There are a lot more UHF-TV frequencies in use in LA than your quick scan of the dial reveals.
You can't use channels 14-20, because they're shared with public safety two-way communications.
There are digital TV signals on channels 23, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66 and 68, so those frequencies are unavailable.
There are additional analog full-power signals on 24, 44, 52, 57, 63 and 64 that aren't on your list.
There are low-power analog stations on 25, 26, 33, 45, 55 and 66 that make those channels unavailable. (Even if you can't see them in some parts of the market, they still have to be protected from interference.)
There are full-power analog signals in Palm Springs (36 and 42) and San Diego (39, 51 and 69) that would have to be protected from interference.
Channel 37 (608-614 MHz) is reserved internationally for radioastronomy and can't be used by anything else.
Mexico has been increasingly belligerent about interference from the United States on its border signals, so the use of the channels reserved for Tijuana (21, 27, 33, 49 and 57) would probably be impossible.
And the UHF TV spectrum has ended at channel 69 for more than two decades now; the space above there (806-890 MHz) has long since been filled by cellphones and various trunked two-way radio systems.
Some of the spectrum will be freed up when analog TV service is phased out, possibly as soon as 2006 but more likely beginning around the end of the decade. Until then, though, the spectrum the FCC wants to share right now is largely full in most big cities.
(A few additional notes: the "channel 83" that you may have on your cable system is a completely different band of frequencies from the old UHF channel 83. As noted above, UHF TV has ended at channel 69 for quite a few years now. And MW radio services outside the Western Hemisphere aren't spaced "on any old frequency"; they're at 9 kHz intervals [531, 540, 549, 558 and so on.])
...Great-Grampa paid City Telegraph, Telephone and Illuminating Gas the whopping sum of fifty whole dollars so he could lock up "Main 123J" as his phone number for the next 100 years.
If all you're trying to do is to cover a building or a couple of adjacent buildings, a licensed LPFM is overkill. Under Part 15 of the FCC rules, you can use a micropower transmitter on the AM or FM dial without a license. You can buy these transmitters in kit form or fully assembled from places like Ramsey Electronics.
If you need to cover a little more ground - say, two or three blocks in a city or half a mile in a less built-up area - part 15 AM radio can get the job done without requiring a license.
Even RTFA'ing won't give you the whole story on this one, so here goes:
Radio One's not the guilty party here. They didn't apply for the "new" 107.9 station in Pennsauken NJ; they just bought it from the guy who figured out how to squeeze it onto the dial. (The station isn't really new at all - it's being moved from Bridgeton NJ, where it's been operating on 107.7, and earlier on 98.9, since 1948.)
The rules are the rules. As a class D (10-watt) station, WHHS is considered a secondary service to higher-powered stations. In the early 80s, WHHS was ousted from its original spot on the dial, 89.3, when two other class D stations upgraded their signals. At that point, the high school had two options - it could also have upgraded WHHS to a protected class A signal somewhere on the 88-92 MHz commercial band, or it could have kept WHHS as a class D and moved it up above 92, taking the known risk that a commercial station of a higher class would someday displace it. It didn't take an engineering genius to figure out that someday the latter option could put WHHS at the risk of being squeezed off the dial; here in my (much smaller) hometown, one high school's class D station got shuffled from 90.9 to 93.3 to 94.3 to 104.7 and now faces yet another move.
The school district took the cheaper route, and still managed to get 20 more years out of the license. (And they still might not lose it - the chief engineer for Radio One in Philadelphia, a good friend of mine, is working hard to help find them a new frequency and says he has some decent options.)
Format has nothing to do with any of this; it's well-established FCC allocations policy, the goal of which is to provide a maximum number of broadcast signals for the largest possible population.
So as much as it's cool to bash a mega-company on this site, it's not really Clear Channel who is trying to kill off LPFM, it's the religious broadcasters who are booking up all of the free slots on the dial so that LPFM can't get them.
Correct. IIRC, Clear Channel accounted for fewer than 100 of the several thousand applications for new translators, and those were mostly (if not entirely) "defensive" applications to keep existing signals from getting chipped into by other new translator applications.
Not that that will make a difference to the habitual CC-bashers here and on the radio message boards.
Not really. The "HD Radio" system the US is adopting (which is, in good US fashion, a completely different and incompatible system from what the rest of the world, Canada included, is using) depends on being able to use the adjacent frequency space on either side of the existing analog signal. So a signal on 94.7, let's say, that currently occupies 94.6-94.8 MHz will now spread out from 94.4-95.0 MHz, give or take. (The way the system is designed, it can recover a usable digital signal even if it can only hear one of the sidebands and suffers interference on the other.)
