Re: [IRCA] IBOC battle begins

["Craig Healy" <bubba@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Because of a little matter called Public Service...
>
> I admire your idealism, but you know as well as I do that the vast
> majority of the stations that would be silenced (or have their
> interference complaints bought out) aren't doing school closings and
> traffic reports, and haven't done so for years.

Maybe they haven't, but the potential is there.  And, they still have to
provide EAS which will be gone if the big guys buy them out and shut them
down.  And I still haven't heard anyone in the IBOC community declare that
the HD Radio sidebands will have no negative effects on EAS reception.

> > I look at it as Walmart barging into a town and driving the locals
> > out of business.  That's why we have zoning at the local level.  Too
> > bad the zoning boards don't have some say in radio.
>
> Thank god they don't! There would never be another radio tower built
> anywhere in the country if most local zoning boards had their say!

Of course they do!  Only ham operators have the protection of PRB-1.  Look
at the protracted efforts in the Boston market to get that combined facility
for 1330 and others underway.  It still would be good if the FCC were to
seek out comments from the local community on a sale.  If they do now, it's
certainly way below the radar.

> One could argue that a system that gives the vote of a Montana resident
> something like 25 times the impact of my New York vote was never that
> equal to begin with, but I digress...

The framers of the Constitution certainly though about that.

> The WOWO of 1991 was worth saving - a live human being playing music and
> taking phone calls all night long. But even before the big downgrade,
> that WOWO was dead. You know what's on WOWO all night now? The same
> syndicated dreck that's on WHAM and WPHT and a dozen other signals up
> and down the dial. There is NO - zero, zip, nada - local news presence
> on WOWO after 6 PM local time. Nobody in the newsroom if something
> happens. Nobody in the control room to break in with national news,
> even. Just a bunch of Starguides and Prophet automation. Call me cynical
> - but why again is that worth saving?

I have to wonder if WOWO would have done that if it hadn't been sold and
gutted.

> (And the WLIB upgrade preceded Air America by more than a decade, anyway.)

Was any of their previous programming of any value?  If so, why the change
to Air America?  Just another syndicated gabathon of no real value.  Just
more radio attack dogs.  I find it hard to believe that it added *anything*
to NYC.  It was only an investment by the owners of WLIB to increase the
station's value.  They spent $xxxxxxxx dollars to buy and downgrade WOWO,
and $xxxxxxxx dollars to upgrade WLIB's facilities.  And WLIB's value was
increased by more than the total expenditures, I'd bet.  Just a business
move, and the people of Indiana lost out while hardly anyone in NYC even
noticed.

> I hate to be this negative, but it seems to me that something's happened
> to AM radio in just the last decade or so. With the exception of a very
> small number of stations (WBZ is one of them, actually; WGN, WSM, KGO
> are a few others), just about nobody on the AM dial is offering anything
> truly local in the overnight hours, or even late evenings.

True.  But IBOC isn't going to help.  If anything, the purchase of little
stations by the big guys will only make it worse.

> (The state of AM listenership has become so dire, at least in my own
> medium market, that we're scrambling at my own station to find *any*
> solution that will get our programming over to the FM dial, simply
> because an increasing portion of the potential audience can't or won't
> bother finding us on the AM dial. It's a painful reality to deal with.)

Then maybe it's time to make a radical change in the AM band by allowing
LPAM.  Limit *all* stations to a kilowatt non-d and a half wave tower.
Maximum stations owned limited to three or four.  Require the owner to live
withing a certain radius of the station location.  Require programming for
at least 12 hours per day to be local.  Require Monday Morning sign-off...
no...  wait...  Carried away there..  Sorry...

> Do any of us, as DXers, spend any significant time actually LISTENING to
> distant programming these days for entertainment? I'm quite curious to
> hear answers to this question.

Damn straight!  CBA-1070 (soon to go) and several others.  CHWO-740, WCBS
for news - even with the dratted hiss.  I started my radio career scanning
the dials for shows like Fibber McGee and Molly, and Amos 'n Andy.

> These, needless to say, are not the stations that would be bought into
> silence by any sort of interference-reduction scheme.

No, but they suffer from someone else's hiss.  WTIC-1080 IBOC makes CBA much
less enjoyable.  I wish they'd complain, even if they are going dark.

> > And just why does iBiquity or Clear Channel get to shut these down?
> > either by acquiring them, or jamming them off the dial?  If a station
> > owner wants to sell out, it's not that hard to do.  Brokers happen..
>
> Indeed - and if a station owner wants to sell out, why shouldn't a CBS
> or Citadel or Tribune have just as much right to buy the station into
> silence as any other buyer would have to keep the station "alive," for
> whatever that might be worth.

Because by shutting the station down, or limiting it's coverage by acquiring
the night protection limits, they reduce the quality of life for that local
community.   It takes something away and nobody in town is compensated.
Sort of like building a wall to prevent someone from seeing a nice scenery
vista.

> Let me put the question another way: we can each, no doubt, cite
> stations in our areas that are limping along so badly that they're
> probably not salvageable any longer. In Craig's market, I'm thinking of
> WALE on 990, which has a toxic-waste-contaminated transmitter site, a
> sea of unpaid power bills, and on and on.

Now there is a station that really should not have been allowed to stay on
the air.  Even RCA with all it's expertise could not get a city-grade signal
over Providence when it was built.  18mv/m instead of 25mv/m.  They had to
apply for a waivier.  It should have been rejected.  Add in the critical
hours interference from Scott's local on 990, and it's a tough facility.  I
often thought it would be far better to drop power and tower count radically
and move it to the Providence area.  Diplex into the 1290 site, perhaps.

> Where were the protests from the "unserved" public in greater
> Greenville, Rhode Island when WALE just spent ten months off the air?
> How much better is the public interest served now that the signal is
> back on the air, probably not at full power, playing who knows what? If
> it were to be worth it to Crawford to pay off the value of the WALE
> license in order to improve the signal at WLGZ in Rochester (which does
> have an audience, despite its local signal issues), why wouldn't that
> move be in the public interest, too?

If there had not been out of town signals from Providence and Boston, I'd
bet there would have been complaints.  If that station were in the middle of
Green County in Nebraska instead of Greenville, RI, it would be noticed.

> And while I'm being very careful not to insult Craig's own client
> stations (he's got to put food on the table, too, after all!), one
> wonders how many other satellite-fed AM signals could disappear from the
> airwaves tomorrow with hardly anyone noticing.

Radio Disney has a surprising audience.  Much greater than I *ever* would
have expected.  WNBH does a lot of local sports and ethnic shows.  It's well
regarded.  WLKW-1450?  Heh!  There was an automation screwup some time ago,
and it played a 15 second clip from some Frank Sinatra song over and over.
Nothing else played.  No commercials, weather or IDs.  This went on for a
couple of days over a weekend, and *nobody* called.  This station does no
local content at all!  I could shut it off to work on something, and the
only people who would notice are the jocks on WCTK when they take readings.
That station is a waste of RF.  Sad.  There's something that ought to be
covering local high school sports, and doing local small town shows like
radio yard sale and whatnot.  Not just satellite fare.

> There was a tremendous amount of wishful thinking that went into this
> whole process.

It really seems like there was just a big bag of deceptive PR put forth.

(sigh)  I'm glad I have other hobbies besides DXing.  This is enough to make
the blood boil..

Craig Healy
Providence, RI

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