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November 4, 2002
WCVB, NJ Police Meet Tropospheric Ducting
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*The atmosphere can be a tricky thing sometimes, especially
near the coast and especially during the summer. Just ask Boston's
WCVB-DT (Channel 20) and the Camden County, N.J., public safety
department, which have been sharing the 506-512 MHz chunk of
the UHF spectrum for the last few years.
It was never a problem when WCVB-DT was operating a few hours
a day, but earlier this year, when the tower work on the Needham
tower WCVB shares with WBZ-TV/DT and WGBH/WGBX was completed
and WCVB-DT was able to go full-time at full power, officers
down in South Jersey started to notice interference to their
two-way radio system, which they tracked down to the new DTV
signal more than 250 miles to the northeast.
Last week the dispute hit the media, with Ocean County (even
closer to the coast than Camden County) joining in a complaint
to the FCC about interference to their radio systems, which operate
in the "T-Band," first allocated a couple of decades
ago on what were then largely unused channels 14-20 in the UHF-TV
spectrum. (How unused? So much so that several low UHF TV allocations,
such as 14 in Worcester, 16 in Providence and 18 in New Brunswick,
N.J., were deleted and reassigned for public safety use.)
DTV, of course, changed all that, with every scrap of the
UHF TV spectrum being pressed into use during the lengthy transition
from analog to digital. In Boston, it's not just 20; channel
19 is in use by WGBH-DT and channel 18 is allocated for WMFP-DT,
while other DTVs in the Northeast are allocated for channels
19 (WABI-DT Bangor, WSYT-DT Syracuse), 18 (WDPX-DT Vineyard Haven
MA, WMBC-DT Newton NJ), 17 (WCBB-DT Lewiston ME, WIXT-DT Syracuse),
16 (WAGM-DT Presque Isle ME, WVNY-DT Burlington VT), 15 (WMED-DT
Calais ME, WPSX-DT Clearfield PA) and 14 (WVII-DT Bangor, WUTV-DT
Buffalo, WPTZ-DT Plattsburgh NY).
In other words, the spectrum that T-band users have had pretty
much to themselves is about to get full, and it doesn't appear
that the FCC did its homework when making the allocations there,
or in other parts of the DTV spectrum. (Just ask WHRO-DT Norfolk
VA and WBOC-TV Salisbury MD, which are battling over channel
16, or WOOD-TV Grand Rapids MI and WMVS-DT Milwaukee, which are
fighting over channel 8.)
The culprit appears to be the FCC's modeling mechanism, which
does not fully account for the effects of unusual propagation,
especially over water. (Notice a common thread in all these DTV
disputes?)
Any DXer knows that there's nothing completely predictable
about propagation at almost any frequency below 800 MHz (as we
type this, we're watching an E-skip pileup on channel 3 that's
bringing in stations from Memphis, Springfield MO, Harrisburg
IL and Eufaula OK, perfectly normal behavior in mid-July but
quite unusual in early November), and every reason to think that
a 500 MHz signal with a megawatt of power from Boston will often
ride the tropospheric ducts down to New Jersey in the summertime.
But those are the sort of questions that should have been asked
before a license was issued, not after millions of dollars
were spent to put up a licensed signal on channel 20 in Boston.
How will this all get resolved now that the damage has been
done? The good news is that there's no reason to expect WCVB-DT
to remain on channel 20 forever; when the DTV transition is complete,
the digital signal will likely replace WCVB's analog on channel
5. You can read more thoughts on digital transitioning down at
the bottom of this week's column. In the
meantime, we'll be following this closely to see how the FCC
gets itself out of the hole it's dug.
*Elsewhere in MASSACHUSETTS, Arthur
Liu is adding to his Multicultural Broadcasting holdings with
a $1.8 million purchase of WSRO (1470 Marlborough) from Alexander
Langer. WSRO isn't much of a signal at the moment, operating
under a long-running Special Temporary Authority since the city
of Marlborough took its old transmitter site, but Liu isn't buying
WSRO for its current signal. The purchase price includes
$150,000 to build out WSRO's construction permit to change city
of license to Watertown and transmitter site to the Lexington
facility of WAMG (1150), which you can see on the October page
of the 2002 Tower Site Calendar. When it's moved and the purchase
has closed, WSRO will join WLYN (1360 Lynn) in Liu's Boston cluster.