There's some concern - some of it legitimate, even - that loosening the spacing rules will cause problems with HD Radio. (In the very distant long term when we all have digital radios - you can stop laughing now, really - the analog signal at the center of the frequency is supposed to go away and the digital carriers will again occupy only 0.2 MHz, making this point moot. No engineer I know believes this is likely to happen any time soon.)
Because just like DSL or cable modems, BPL requires some form of repeater every x000 feet or so along the line. So despite all the friendly talk by Big Power about how BPL will allow them to bring broadband net access to rural areas, the truth of the matter is that it won't be any more economical to roll out BPL in sparsely populated areas than it is to roll out cable or DSL. There's always satellite...
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.
Nice story - but not true. 716-867 wasn't assigned back then. (I know - I was in 716 then, too, and of COURSE we all tried dialing the number.)
Today, it's a Cingular cell exchange in Buffalo, but that's a much more recent development.
The clueless folks at hostasaurus.com not only believe their "customers" WANT them to keep sending those notifications - they've now blocked me from even replying to their snotty e-mails about it:
(Anyone else want to try to pound a clue into Mr. Hubbard?)
Return-Path: Received: (qmail 60997 invoked from network); 29 Jan 2004 23:28:15 -0000 Received: from roc-24-24-39-84.rochester.rr.com (HELO UPSTAIRS.fybush.com) (24.24.39.84)
by relay.pair.com with SMTP; 29 Jan 2004 23:28:15 -0000 X-pair-Authenticated: 24.24.39.84 Message-Id: X-Sender: fybush@gwind.pair.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:33:53 -0500 To: "David Hubbard" From: Scott Fybush Subject: RE: Your message, "", has been BLOCKED In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
At 05:38 PM 1/29/2004 -0500, you wrote: >Scott, thank you for suggestions, I will be >sure to bring them up at our next staff meeting. >If you have any more recommendations on how to >run our operations, even if it is contrary to what >our customers have requested such as with your >current suggestion, please feel free to let me >know.
Thanks. I'm not saying you shouldn't be running a virus catcher on your mail system - just that it's good practice to disable the auto-reply function when it catches a worm like the current MyDoom that spoofs the "from" address. Look at the headers here - what MyDoom is doing is to pull a random domain name from the host machine's address book (in this case, "@fybush.com") and then to prepend it with a dictionary-attack list of random user names (in this case, I believe it picked "Dave," which isn't a valid username on my domain), then to send it TO another randomly-chosen user name (in this case, "jody") at a randomly-chosen domain name (in this case, "stormprotection.com.") An auto-reply like the one your system sends out is of value ONLY if the virus that's caught is one that doesn't spoof the "from" address, and I can't remember the last time I got one of those.
It's not a question of keeping your customers happy in this scenario, since - if I'm reading the headers right - there isn't even a real customer at the address this particular worm was being sent to. It's a question of not adding to what's already an overload of e-mail traffic by sending auto-replies that BY THEIR VERY NATURE are useless to the recipient. Doesn't that make at least a little bit of sense?
From the "beyond nitpicking" dept...Allston is a neighborhood in the city of Boston, so "here in Boston" is perfectly valid - especially if WBZ is on their 10 kilowatt backup transmitter at the studio when he's saying it:-)
Sure, the station paid to set up the equipment at Gary's vacation home in Florida - equipment which consists of maybe $5000 worth of an ISDN codec to get the audio back to Boston, a mic and a mixer, a PC connected through a broadband connection to the station's computer system, and a phone line so Gary can talk to his editor back at the station.
Gary's been doing morning news at WBZ for forty years, and he's a big reason why the station is consistently (by far) top rated in that daypart. He's been talking about retiring since I worked there as his newswriter (1992-97), and being able to work from Florida for part of the winter was a big perk that helped him decide to renew his contract instead of heading down to Florida for good.
How many spots does WBZ have to sell in morning drive to pay for all the gear they set up in Florida for Gary? At the last rates I was privy to, about ten minutes' worth!
I worked for WBZ as a newswriter from 1992-1997, much of that time as Gary LaPierre's newswriter in morning drive...so take my comments as being openly biased in support of the man, who taught me most of what I know about writing for radio.
Gary is one of the longest-running news anchors in the business. He came to WBZ in 1964, and the very first story he covered was the Beatles' arrival in Boston. He's been working nonstop ever since, most of that time as morning news anchor, hauling himself into the station at 4 every morning. (I remember asking him, when I started on the shift, how long it took to get used to the hours - his answer was, "You don't.")
