Re: [IRCA] [AMFMTVDX] Should Skywave Listening be protected?

["Robert Foxworth" <rfoxwor1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In discussing HD Radio (IBOC) on the AM
broadcasting band, you wrote:


>Patrick,
>
>What DX?  The stations to DX will be gone!  The little ones will have
lost their advertising revenue because they can't be heard.  I'm >afraid
the bigger ones with deeper pockets would up their power thanks to the
added interference that their own stupidity caused.
>
>Mike Hawkins


I think Patrick was referring to the foreign stations which
would be heard more easily if the AM band was clear
of domestics which had gone bankrupt and closed.

My personal belief (undocumented) is that there is a
collusion between major station chain owners and
a major three-letter trade association, and perhaps
a major three-letter regulatory agency, to reduce the
number of stations (force all the smaller independents
off the air) so the remaining big chain operations
will have bigger shares of the pie, as the competition
narrows the playing field. And the entry cost to move
to IBOC is just one of these hurdles. So the marginal
audience that is fragmented among all these niche
players will be forced to move to the major operations
for listenership. The emergence of satellite radio
was probably not factored in, when this plan was
concocted several years ago.

So the bigger operators are not being stupid, they
are just being ruthless. Hey, that's just business.

What I find distressing is the threat to our nation from
foreign "interests" that seek to cause us great
damage and economic turmoil (believe it, this threat
is real and present, though it may be several years
in the future). The threat to the cyber-infrastructure
is as real as the one to the physical infrastructure.

Where this intersects with radio is that AM radio is
probably the sole surviving medium that allows the
instantaneous low-tech dispersal of information in a
"multicast" mode (one sender, many receivers) to
recipients over a wide geographical range. This
was proved amply well in the great Northeast
power blackout in August 2003 when millions of
people depended on night time skywave AM for
ANY information. I did mention this in my 99-325
comments.

For the DHS to ignore this reality, and sit silently
by, while the dismantling of this wide-area
coverage ability moves forward, is amazing and
I believe, negligent. I would think this merits a
front page story in the Wall Street Journal, but
they would need to find a reporter who understands
the technical issues adequately well enough to
report it properly, as it is primarily a technology
issue and secondarily a money issue.

Such a story would focus primarily on the threat to the
nation's security, by loss of this "fail-safe" method
of instantaneous communication with the population
who NOW has millions of AM receivers on hand, and also
would be an investigative piece which would analyze
how this technically flawed system came to rise to
such ascendancy politically. The alternative scenario
is that the government does not care about having
this ability (instantaneous wide-area information
dispersal which does not depend on an interconnected
communications network) , and I am not prepared to
accept that, as of now.

I am not sure there is a newspaper anywhere that
would take this on.

- Bob                                 sent at 2005-05-13  0921 edt

(this as written, is not a letter intended for
publication in any newspaper)




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