's own rules, and questioned the FCC's assertion that there's space available elsewhere on the Seattle-area radio dial. The school says the proposal is 'little more than an effort to migrate from a rural community to an extremely well-served urban area.' Critics of the proposal contend that the move is an attempt to tap the much larger Seattle radio advertising market."
The Dalles is 250 miles from Seattle and isn't a suburb of anything. It's 85 miles from Portland.
Right! Government once again using the broad law to help those who can pay for it. The little guy shouldn't have any rights? So much for government being the helpful force. Let's reduce it, reduce the FCC... we're moving to NH to start the process. The Free State Project proposes to reduce government to its constitutionally mandated limits. You can help! http://www.freestateproject.org
Kat Dillon
it happened to WHHS Haverford HighSchool... the oldest High School radio station in the United States.....
They too are Class D and in the way of a Class A that wants to start up somewhere in South Jersey.... The FCC rules offer them nothing much since they never became Class A. They have to yield to other stations. The only chance is for them to find another frequency to move to (not a simple or cheap thing really).
Mods, I'd like to take this oppertunity to point out that the parent is not really offtopic. He raises a good point, that the larger corporations (ClearChannel) are coming in and pounding the little stations into the ground. In my area, pretty much ALL the stations are ClearChannel, except for the (suprisingly good) local college channel.
This isn't necessarily true. There are still a number of small owners in very small markets that make a decent business out of serving the community. Granted, you're going to hear high school sports, and "trade-e-o", and community bulletin board and all that folksy stuff, but isn't that what serving the community of license is all about?
Your comments that small communities had stations all to themselves isn't on point either. None of the reallocations I've been involved with had nothing to do with the smaller community not requiring the services of the station and everything to do with the new big owner (Cumulus, Clear Channel et al) wanting to push it into the market and require advertisers to buy multiple advertising packages on all stations.
Let me tell you, you'll never hear high school sports scores or community bulletin board on a Cumulus station. You'll hear rap music being piped to farmers, but nothing of community interest.
Because that "free space" is most likely in the 88.1 to 91.9 FM educational band in which the commercial station can't move into, but the high school's station most certainly can.
Small-signal educational stations have been put on notice that if they've got a Class D license in the commerical section of the FM band, they'd better get their act together and move into the educational band or at least admit they're small-timers ad step down to an LPFM license. This school did neither... and now the station-owners of the other 104.5 FM stations in the area have come up with a plan that pretends that the high school station doesn't exist. Guess what, since the high school never got relicensed as LPFM, they're a "secondary user" of their channel that could be squeezed out by anybody filing a primary use request... so for the purpose of this new filing by the commercial stations they don't exist.
well i am sure the Class A filed to cover a large area, including the small area the Class D station covered. If it's Class D then it is under 100 watts. The new commercial station is probably a few thousand watts or more, so it's harder for them to fit in the FM puzzle.
That's why *most* Class D stations that had support fromt he School, or whomever funds them, refiled for power increases and became Class A almost 25 years ago. The station i do work at, WKDU Philadelphia, jumped to 110 Watts from 10 Watts back in 1981 to avoid being bulldozed like this. Initially back in the 70s the wording made it seem like any station under 100 Watts was toast so most little stations freaked out and applied to be 100+ watts. The situation wasn't as bad as it initially seemed, but in the end the stations that stayed Class D were told they pretty much had no squatters rights if a Class A station wanted to stomp on their broadcast area.
I do not know the exact legal classification that makes a station Class A, but WKDU was Class A when we were 110 Watts (now 800), non-commercial and owned/operated by Drexel University. I guess it is not much more than jumping over 100 Watts? hell, we were not even stereo till about 1990.
A low power transmitter with an antenna that is not mounted on a high tower has the most flexibility wrt its frequency. As long as there is not another station on that frequency in the immediate vicinity then there's no problem.
A high power transmitter whose antenna is on a high tower is quite different. Interference is possible at a much longer range. ie. the commercial station has a lot less flexibility than the much smaller high school station.