There's nobody on the radio in Boston right now, IMHO, who knows the city, the region and its people as well as Gary does.
He's been threatening to retire since the days when I worked there, and the opportunity to work from his vacation home in Florida was offered to him a few years ago as a perk to get him to re-up for a few more years (WBZ's morning drive is by far the top-rated broadcast in Boston, so the station had a big incentive not to lose Gary's services.)
Everyone in Boston radio has known for years that Gary does a few weeks a year from Florida, and he's never denied it when anyone's asked him. Only the Globe, which has some of the worst coverage of radio in American newspaperdom, was apparently surprised to find out this was going on. (And, as usual, the paper didn't even get all the facts right, starting with Gary's shift, which is NOT "5:30-9.")
What Gary does is to anchor the top- and bottom-of-the-hour newscasts, of which he writes about half himself and has the other half written by a newswriter (though he then proceeds to rewrite the material himself much of the time!). He hasn't done reporting from the field on a daily basis for years. The station has a crew of field reporters, as well as in-house writer/reporters and editors, who are always back in Boston when Gary's in Florida. (It also draws heavily on the resources of its sister TV station.)
So what we have here is a guy whose job is to synthesize the information that's coming into him from his editor, from the reporters in the field, from the newswires and from the TV side and to make it all make sense to listeners in Boston. There's no part of that job description, it seems to me, that requires him to be tied to a desk in Boston at all times. Someone downthread had it just right: he's telecommuting, something that would have been impossible in radio news as recently as my own days at the station.
I draw a distinction between "broadcast telecommuting" by veteran broadcasters like Gary (or Paul Harvey, or Don Imus, or Rick Dees, or even Rush Limbaugh, all of whom broadcast at least part-time from home studios at their vacation residences) and the more insidious practice of having "local" news and talk provided, in its entirety, by distant and often inexperienced voices who've barely set foot in the community they're presuming to serve.
The worst case, at the moment, has nothing to do with Clear Channel (or Viacom, which owns WBZ). Sinclair Broadcasting runs an operation called "News Central," based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, that supplies news and "local" weather to about a dozen of its stations around the country.
Here in Rochester NY, the arrival of "News Central" meant that Sinclair's local Fox affiliate unceremoniously ditched most of its (already small and relatively green) local news staff, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of reporters and anchors to gather local news headlines. Each night at 10, the local anchor alternates news segments with national news "from News Central." The Maryland-based anchor is sitting on an identical set to the Rochester anchor, and viewers are never told that half the newscast doesn't come from here - or that the weather (which is very important here in the frozen tundra) is coming from Maryland. And the weather forecaster makes frequent references to "here" and "us," even though she's never set
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot more UHF-TV frequencies in use in LA than your quick scan of the dial reveals.
You can't use channels 14-20, because they're shared with public safety two-way communications.
There are digital TV signals on channels 23, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66 and 68, so those frequencies are unavailable.
There are additional analog full-power signals on 24, 44, 52, 57, 63 and 64 that aren't on your list.
There are low-power analog stations on 25, 26, 33, 45, 55 and 66 that make those channels unavailable. (Even if you can't see them in some parts of the market, they still have to be protected from interference.)
There are full-power analog signals in Palm Springs (36 and 42) and San Diego (39, 51 and 69) that would have to be protected from interference.
Channel 37 (608-614 MHz) is reserved internationally for radioastronomy and can't be used by anything else.
Mexico has been increasingly belligerent about interference from the United States on its border signals, so the use of the channels reserved for Tijuana (21, 27, 33, 49 and 57) would probably be impossible.
And the UHF TV spectrum has ended at channel 69 for more than two decades now; the space above there (806-890 MHz) has long since been filled by cellphones and various trunked two-way radio systems.
Some of the spectrum will be freed up when analog TV service is phased out, possibly as soon as 2006 but more likely beginning around the end of the decade. Until then, though, the spectrum the FCC wants to share right now is largely full in most big cities.
(A few additional notes: the "channel 83" that you may have on your cable system is a completely different band of frequencies from the old UHF channel 83. As noted above, UHF TV has ended at channel 69 for quite a few years now. And MW radio services outside the Western Hemisphere aren't spaced "on any old frequency"; they're at 9 kHz intervals [531, 540, 549, 558 and so on.])
