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Re: [IRCA] KDLG-670 now IBOC
rfoxwor1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Correct me if I am wrong, you west coast fellows, but I
am pretty sure I read that KDLG is Public Radio. All of these
NPR stations on FM are among the major cheerleaders for
HD and I think ultimately it is the taxpayer that is fronting
all the money for this, and not the stations. I see that WOI
640 in Iowa is due to add HD, and, arent they also non-commercial?
Yes, they are.
But there are some misconceptions here that I think need to be addressed.
First, about those Alaska small-town noncomms. These stations aren't
"public radio" as you or I know it. In many of these bush communities,
like Kotzebue and Dillingham and McGrath and Barrow, these are the ONLY
stations anyone can hear, and they function as true community voices.
Most carry an hour or two of Morning Edition and All Things Considered
and an hour of statewide news from Anchorage, but everything else is
hyper-local, often in native languages.
Most of the taxpayer funding for those stations is at the state level,
and there would be political hell to pay from the listeners all over the
Alaskan bush if it were cut.
So is there federal money going to support HD installations in public
stations in the Lower 48?
There is - it's a program called the Public Telecommunications
Facilities Program, and it pays for just a fraction of the cost of an HD
installation. There's usually a matching grant for the cost of a new
transmitter, but the burden of installing, operating and programming the
new signal is squarely on the local level. (In some cases, such as WOI
in Iowa, that "local level" is actually a state university or state
agency; in others, like my part-time employer, WXXI in Rochester, it's a
community group that gets no local government funding.)
Here's PTFP's website: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ptfp/index.htm
It's an interesting read - you'll learn there that most of the PTFP
money actually goes to public TV, where it's keeping PBS signals in
rural areas from going dark under the financial burden of the DTV
conversion. And you'll also learn that it's not even your "tax dollar"
at work - the total grants in the 2008 fiscal year cycle amounted to a
whopping $16 million, which is something like five cents per American.
I'm pretty sure I can find a lot of uses of my tax money that are far
more objectionable.
I wonder how easy it is to buy an HD radio in Dillingham?
What is the population there? What supports the local economy?
Will they run HD at night in January when it is dark for 22 hours
every day? Fascinating, I tell you. My tax dollars at work.
I flew over the Dillingham area once a few years ago on the way to
Narita on a NWA 747. There ain't a whole lot to see except for
tundra.
Precisely so. We're talking about the kind of community where there
would be no radio at all without a significant subsidy. No commercial
operator could ever make a go of things in Dillingham, or Galena, or
Valdez, and there's no significant out-of-market reception, especially
when the sun is up 18 or 20 hours out of the day.
As I explained in my reply to Patrick, it's my understanding that some
of these HD installs on the Alaska bush AM stations will eventually be
used to test digital-only (truly "in-band, on-channel," in that case)
operation. Because the populations in question are SO very small and
well-defined, it's actually possible (or so they say) to supply them
with new radios, turn off the analog, and save on the obscene cost of
powering the analog transmitters.
Is that a silly government subsidy? Maybe from our viewpoint in the
Lower 48, it may look that way. But life in the Alaskan bush is so
heavily subsidized anyway - air service, telecommunication of all kinds,
ice roads, etc. - that it's something Alaska seems to be willing to
justify, especially since the state continues to return a budget surplus
to its citizens in the form of an annual check every spring anyway.
s
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