In any event, most school transmitters aren't really considered to be commercial. Confusing the market shouldn't be an issue.
I used to listen to X104 a couple of years ago (actually, when I was in High School). It used to play really interesting music, such as independent techno and dance music.
I tuned in recently, and I all I could hear was the same generic commerical Rap/"R&B" that every other ass clown radio station in Seattle plays.
If anyone is interested, there is another HS radio station called C89fm, run by Seattle Public Schools. It plays content similar to what x104 used to play and even has a webcast so I can listen at work.
Its a great break from the average commerical crap radio in Seattle.
It's really regrettable, in the sense that the Mariposa, CA area had NO rock radio station in the area. The closest station was in Fresno, and didn't get reception well, if at all, in the area.
The station itself had a range of approximately 3 miles in any direction, which was enough for the town of about 2000 to be entertained. The only thing that was even close on the frequency was a spanish station, whose reception was incredibly poor in the radius of 20 miles from the town. Considering up there is a mostly white demographic (like 95%), I can't imagine any objection.
The thing is, creating a radio station, thanks to the FCC and government, forces the act into a business. This was something that my friend ran out of his house. He received no donations, just overwhelming community support, especially from the 700 or so high school students that had nothing to listen to on the air.
The crap part, is since that it's such a small town, there's no amount of advertising that would make up for the FCC fees alone. Therefore, Mariposa, CA is stuck with a country music station.
This story is just another one that ends up frustrating me in the end. Thank you, FCC. You properly ended up making free speech available and accessible to the upper class.
*** END RANT ***
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If the station received its license on the basis of its promise to serve Fooville, why should it be allowed to move to a nearby major market?
Because they can claim that Fooville is already recieving a "primary local service" from several other radio stations, so even though they were the closest station to Fooville and got their allocation in the early days by promising to serve Fooville, Fooville doesn't really need them anymore. Therefore, they want to move to Barville and provide a new "primary local serice" to them since they seem so underserved.
The fact that the real motivation is that a new setup in Barville will give them a whole lot better signal in Capitol City, which is where they've really been trying to aim themselves at all along, is something that they can easily leave out of the FCC applications.
The fact is, "primary local service" is a joke these days, and have been that way for a long long time. The laws of market economics have basically taken over. If there's an ad market to support a community than the market exists, otherwise it gets folded into the nearest market that is large enough to qualify.
Afterall, ad sales is really what local service is all about in broadcasting these days. Community calendars are being left to the local newspaper, which more and more is now just some localized inserts into an otherwise regional newspaper. (In some cases, it's one title with a regional section... in other cases it's 5 co-owned papers with different titles that have their own front page, but share any story that applies to the whole area or is purely a "feature" story.)
If the local radio market really was that viable... than MegaCorp wouldn't be able to justify coming up with enough money to get the local owner to part with his station.
KMIH has been an exception to the FCC rules since 1978, when after being backed by NPR and universities operating larger stations in the dedicated "educational band" from 88.1 to 91.9 got the minimum power requirement for any station in that band to keep its primary status to be 100 watts. KMIH was lucky to have survived this timeframe... dozens of similar stations got bumped out of the band when larger stations filed for upgrades leaving the smaller station with nowhere to go other than out of business.
KMIH didn't meet its match until the 1990s when finally a larger station came forward with a plan that bumped them off their allocation. The FCC, however, was nice to them... they were given a gift in the form of being allowed to start a Class D allocation at 104.5. That represented an FCC rule being waived for them... Class D stations don't belong outside of the educational space. But, it came with a catch. Being a non-compliant grandfathered station, they were still stuck with "secondary status" which means any application for primary status would be able to bump them out of existance. The only thing that protected this station was the fact that the surronding 104.5 FM stations were owned by different owners, and none of them could really upgrade themselves without crashing into another commerical user who'd most definitely object.