 Congratulations to
Mistress Carrie of WAAF (107.3 Worcester), who adds "music
director" to her midday jock duties at the hard rocker.
And congratulations to WJUL (91.5 Lowell), which marked its
50th anniversary (it started as carrier-current WLTI in January
1953 and has been on FM since 1968) with a reunion this past
Saturday. We'll try to bring you some pictures and stories in
our next issue...
We've been remiss in mentioning the latest addition to the
schedule at Sporting News Radio's WWZN (1510 Boston); Mike Adams
has joined the station to do mornings, which means that 1510
is now running local all day long before joining Sporting News
in the evenings (when there's not a Celtics game, anyway.)
More TV news: WCEA-LP, displaced from channel 19 by WGBH-DT,
has lost its bid to move to channel 3, with the FCC dismissing
its application for that low frequency after receiving petitions
to deny (we'd guess from WBZ, WGBH and WFSB, perhaps?) WCEA-LP
now has a new application in to move to channel 58 with 5 kW
visual, but that channel will also have to change in a few years
when the FCC removes channels 52-69 from TV service.
Out west, W51AE (Channel 51) atop Mount Greylock has applied
to move to channel 38; the translator for Albany's WNYT is being
displaced by the new full-power CP for Pittsfield on channel
51.
And Springfield's WSPR (1270) has been granted a move to the
site of co-owned WACM (1490 West Springfield); it'll run 5 kW
day, 1 kW night from the existing WACM tower and a new second
tower to be built nearby.
 *It
could just as easily fall under the Bay State heading - but the
"new" station serving Fall River and New Bedford is
still licensed to RHODE ISLAND, as WKKB (100.3 Middletown).
The Citadel rocker, formerly Providence-based 80s outlet WZRI
("Z100") made its debut last Friday (Nov. 1), with
a schedule that includes Patriots football and voicetracking
(initally overnight and now middays) from "Brian the Pharmacist,"
late of the FNX network.
Speaking of sports in Rhode Island, the Celtics are back on
the Providence dial, with WSKO (790) and WSKO-FM (99.7 Wakefield-Peace
Dale) picking them up after a season's absence down there.
*On the Rhode Island-CONNECTICUT line,
WKCD (107.7 Pawcatuck) has changed calls to WHJM to match its
"Jammin 107.7" identity.
Down the coast, Scott Weimer will take over as PD of Cox classic
rocker WEFX (95.9 Norwalk) Nov.18; he comes to the market after
stints at the Worldspace and XM satellite radio services.
*Just one NEW HAMPSHIRE note: the
FCC has approved the transfer of WPXB (Channel 60) in Merrimack
from Pax to NBC, which will use it as its Telemundo outlet for
the Boston market, thanks to the miracle of cable must-carry.
*The FCC approved a minor change to one VERMONT
TV station: WNNE (Channel 31) in White River Junction gets
to put up a new antenna at 684 meters above average terrain,
with 1820 kW directional. (Their old antenna, on the same Mount
Ascutney tower, does 2240 kW at 677 meters...)
*NERW hears a few of the top brass at Clear
Channel's MAINE clusters received their walking papers
last week; in Augusta, GM Tim Gatz and GSM Brian Strack were
dismissed, as was Bangor GM Keryn Smith. We hear Clear Channel
regional exec Jim Herron will be running things up there for
now...
 *On
to NEW YORK, then: there will be a new addition to the
skyline soon that should help the city's beleaguered TV broadcasters
restore a better signal to over-the-air viewers even in the event
of problems at their primary Empire State Building site.
Four Times Square, the "Conde Nast Building" on
Broadway between 41st and 42nd streets, is already home to auxiliary
FM transmitters for New York's Clear Channel and Spanish Broadcasting
System clusters, as well as public radio WNYC-FM (93.9).
Now the building's owner, The Durst Organization, plans to
add another 200 or so feet to the mast atop 4 Times Square to
provide auxiliary transmitter space for New York's TV stations.
