Steve Francis wrote:
Remember how the FCC said that the expanded band station would always carry the same city-of-license as the parent station? Yet we have Gulf Breeze, West Sacramento, Fox Farm, Torrance, Jersey City, Canovanas, Dry Branch, Ada, Lindenwold, Avondale Estates, Berwyn and Richardson! This of course is nothing compared to the "requirement" that one license or the other would have to be surrendered after the X-bander had been broadcasting for five years. Some did (WVMI-570 Biloxi turned in a groundwave goldmine), some didn't. It beats me.
The X-band is, to put it kindly, a regulatory mess.Around the time that the five-year rule would have kicked in for the first X-banders to be licensed, a group of X-band licensees filed a petition with the FCC asking to rescind the five-year rule.
In a nutshell, the petitioners argued that the FCC had utterly failed to achieve the interference-reduction goal that the five-year rule was meant to accomplish, and that the public good would now be better served by allowing X-band licensees to sell their second licenses to minority or small-business broadcasters, rather than forcing those stations to go silent, especially when many of them had branched off into separate programming.
The FCC did the same thing with the petition that it's done with pretty much everything else having to do with the X-band over the last decade: nothing whatsoever. But because the petition had been accepted for filing, the FCC's inaction meant that those X-banders have been able to keep operating their second signals all this time, and that operation can apparently continue until such time as the FCC finally rules on the petition. (And there is no "shot clock" forcing the FCC to ever take action on the petition!)
Life, of course, is unfair - and the stations that played by the rules and shut down one of their two signals can't get them back, though the petition requested that restoration of a deleted signal be considered. In a handful of cases (I'm thinking of the 920/1690 in Maryland), the 2003 window brought about applications for new stations on the vacated channels, making it impossible for the old signal to return.
At least one paired station may yet succumb to the five-year rule. WDDD 810 in Marion, Illinois begat what's now WVON 1690 in Berwyn/Chicago, and Clear Channel has filed to sell WDDD to Russ Withers, who's operating it under an LMA. But the FCC turned down the transfer application and, at least as things stand so far, appears to be poised to order WDDD off the air when its license expires on June 2, 2011.
Meanwhile, the FCC would apparently like to pretend the X-band never happened. No window was ever opened for more X-band apps, even though a bunch of the initial paired grants were never built out and entire regions of the country (New England, most notably) have no X-band signals at all. Most recent AM action, such as the 2003 window for new station applications, has explicitly excluded the X-band.
The only potential new X-bander on the horizon is on 1700 in Rockland County, NY, where WRCR (1300) used some heavy-duty leverage from its local Congressional delegation to get the FCC to open a special window for a new license on 1700 with the rationale that the area around the Indian Point nuclear plant needs better AM coverage for emergency announcements. Four broadcasters applied, and I believe it's slated to go to auction someday, though here again the FCC is in no hurry at all.
As for my own X-band memories, I was living in suburban Boston when the first signals went on in 1995-96. It was pretty remarkable to hear KXBT from California on a barefoot Sony 2003...but with nothing else at all on 1630 (or was it 1640?) anywhere at all, why not?
I have a bunch of tape of "K-Truck" on 1670 from Maryland. They went through three sets of calls - first "KTRK," until someone realized those calls belonged to a TV station in Texas, then "ARMY," until someone pointed out that the US doesn't have the AR-- call block, and finally "ABS" (Army Broadcast Service). I never QSL'ed them, and wish I had.
And I claim a particular tiny little niche in X-band history: when WJDM lit up its 1660 signal in the fall of 1995, their regular programming did not include newscasts. But on the first or second Saturday that WJDM was on the X-band, they carried a special one-time-only simulcast of "Spectrum," the radio show about radio that was then heard on WWCR shortwave. I was Spectrum's news director, and so I make the claim that my newscast during that Spectrum show was thus the very first newscast ever heard on the X-band :)
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