Now, when LPFM came out... there was a chance for KMIH to get themselves out of the doghouse. They could have simply filed the paperwork to convert their Class D license into an LPFM1. It turns out, they were fully compliant already and they wouldn't have had to change their technical operations at all to change status, but it'd gain them the chance to become a primary user of the space they were hanging onto so that nobody could knock them out of it. They likely didn't do that because they didn't see this kind of problem coming, or if anybody raised the posiblity they weren't able to get the school to pay the legal fees to get the paperwork done.
So, when the surronding 104.5 FMs were able to create a plan that benefited all of them but left KMIH with no place to hide, KMIH's lease on life expired.
When you've got a secondary allocation, you've got to beware of those things possibly happening... clearly this high school operation wasn't and that turned out to be their undoing.
In this case, it just turns out that the corporate interests had the resources to dot all the I's and cross all the T's on their application... and take advantage of the fact that the public group missed the chance they had to turn in their Class D license for a LPFM1 license that would have blocked this move.
Failing to do that when the LPFM classes were created basically left this station exposed. Any non-commerical interest could have taken their license away simply by proposing an LPFM1 station on their channel. The commerical stations didn't exactly want any LPFM1 station to form there... so they pulled out their mapping software and created a plan that got upgrades for all of them and locked-out the posiblity of there being a 104.5 FM where KMIH stands and submitted it.
The FCC's mode as a bureaucracy kicks in, and has to approve this plan because Class D's that are under 100 watts have no protection from competiting plans.
As is the usual case, this would all be a moot argument if the whole world would set aside what it thinks it knows and let ME make all the important decisions.
:)
My declaration to remove all the current problems with so-called "interference" (listen up HAMs, you guys complain the most about "interference", at least on Slashdot): Software defined digital radio
Seriously though, one of the issues that has been brought up with a software radio is that "interference" isn't what it's portrayed to be. Radio waves don't collide with one another, the way that "intereference" implies. Interference is actually an artifact of the low quality analog recievers we use to listen to radio. Their selectivity leaves a whole heckuva lot to be desired. A radio with greater selectivity (the ability to distinguish two radio boadcasts with similar carrier frequencies, even those coming form the same source) can eliminate this dated notion of interference.
Read This Salon article on the subject and be converted to the new way of thinking about "interference". Or not
P.S. This article was the subject of a previous Slashdot article.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
They are. As I understand it (and I am no expert) it is because when you broadcast at lower frequencies, the signals require less power to reach a greater area, and many of these stations broadcast at 1-10 watts, rather than 5000-10000.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
If you were going down to the AM band, maybe, but you would need an enormous antenna to efficiently radiate the power, and it would be useless at night anyway. It would be quite difficult to make the power comparison between AM and FM, a major AM station (I know only of the UK, the numbers might differ elsewhere) might radiate 100Kw, so might a major FM station, but the FM transmitter will only be a few Kw, the apparent increase comes from the antenna gain (not a real power gain at all, it simply puts most of the energy where it matters, mostly horizontally), whereas the AM transmitter will be some enormous thing pumping thousands of volts into an inefficient antenna with an apparent loss, rather than gain.
The AM transmitter should cover a radius of 50 miles or more, maybe even 100, during the day, and will not be affected significantly by most obstacles, the FM range is effectively line of sight plus a bit, depending on antenna height it may well be 50 miles in favourable terrain, but it will be affected by obstacles although remaining useable at night.
So, you can't make a direct comparison of the effects of major frequency changes, the bit in the middle (HF) is even less amenable to simple definition of how it will behave.
But from one end of the AM band to the other there is a 3 to 1 frequency ratio, it is far easier to get an efficient antenna at the top end, smaller wavelength, so the dimensions of an efficient antenna do not make it unaffordable. But an FM dipole is only about 1.5 metres long, who cares if it is 1.4 or 1.7, at either end of the band, it is quite immaterial to the cost. Nowadays the power transistors in the transmitter don't have much difficulty performing at the top end of the band either, at one time there would have been a decrease in electrical efficiency towards the top end because the transistor (or valve/tube) gain-bandwidth product was embarassingly low, but not nowadays.