(By the way, Durst has hired one of the city's top broadcast
engineers to supervise its own broadcast-leasing operations:
John Lyons, the former chief engineer for Clear Channel's WAXQ
in New York, now calls Four Times Square home, which is only
fitting, considering he had a huge hand in designing the broadcast
facility there!)
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan TV Alliance, the industry group
formed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to restore full TV
service, is still pressing ahead on its own plans for a 2000-foot
tower somewhere on the Jersey side of the Hudson for TV transmission;
if both that plan and the Durst plan at 4 Times Square work out,
New York's TV stations will have much more redundancy in their
transmission systems than they've ever had before, which is a
good thing.
More New York aux news: the Emmis stations, WQHT (97.1), WRKS
(98.7) and WQCD (101.9), have been granted auxiliary facilities
up on First Mountain in West Orange, N.J., running 29.5 kW from
one of the towers at the WFME (94.7) site.
 From the "tilting
at windmills" file: Chuck Zlatkin's "Save WEVD"
organization is still around, more than a year after the Forward
Association leased the talker to Disney to become ESPN Radio's
New York outlet. The group's latest move is a petition to deny
Disney's $78 million purchase of the station; we don't expect
it to delay FCC approval of the sale, which should come any day
now.
*LATE UPDATE: Big City Radio - the folks behind
the "Rumba 107" quadcast of WYNY (107.1 Briarcliff
Manor), WWXY (107.1 Hampton Bays), WWYY (107.1 Belvidere NJ)
and WWZY (107.1 Long Branch NJ), as well as stations in Chicago
and Los Angeles - announced Monday night that it's putting all
of its stations up for sale. Details in the next NERW!
Out on Long Island, students at Long Island University's C.W.
Post campus are upset about a cutback in their broadcast time
on WCWP (88.1 Brookville), which has turned into a nearly full-time
simulcast of WLIU (88.3) from LIU's Southampton campus. The "Long
Island University Public Radio Network" now programs jazz
and NPR news on WCWP 21 hours a day, leaving only 10 PM to 1
AM for the students, and they say the university plans to eliminate
even that timeslot.
Heading upstate, WTBQ (1110 Warwick) has been granted a power
increase from 250 watts to 500 watts, still daytime non-directional.
 In Albany, "DJ
Biz" (aka Irving Bynum) is recovering from gunshot wounds
he suffered when he was attacked as he left the Latham studios
of WAJZ (96.3 Voorheesville), where he's the night jock, early
on the morning of October 30. Bynum was shot four times and slashed.
Police arrested a club DJ named Aristelle Thomas, charging him
with attempted murder in the attack.
Also in Albany, Ed Levine's "K-Rock" (WKRD 93.7
Scotia) has applied to boost power just a bit, going from 1150
watts at 218 meters to 1300 watts at 215 meters.
A Utica LPTV will be changing channels: religious W27BJ has
been granted a move to channel 40, where it will be known as
W40BT.
Here in Rochester, Entercom's stations (news-talk WROC 950,
country WBEE-FM 92.5, oldies WBBF 93.3 and classic hits WBZA
98.9) are settling into their new home in the High Falls district.
As of today, they're out of the longtime WBBF/WBEE facility on
the fifth and sixth floors of the B. Forman building at Midtown
Plaza and into a new streetfront studio complex right behind
public broadcaster WXXI in the happening High Falls neighborhood.
Phone numbers don't change, but mark down the new address: 70
Commercial Street, Rochester NY 14614.
We're now a two-DTV city: your editor noticed WROC-DT (Channel
45) on the air Monday evening, which was apparently one of its
first nights on the air, having signed on at 4:00 Halloween afternoon
with 1.74 kW under special temporary authority. (Two DTVs now,
and we're "Made
for Living," too...)
(One more Rochester move: "Busta," the music director
at CHR WPXY 97.9, gets moved from late nights to the earlier
evening shift at 98PXY...)
Where are they now?: Cary Pall, a veteran of several stations
in Rochester, is on the beach after a long run as director of
programming and operations at Clear Channel's Toledo cluster.
