Mike Hawkins wrote:
I'm playing with radio station history again and I'm doing battle with myself about how to document station swaps. I'll give two examples. Example #1: A few years back, KLOC/920/Ceres CA format moved to KVIN/1390/Turlock CA, and the KVIN format moved over to KLOC. The call letters swapped with the format change. From a listener's perspective, that is a frequency change and the city change is transparent to the listener.From the FCC perspective, its two call letter changes for two separatefacilities and who cares about the formats. Example #2: Recently, KERN/1410/Bakersfield CA swapped formats and call letters with KERI/1180/Wasco CA. As with example #1, the listener finds their favorite station on a new frequency, and the city change is transparent. The FCC sees it as two call letter changes for two facilities. I'm on the fence and looking for opinions on how this should be properly documented.
There's really no difference between those examples from the FCC's point of view.
Let me back up a little: when the FCC implemented its current database system (CDBS, "Consolidated Database System") in the 90s, it moved away from using callsigns as the primary internal identifier for each station. Instead, they assign each station a unique "facility ID number."
So to the FCC, 1410 in Bakersfield is "6640" and 1180 in Wasco is "35899," and all that happened, as you correctly note, was that 6640 changed calls from KERN to KERI and 1180 changed calls from KERI to KERN. However it was promoted to listeners - "KERN Newsradio is moving to 1180!" - is of no interest to the FCC.
Having said that, then, the guidance I'd offer is to treat call swaps like this no differently from the way you'd handle any other call change. If you'd have counted a new logging if 1410 had changed calls from KERN to KQPX, then you should also count it as new if you logged them after changing from KERN to KERI. But if you don't count a garden-variety call change as a new logging, there's no reason to treat these swaps as new loggings.
(Given the rapidity with which callsigns change these days, and the fact that a call change by itself makes no difference in a station's DXability, I am not in favor of counting call changes as new loggings, period, but that's a separate discussion.)
As for the larger question of what *should* then constitute a new logging, there's now a huge amount of information available for the DXer interested in learning the specific details of a station change. A generation ago (heck, even a decade and change ago), you pretty much had to go to the FCC in Washington to see the files that contained stations' engineering applications. Today, those details are as close as the FCC's own website (or a bunch of others, like the excellent and free FCCInfo.com, that present it in a more understandable form.)
So the technology and data exist (at least for US and Canadian stations) for us to slice and dice the definition of "new logging" however we'd like. Many of us maintain "home" DX logs that contain only loggings made within 25 miles of our QTH. One could do the same with transmitter sites: if a station moves more than 25 miles, consider it a new logging. (That would handle the "what to do with KTRB" question neatly.)
Or, with a bit of more sophisticated data management, one *could* say that any change made by a station that would alter its predicted signal strength at your QTH by more than some determined number (+/- 3 dB? 6 dB? 10 dB?) would be considered a new logging.
But this is a hobby, after all, not a science. I *have* to track all these FCC changes because it's my job. I wouldn't want to do it as a hobby; life is too short, at least from where I sit. The point I'm making here is simply that it's probably worth having this discussion in greater depth at some point, given how much information is available to us *if* we want to avail ourselves of it.
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