...Great-Grampa paid City Telegraph, Telephone and Illuminating Gas the whopping sum of fifty whole dollars so he could lock up "Main 123J" as his phone number for the next 100 years.
Where do I go to renew?
No, it does that just fine (and often enough) on its own.
If you need to cover a little more ground - say, two or three blocks in a city or half a mile in a less built-up area - part 15 AM radio can get the job done without requiring a license.
Radio One's not the guilty party here. They didn't apply for the "new" 107.9 station in Pennsauken NJ; they just bought it from the guy who figured out how to squeeze it onto the dial. (The station isn't really new at all - it's being moved from Bridgeton NJ, where it's been operating on 107.7, and earlier on 98.9, since 1948.)
The rules are the rules. As a class D (10-watt) station, WHHS is considered a secondary service to higher-powered stations. In the early 80s, WHHS was ousted from its original spot on the dial, 89.3, when two other class D stations upgraded their signals. At that point, the high school had two options - it could also have upgraded WHHS to a protected class A signal somewhere on the 88-92 MHz commercial band, or it could have kept WHHS as a class D and moved it up above 92, taking the known risk that a commercial station of a higher class would someday displace it. It didn't take an engineering genius to figure out that someday the latter option could put WHHS at the risk of being squeezed off the dial; here in my (much smaller) hometown, one high school's class D station got shuffled from 90.9 to 93.3 to 94.3 to 104.7 and now faces yet another move.
The school district took the cheaper route, and still managed to get 20 more years out of the license. (And they still might not lose it - the chief engineer for Radio One in Philadelphia, a good friend of mine, is working hard to help find them a new frequency and says he has some decent options.)
Format has nothing to do with any of this; it's well-established FCC allocations policy, the goal of which is to provide a maximum number of broadcast signals for the largest possible population.
So as much as it's cool to bash a mega-company on this site, it's not really Clear Channel who is trying to kill off LPFM, it's the religious broadcasters who are booking up all of the free slots on the dial so that LPFM can't get them. Correct. IIRC, Clear Channel accounted for fewer than 100 of the several thousand applications for new translators, and those were mostly (if not entirely) "defensive" applications to keep existing signals from getting chipped into by other new translator applications. Not that that will make a difference to the habitual CC-bashers here and on the radio message boards.
Not really. The "HD Radio" system the US is adopting (which is, in good US fashion, a completely different and incompatible system from what the rest of the world, Canada included, is using) depends on being able to use the adjacent frequency space on either side of the existing analog signal. So a signal on 94.7, let's say, that currently occupies 94.6-94.8 MHz will now spread out from 94.4-95.0 MHz, give or take. (The way the system is designed, it can recover a usable digital signal even if it can only hear one of the sidebands and suffers interference on the other.)
There's some concern - some of it legitimate, even - that loosening the spacing rules will cause problems with HD Radio. (In the very distant long term when we all have digital radios - you can stop laughing now, really - the analog signal at the center of the frequency is supposed to go away and the digital carriers will again occupy only 0.2 MHz, making this point moot. No engineer I know believes this is likely to happen any time soon.)
No...they're about as well done as the studies Congress ordered up (and the FCC just approved) that prove that it won't.
Because just like DSL or cable modems, BPL requires some form of repeater every x000 feet or so along the line. So despite all the friendly talk by Big Power about how BPL will allow them to bring broadband net access to rural areas, the truth of the matter is that it won't be any more economical to roll out BPL in sparsely populated areas than it is to roll out cable or DSL. There's always satellite...
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
Nice story - but not true. 716-867 wasn't assigned back then. (I know - I was in 716 then, too, and of COURSE we all tried dialing the number.) Today, it's a Cingular cell exchange in Buffalo, but that's a much more recent development.
The clueless folks at hostasaurus.com not only believe their "customers" WANT them to keep sending those notifications - they've now blocked me from even replying to their snotty e-mails about it:
(Anyone else want to try to pound a clue into Mr. Hubbard?)
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Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:33:53 -0500
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At 05:38 PM 1/29/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Scott, thank you for suggestions, I will be
>sure to bring them up at our next staff meeting.
>If you have any more recommendations on how to
>run our operations, even if it is contrary to what
>our customers have requested such as with your
>current suggestion, please feel free to let me
>know.