 And we're very sorry
to report the death of Darrian Chapman, who's still well remembered
in Buffalo for his stint as sports director of WGR (550) and
WWKB (1520), where he was also the play-by-play voice of the
Buffalo Bisons. Chapman headed for the big time from Buffalo,
doing sports for WRC-TV (Channel 4) in Washington from 1995-2000
and then moving to Chicago as lead sports anchor at WMAQ (Channel
5).
Chapman died Wednesday (Oct. 30) of apparent cardiac arrest
while playing in a pick-up hockey game at a Chicago-area rink.
He was 37.
*Two bits of NEW JERSEY news: "Captain
Jack" Aponte and Donna Rose have a new radio home; the Jersey
Shore radio vets are now doing mornings on Press Broadcasting's
WBHX (99.7 Tuckerton), the first big hires for the station's
new AC "Breeze" format.
Over in Warren, Ibiquity is doing day and night IBOC testing
on 50-watt WI2XAM (1700), which is being heard in Warren and
adjoining towns with a loop of musical bits and frequent station
IDs.
*In PENNSYLVANIA, WKAB (103.5 Berwick)
has slid back to classic hits after a stint with oldies aimed
at Wilkes-Barre. Down the road in Bloomsburg, Joe Reilly's WHLM
(930) has changed its plans to build a permanent transmitter
site (it's been on an STA since returning to the air last year),
applying for 1000 watts day, 18 watts night from a single tower
and ending its plans to build a directional array.
Over in Reading, Regent made some changes at its new acquisition,
WIOV-FM (105.1 Ephrata), ousting PD Jim Radler and bringing Dick
Raymond in. Raymond's last gig was at WWFG (99.9) in Ocean City
MD.
 *And
there's just one piece of news from CANADA, while the
CRTC keeps itself busy with the ongoing hearings for new FM licenses
in Kitchener/Waterloo: the sale of Telemedia's Quebec and Maritimes
properties to Astral Media has closed. Astral gets Telemedia's
Rock-Detente network and the other half of the Radiomedia news-talk
network (it already owned half) in Quebec (with Radiomedia then
being spun off to TVA), as well as several stations in New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia.
*And with the week's news out of the way and a week's vacation
looming (we'll be in New York City and eastern Pennsylvania November
6-14, with the next NERW coming on November 18), we'll give you
something to think about in the meantime: a NERW Mini-Rant on
digital radio and TV:
"Let's Kick the Transition
Up a Notch"
I've always had a fascination with the
early days of any given broadcast technology, wondering what
it must have been like to listen to (AM) radio in 1921-22, FM
and TV in the late forties or UHF around 1953-54. But I came
along too late, and all those technologies were fairly mature
long before I learned how to use them. Until now, the best I've
been able to do is to boast about having been on the Internet
since 1990, and that's not quite the same thing.
Now we're on the verge of something truly new: the move of
our entire broadcast spectrum from analog to digital. And if
you're in the right frame of mind about it, the whole thing just
might be as exciting as those early days of analog broadcasting.
Up here in backwater Rochester, digital TV has just arrived
on the scene within the last few weeks, and in fact it was just
tonight that I had my first chance to see the local DTV signal.
(Make that "signals" - the second DTV in town signed
on just last week, it seems. See, I told you this was exciting!)
Yeah, the tuners are expensive. Are you ready to plunk down
$450 for a box that gets just a couple of channels, none of which
sign on before 8 at night? You'll find yourself in the same boat
as the TV pioneers of 1948 or 1949, for whom even the test patterns
were thrillingly exciting. But you know what? It works. Even
on a little 14-inch NTSC set, there's a distinct difference with
the DTV receiver: no ghosting, no multipath, no sparklies - you
either have a perfect signal or you don't, which is downright
remarkable when you're tuned to the NBC or CBS affiliates 70
miles away in Buffalo.
Add into that the multicast capabilities (Buffalo's CBS affiliate,
for instance, runs weather radar and its co-owned independent,
WNLO channel 23, on its sub-channels) and the electronic program
guide and all that, and this is something distinctly better than
the NTSC analog we've been living with all these years - even
before saying a word about HDTV. $450 better? Maybe not. $50
or $100 better? Show me the receiver and I'll buy one yesterday
(and then two more for the other TVs in the house!)