The ultimate limiting factor, "atmospheric" noise, is more or less constant across the FM band and is anyway quite low, so unavoidable receiver noise matters, at the bottom end of the AM band, atmospheric noise is bad, a low-noise receiver is an irrelevance, and the efficiency of a whip antenna is minimal, so all in all, FM is best, exact frequency unimportant, followed by the top end of the AM band as a poor second.
All in all, a very complex subject, and then there is band planning, you don't want low-power stations in among the big boys, so that they are obscured by poor receiver selectivity, but that is the function of the FCC, whose reputation abroad is no better than in the US.
I went to Haverford High School, and let me tell you that the school administration could care less about the radio station. It was primarily student run and student funded. I can tell you that any action to move from a Class D license, such as converting to Class A, would have taken far more money than the administration would be willing to even consider. I remember they recently replaced the failing tower with a brand new one, and that took years of student effort and organization, not to mention a whole lot of begging for funding. So, basically, a radio station that has been around since 1949 and primarilly run and maintained by high school students suddenly must shut down (with all the student's efforts for naught) because some corperation wants a frequency in the area that no one else has used in 55 years. Do they really think the community is going to listen to this station, after it has trounced out the highschool station that has been there as long as they can remember?
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
The FCC stays out of the content business. It doesn't care what you broadcast, as long as you pay their fees, identify yourself once an hour, and stay away from the seven dirty words.
the little slice they had for colleges and highschools is being systematically being pull-out in favor of more clear channel crap.
You are correct, there is a little slice set aside for colleges, high schools, religious broadcasters, and other non-commercial interests. It's 88.1 through 91.9.
Now I'd like you to point out even ONE case where Clear Channel kicked someone out of this band. Clear Channel is not able to own a station in the non-commercial band. It's been about five years since I worked in radio, but I think I'd notice if suddenly commercial entites were allowed to have non-commerical radio stations "systematically being pull-out" (whatever that means).
Moreover, can you document that Clear Channel/Viacom/CBS/Whatever Megalomedia is "systematically" pushing non-commercial stations off the air, or are you just making things up as you go along?
Furthermore, how is LPFM a joke? There are dozens of LPFM stations out there working very hard to serve thier communities, and doing a fine job of it. This high school's little Class-D signal wasn't much different than a legitimate LPFM that you consider a joke. The kids have the station to learn. They don't need 100,000 watts to learn how to bulk erase a cart.
And it's a lie to say that it's too late to get LPFM licenses now. Dozens were awarded within the last month or so. In fact, just last week WKHV-LP/Kingston and WXLJ-LP/Harwich applied for licenses to cover (if you don't know what that means, you shouldn't be posting in this Slashdot conversation). Two weeks earlier, WJSK-LP/Bartlett was granted its license to cover.
Again, anything to back up your claims, or are you spewing rectally again?
World's tallest building rises in the desert
that is not quite true... class D has more protection than LPFM (we [KMIH] did look at the option of going that route)... we have been persuing class A status since about 1994 (look at our past filings).
:)
Additionaly, senator Cantwell is currently soponsering legislation to force the FCC to convert super powered class D stations (like KMIH) to class A. If you have any doubt about KMIH, just head to their website at http://x104.fm and find out what they do.
John
john@x104.fm
Just an FYI... It would be obvious that we are not scratching our heads, the problem is there are no more frequencies in the seattle area. So far the High School station (not the high school) has spent a huge amount of donated money on trying to get a more powerful liscence, a fight which dates back years if you lookup our application history with the FCC. In fact, we are such a powerful class D that we go more than the minimum distance with a 60 dbu conture that a class A station is requried to go. Take a read of "Mercer Island School district" filings in the actual rule-making procceding, we are not sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.
:)
Procceding number 02-136
John