Re: [IRCA] On the nature of DX Alerts

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm just catching up with the list here - Lisa's on her third 
hospitalization in three months, so I haven't had much time for DXing or 
for broadcasting lately.

A few thoughts from this end:

I think everyone in this very productive and civil conversation has a 
good point to make. As DXers, we want to have a way to notify each other 
of unusual conditions without having a "Heisenberg effect," if you will, 
causing that observation to change what we're observing. Saul is quite 
correct that some DXers will hesitate to post to a DX tip list if they 
know that the result will be an immediate notification to the station 
being observed that it's operating outside parameters. And as DXers, we 
have no particular obligation - certainly not a legal one, and only very 
questionably a moral one - to let stations know they're out of tolerance.

At the same time, Paul's quite right, too, that we can be a little 
irrational sometimes in our attitude toward out-of-normal operation: 
it's fun to log a station like KHMO, normally a law-abiding signal, if a 
rare glitch causes it to be running day pattern at night...once. But 
it's no fun at all to have a KRHW or a KRXR blasting away night after 
night on day facilities.

And of course as a broadcaster, I'm in general agreement with Paul and 
Gary Glaenzer (who's a friend of mine, too) that we strive to operate 
legally at all times. If I'm out driving at night and I hear WXXI on the 
west side of town when I shouldn't, yeah, of course the first call I'm 
going to make is to master control to make sure we're on night pattern.

But having said that, I think that even as a broadcaster, I'm not sure I 
personally would have reacted to the DX-tip post as hastily as Paul did. 
It's not as though it's 1937 and the FCC is actively monitoring the AM 
band at night for out-of-tolerance stations. The Commission itself has 
made it abundantly clear through its enforcement actions, or lack 
thereof, that nighttime operation on the AM band is now largely up to AM 
stations themselves to police. I can't recall the last time I saw a 
citation issued for one-time night operation with day facilities. The 
only stations that get busted these days, and only inconsistently, are 
those that abuse the rules on an ongoing basis and, in the process, 
cause interference to another station that's sufficiently motivated to 
complain about it.

Even then, it can be hard to get the FCC's attention. There's a daytimer 
on 1370 in Pennsylvania that tends to leave its day power running all 
night on a routine basis, nibbling away at our night coverage here in 
Rochester, but years of complaints have done little to get it to stop.

So if the FCC manifestly doesn't care about the pollution of the AM band 
(and Canada cares even less; it was CHOK's former sister station CKTY 
1110 that was notorious for day-pattern operation at night all through 
the 1990s!), do I as a little cog in the broadcasting wheel feel so 
personally motivated to protect the sanctity and purity of the sacred 
medium-wave spectrum that I'm going to go out of my way to let an 
engineer know within minutes of a DX-tip list posting that his station 
is being heard where it shouldn't?

Unless it's especially egregious - say, it's the 1080 in Buffalo 
blasting away during a Red Sox playoff game on WTIC <g> - I think my 
instinct in a case like that would probably be to see what beers are 
cold in my fridge, pop a cold one, check out the last period of the 
Sabres game on TV, and then maybe a couple of hours later I might drop a 
"hey, did you know your pattern didn't switch" line to the engineer in 
question...if you get my drift.

The good guys like Gary will be certain to make sure it doesn't happen 
again the next night, and they're not going to face any FCC consequences 
as a result. The bad actors...well, we know as DXers who they are, and 
if they're causing real harm to other stations, karma will catch up to 
them sooner or later, with or without our assistance.

s
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