Then there's digital radio. We've discussed XM and Sirius
before, and there's not really much for me to add: they're neat
for niche markets (truckers; fans of obscure formats, especially
in small markets; buyers of luxury cars) and some of the programming
sounds interesting, but we're not looking at a huge threat to
broadcast radio as we know it. Now we add to that mix "HD
Radio," the marketing name for the technology we in the
industry have been calling "In-Band, On-Channel" (IBOC)
digital. While DTV's been on the air in some big cities for four
years now, the FCC just gave IBOC the go-ahead last month, and
most people - even in the industry - have only heard it in trade-show
demonstrations, if even that. (One of the reasons I'm headed
to New York this week is to hear WOR 710 in digital, and yes,
you can expect a full report here when I return!)
The benefits of IBOC are a bit harder to quantify: FM stations
say they'll sound "as good as CDs," but there are a
lot of lousy CDs out there, and even more lousy FM radios and
less-than-ideal listening environments (any automobile, just
for starters) where the slight benefit in sound quality offered
by IBOC digital will be tough to notice. On the AM side of the
equation, the improvement in sound quality ought to be more dramatic
- at least while the sun is shining. There are still good reasons
to believe that the technology as it now exists simply will not
work under nighttime medium wave propagation conditions - at
least as long as simultaneous analog and digital operation continues.
And that's my thesis today: that if the industry is serious
about a digital conversion, it needs to figure out how to get
receivers - hundreds of millions of them - into consumers' hands
quickly and cheaply enough to allow for a full-fledged conversion
from analog to digital without spending decades in transition,
because it's that transition period that could doom these technologies
to failure.
Back to DTV for a minute: the TV spectrum was already getting
crowded before digital came along. In most communities, the table
of allocations for full-power stations that was put in place
in the early sixties was finally filled out by the mid-nineties.
Take away channels 70-83, as the FCC did in the seventies, add
to that the flood of LPTVs that began in the mid-eighties, and
add to that the UHF channels from 14-20 that found double
use for public safety two-way communication, and there wasn't
a ton of open space on the UHF dial by the time DTV came along.
So the need to allocate a second channel to every full-power
station for DTV use brought with it some technical compromises:
interference standards had to be rewritten to allow for previously-forbidden
uses such as first-adjacent TV channels in the same location.
And - call it politics if you will - the FCC had to cut some
corners to squeeze in channels for everyone. That's how WBOC-TV
in Salisbury, Maryland and WHRO-DT in Norfolk, Virginia ended
up uncomfortably sharing channel 16, and how WCVB-DT in Boston
and the police in South Jersey ended up together on channel 20.
The situation on the radio dials has the potential to be even
uglier, because "IBOC" signals aren't really entirely
"on" channel. On the FM dial, the subcarriers that
hold the digital data occupy spectrum beyond the +/- 100 kHz
mark that separates one FM channel from the next one up and down
the dial. On the AM dial, the digital data spreads well into
- and beyond - the first-adjacent channels on each side.
("HD Radio" proponents point out, quite correctly,
that the "IBOC-AM" signal is still well within the
NRSC mask that governs the bandwidth of signals in the medium-wave
band, and that's true. But I'd contend that the mask's designers
assumed the use of analog signals throughout the band, and that
the effect of digital "hash" heard against an analog
signal is far more destructive to enjoyable listening than interference
from a neighboring analog signal would be.)
Here in Rochester, we have no locals below 950 kHz. For eighty
years, that's been a boon to radio listeners here: at night,
we can tune across a broad spectrum of distant skywave AM signals.
For instance, at 650 we can easily tune in WSM from Nashville,
followed at 660 by WFAN in New York and at 670 by WSCR in Chicago.
Put IBOC on all three, add typical skywave fading, and the analog
signals of each of the three will become unlistenable because
of the digital hash from the others. Switch to a digital radio,
and it's reasonable to expect that the strong analog signals
on the adjacent channels will wipe out the desired digital sidebands
- and in digital, there's no such thing as graceful signal degradation.