Thanks. I'm not saying you shouldn't be running a virus catcher on your
mail system - just that it's good practice to disable the auto-reply
function when it catches a worm like the current MyDoom that spoofs the
"from" address. Look at the headers here - what MyDoom is doing is to pull
a random domain name from the host machine's address book (in this case,
"@fybush.com") and then to prepend it with a dictionary-attack list of
random user names (in this case, I believe it picked "Dave," which isn't a
valid username on my domain), then to send it TO another randomly-chosen
user name (in this case, "jody") at a randomly-chosen domain name (in this
case, "stormprotection.com.") An auto-reply like the one your system sends
out is of value ONLY if the virus that's caught is one that doesn't spoof
the "from" address, and I can't remember the last time I got one of those.
It's not a question of keeping your customers happy in this scenario, since
- if I'm reading the headers right - there isn't even a real customer at
the address this particular worm was being sent to. It's a question of not
adding to what's already an overload of e-mail traffic by sending
auto-replies that BY THEIR VERY NATURE are useless to the recipient.
Doesn't that make at least a little bit of sense?
From the "beyond nitpicking" dept...Allston is a neighborhood in the city of Boston, so "here in Boston" is perfectly valid - especially if WBZ is on their 10 kilowatt backup transmitter at the studio when he's saying it :-)
Gary's been doing morning news at WBZ for forty years, and he's a big reason why the station is consistently (by far) top rated in that daypart. He's been talking about retiring since I worked there as his newswriter (1992-97), and being able to work from Florida for part of the winter was a big perk that helped him decide to renew his contract instead of heading down to Florida for good.
How many spots does WBZ have to sell in morning drive to pay for all the gear they set up in Florida for Gary? At the last rates I was privy to, about ten minutes' worth!
Scott Fybush (Gary's newswriter at WBZ, 1992-97)
Gary is one of the longest-running news anchors in the business. He came to WBZ in 1964, and the very first story he covered was the Beatles' arrival in Boston. He's been working nonstop ever since, most of that time as morning news anchor, hauling himself into the station at 4 every morning. (I remember asking him, when I started on the shift, how long it took to get used to the hours - his answer was, "You don't.")
There's nobody on the radio in Boston right now, IMHO, who knows the city, the region and its people as well as Gary does.
He's been threatening to retire since the days when I worked there, and the opportunity to work from his vacation home in Florida was offered to him a few years ago as a perk to get him to re-up for a few more years (WBZ's morning drive is by far the top-rated broadcast in Boston, so the station had a big incentive not to lose Gary's services.)
Everyone in Boston radio has known for years that Gary does a few weeks a year from Florida, and he's never denied it when anyone's asked him. Only the Globe, which has some of the worst coverage of radio in American newspaperdom, was apparently surprised to find out this was going on. (And, as usual, the paper didn't even get all the facts right, starting with Gary's shift, which is NOT "5:30-9.")
What Gary does is to anchor the top- and bottom-of-the-hour newscasts, of which he writes about half himself and has the other half written by a newswriter (though he then proceeds to rewrite the material himself much of the time!). He hasn't done reporting from the field on a daily basis for years. The station has a crew of field reporters, as well as in-house writer/reporters and editors, who are always back in Boston when Gary's in Florida. (It also draws heavily on the resources of its sister TV station.)
So what we have here is a guy whose job is to synthesize the information that's coming into him from his editor, from the reporters in the field, from the newswires and from the TV side and to make it all make sense to listeners in Boston. There's no part of that job description, it seems to me, that requires him to be tied to a desk in Boston at all times. Someone downthread had it just right: he's telecommuting, something that would have been impossible in radio news as recently as my own days at the station.
I draw a distinction between "broadcast telecommuting" by veteran broadcasters like Gary (or Paul Harvey, or Don Imus, or Rick Dees, or even Rush Limbaugh, all of whom broadcast at least part-time from home studios at their vacation residences) and the more insidious practice of having "local" news and talk provided, in its entirety, by distant and often inexperienced voices who've barely set foot in the community they're presuming to serve.
The worst case, at the moment, has nothing to do with Clear Channel (or Viacom, which owns WBZ). Sinclair Broadcasting runs an operation called "News Central," based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, that supplies news and "local" weather to about a dozen of its stations around the country.
Here in Rochester NY, the arrival of "News Central" meant that Sinclair's local Fox affiliate unceremoniously ditched most of its (already small and relatively green) local news staff, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of reporters and anchors to gather local news headlines. Each night at 10, the local anchor alternates news segments with national news "from News Central." The Maryland-based anchor is sitting on an identical set to the Rochester anchor, and viewers are never told that half the newscast doesn't come from here - or that the weather (which is very important here in the frozen tundra) is coming from Maryland. And the weather forecaster makes frequent references to "here" and "us," even though she's never set