It's either there or it's not, and it won't be there in that
case - and this is why the FCC still hasn't approved IBOC for
nighttime AM use. (And let's not forget that up here, sunset
won't come later than 5 PM again until February, so that knocks
out IBOC on PM drive, too!)
The industry - at least, the proponents of IBOC - want to
believe that these problems are limited to long-distance AM reception,
and that stations will eventually be able to broadcast with IBOC
24 hours a day to local listeners. Ironically, if this were 1960,
it just might work - but the radio industry dug its own grave
in the decades that followed by massively overpacking the AM
dial.
That story - all about the breakdown of the clear channels,
the power increases on the regional and local channels, the granting
of tiny night powers to former daytimers and the near-abdication
of enforcement duties by an overburdened FCC, exacerbated by
the sprawl of metropolitan areas far beyond the service areas
envisioned when so many stations were built in the forties and
fifties - is one that has been told elsewhere and is outside
the scope of this discussion. But its lessons are obvious any
time you turn on the AM dial at night. Interference on medium-wave
frequencies in AM broadcasting is cumulative; just listen to
any of the "graveyard" channels (1230, 1240, 1340,
1400, 1450 and 1490) to hear what it sounds like when 300 stations
are each throwing a kilowatt into the ether.
What this all means in real life is that far too many AM stations
reach just a few miles from their towers before their signals
are overcome by all the other noise on the band. Adding IBOC
to that mess won't help, and at night has the potential to make
things even worse.
But the AM operators who look to digital as the last savior
of a medium in its death throes aren't completely delusional:
their dreams of having signals that can compete with FM in audio
quality and signal reach have some chance of coming true, when
and if they're able to broadcast digital-only, moving the digital
signal to the core of their spectrum and eliminating the sidebands
that slop over to the adjacent channels and end up hurting everybody
(except the biggest stations, which are generally the only ones
making money these days, anyway.)
And while TV at least has a vague plan for reaching that transition,
perhaps as early as the scheduled date of 2006 (after which much
of the overcrowding of the TV dial goes away as many stations
move DTV to their original analog allocations and take their
"interim" DTV channels dark again), nobody in radio
is even discussing a method or a deadline for replacing all those
hundreds of millions (billions, even?) of analog radios that
date back to the twenties.
Nobody's disputing that the challenge is even bigger for radio
than for TV; after all, a TV is a fairly big purchase, it's stationary
(making a set-top digital-to-analog converter feasible to keep
older sets usable), and the advantages to the consumer of DTV
should become sufficiently obvious in the next few years. Add
that to an FCC/industry agreement to make DTV tuners a standard
feature of even smaller TV sets, and it's a safe bet that most
homes will be able to see DTV in time to make the analog shutoff
at least by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
Now let's look at the radio transition. So far, IBOC is in
its infancy, and the attention of the industry has been on simply
getting it up and running at a few stations. But this column
believes it's never too early to look a few chess moves ahead
and figure out how this "HD Radio" thing has a chance
to get consumers' acceptance in a world that's overcrowded with
new toys all labeled "digital." So here's NERW's modest
plan for a transition that might work:
- Mandatory IBOC conversion for FM broadcasters, with a
short target date. Adding IBOC digital to FM signals looks
to be a fairly straightforward process; many recent transmitters
and antenna systems can go digital simply by swapping out exciters,
while lower-powered facilities (college stations, for instance)
may find it simpler to add a second transmitter and antenna for
the digital portion of the signal. The idea here, just as with
DTV, is to solve at least half of the "chicken and egg"
problem by making sure there are plenty of digital signals out
there for digital receivers to tune in. Add to that a mandate
that stations utilize the broadcast data features (IBOC's version
of the sadly neglected RDS for analog FM), and by 2006 or 2007
we could hear digital on most of the nation's FMs. (It's reasonable
to expect that translators and small noncomms would get a longer
grace period to save up for the new equipment.)
- An "All-Channel" receiver act for radio manufacturers.
It was discussed for FM in the fifties and early sixties,
and for AM stereo in the eighties, but the FCC has consistently
declined to mandate that receivers be able to pick up specific
frequency bands or modulation types. The "NERW Plan"
would change that: by 2007, we'd mandate that any radio retailing
for $50 or more be capable of receiving analog and IBOC signals,
on AM and FM. (If the cost of IBOC reception can't be brought
down that low in five years, we don't have much hope for the
system's success, frankly.) And by the way, we'd get right in
line to buy the first radio under $100 that can tune analog,
IBOC and whichever of the satellite radio services survives...and
I doubt we're alone.
- An incentive to begin providing separate programming on
"digital FM." FM was around as early as 1939, and
its technical advantages were obvious from the beginning. (We'd
argue, in fact, that the difference in quality between AM and
FM, even in 1939, was far more evident to the average listener
than the difference between analog FM and digital in 2002.) FM
radios were on the market, for not that much more than the cost
of a good AM table radio, in the years just after World War Two.
But the medium didn't take off for another twenty years - and
it took the passage of a rule banning AM-FM simulcasts, which
forced FM radio to develop its own programming, which finally
gave the audience a reason to seek out FM radios. If it takes
digital that long, it's dead - so here's the "NERW Plan":
allow separate programming on the digital side within three years
(once there's enough of a receiver base out there to provide
some listeners!), but with some conditions and incentives. Commercial
load would be limited, say to 10 minutes an hour - and stations
that broadcast separate digital programming would get some benefit
in addition to the extra ad inventory. (We're thinking tax credits
on the purchase of additional equipment for the digital signal,
or extended license renewals, perhaps.) Yes, separate digital
programming would sacrifice the "blend-to-analog" feature
of digital FM - but it's a sacrifice that will have to be made
eventually, if consumers will ever have a reason to buy the new
radios. And the reduced commercial load is a self-disciplinary
measure the industry will have to take one of these days, if
it expects anyone to be listening to the radio 20 years
from now.
One more note here: consumers will spend plenty
of money on a technology if they view it as either essential
or just too cool to live without. DVDs overtook VHS tape in the
rental stores in just a couple of years with no conversion mandate,
simply because the costs came down quickly and the advantages
over tape were so obvious. UHF may not have been a national success
until the seventies - but if you lived in Yakima or Fort Wayne
or Scranton in 1955, you spent the extra money for a UHF-capable
set because it was the only way to get local TV. There's no reason
to think consumers will behave any differently where digital
radio is concerned.
- So what about AM? Let the market decide. It sounds
counter-intuitive, I know. After all, that was the very policy
that doomed AM stereo two decades ago, right? But the "NERW
Plan" has something the AM stereo transition didn't, in
the form of that "All-Channel Receiver Act," which
would ensure that receivers are out there that will be able to
pick up digital AM if stations choose to transmit it. Our plan
has something else AM stereo didn't: much more market flexibility
for AM operators to decide their own fate. We can imagine big-city,
big-signal AMs wanting to go digital quickly, while small-town
stations find it hard to justify the costs of converting. And
of course we foresee a transition period when just about everyone
is suffering more interference than they've ever suffered before.
So the "NERW Plan" would be even more aggressive than
current FCC practice in letting stations buy and sell their interference
rights. Under the plan, stations would be allowed to broadcast
digitally at night - but would be responsible for any additional
interference they cause. So if some of the newer stations on
1200 are cutting into the signal of San Antonio's WOAI, for instance,
they'd have to reduce their digital signal levels...or reach
an agreement (with appropriate compensation, of course) to remain
analog-only or to go digital-only, which will become a viable
solution once the "All-Channel Act" has put enough
receivers in the marketplace. For some failing stations, the
solution might be to go silent (after being bought out by more
successful stations on the same or adjacent frequencies); for
others, programming might move to one of the new, separate digital
FM services - at the expense, of course, of the stations that
would benefit from the move. We can even imagine some big AM
signals deciding to stay analog to benefit from nighttime skywave
- and paying handsomely to keep their channels free of digital
noise from other stations nearby. In the end, what could result
is an AM dial of perhaps 2500 or 3000 stations, with a noise
floor considerably lower than today: a perfect environment to
then make the permanent switch to all-digital transmission.
- Better enforcement. Under the "NERW Plan,"
a small percentage of the prices paid in these interference-reduction
transactions would become an FCC fee, with the money raised being
dedicated to a more active Enforcement Bureau to police interference
on the AM dial. Just cutting down on all the "daytimers
after dark" would go a long way towards cleaning up the
mess that is medium wave today and make digital more viable.
It all sounds pretty complicated, doesn't it? But I'm not
convinced the alternatives are really that much better. I spent
some time in the U.K. this past spring, where digital radio using
the global Eureka-147 standard has been in place for several
years - and I can report that consumer awareness of digital radio
is nonexistent. Even in the high-end electronics shops, there
were no radios for sale and no apparent interest in them. And
I'm a frequent visitor to Canada, where Eureka-147 has been on
the air for a couple of years in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver
and Windsor, and there too the rollout of radios has been slow
and consumer interest very weak.
And if my plan still sounds too complicated to work, then
perhaps there's another reality to consider: it just may be that
good old analog radio isn't as broken as the industry wants to
believe. That's one reason my plan lacks a mandate to go all-digital
on the AM band; simply reducing the interference level and eliminating
some of the facilities that are no longer viable might revive
analog AM without the added complications of going digital.
So are we looking at VHF TV in 1948, on the edge of explosive
growth that would put it in almost every home in America within
five years? Or are we looking at FM in 1948 or UHF in 1953 -
technologies that lacked a "must-have" factor and lingered
for decades before becoming standard? Or, worse yet, are we looking
at AM stereo or the Elcaset, technologies that might have worked
just fine but weren't in tune with what the market needed?
Your opinions are welcome; we'll share a sampling in an upcoming
NERW.
 *Have you ordered your Tower Site Calendar
2003 yet? (Yes, the very calendar that's even inspired its
own comic strip on
cnyradio.com!)
If you liked last year's edition, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (including Providence's WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont;
Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma City; the legendary WSM, Nashville
and many more), more dates in radio history, a convenient hole
for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall on
the right days!
This year's calendar will go to press in late October, and
if you order now, you'll have yours in hand by mid-November,
in plenty of time for the holidays. And this year, you can order
with your Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express by using
the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW subscription
pledge a little early: support NERW/fybush.com at the $60 level
or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar for free!
How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
International orders: Calendars are US$18 to Canada,
US$20 to the rest of the world, postage included. Send checks/international
money orders (in US dollars) to the address above, or e-mail
for credit-card ordering information.
*And we're also happy to announce that
our good friends at M Street have released the 11th edition of
the M Street Radio Directory. With the disappearance
of the old Vane Jones log and the declining accuracy of the Broadcasting
Yearbook, the M Street directory is widely regarded as the most
accurate, most comprehensive source of information on the US
and Canadian radio scene - and we're thrilled to be able to offer
it to you at a substantial discount!
The directory includes power, frequency, ownership, key personnel,
formats, ratings and much more information for every radio station
in the U.S. and Canada, and now runs almost 900 pages in an 8.5"
x 11" softcover book. List price is $79 (plus $7 shipping/handling),
but if you order through fybush.com/NorthEast Radio Watch, you
can get this invaluable resource on your shelf for $69 (plus
$7 s/h) - a $10 savings! And your purchase benefits the continued
publication of NERW and Tower Site of the Week, so everybody
wins!
You can order in either of two ways: to order by major credit
card, call 1-800-248-4242, ask for Irene, and tell her
you want the "NorthEast Radio Watch" discount. Or,
send check or money order for $76 ($69 + $7 s/h) to Scott Fybush,
92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester NY 14618. Either way, you'll put
the most trusted, accurate information about the radio industry
in print today on your bookshelf.
*We're back to our regular schedule for a while, now that
we're done with a fantastic visit to Dallas-Fort Worth (thanks
to Wally Wawro, John Callarman, et al!) You'll see some
of those pictures very soon on Tower
Site of the Week...stay tuned and we'll see you back here
next Monday!
NorthEast Radio Watch is made possible by the generous
contributions of our regular readers. If you enjoy NERW, please
click here to
learn how you can help make continued publication possible. NERW
is copyright
2002 by Scott Fybush. |