I see AM listeners occasionally mention rare catches as being made possible due to stations staying on daytime power long after sunset in order to carry high school football games. Does the FCC really allow stations to do this, season after season, year after year, with no warning or citation? Or is the "exception" just a DXer fantasy?
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The "Friday night football exception"
- Thread starter CTListener
- Start date
No fantasy, no exception, no warnings, CT Listener -- imho.
It's merely various stations crossing their fingers and playing hide-and-seek with the FCC. Local businesses pay for the ads and mentions, and the businesses aren't liable in any way if there's ever a judgement. I don't know anyone who listens for these great broadcasts anyway except, lol, DXers. To me, a new catch is a new catch. Harrumph.
One night in December here, about 9:00, I was on 1280 listening to an English-language sports PBP. It was pretty solid, and on top of WADO.
Usually, it's regional occupant WADO over it all at night, Spanish, from NYC. So Initially I *had* thought the PBP was from WFBS Berwick PA -- an Oldies station. They're about 20 miles north of me, with some pittance of wattage at night, maybe 30 watts.
Wrong again, Green. It was ANOTHER former daytimer to whom a wee nighttime license was granted. Something like 28 watts. WFYC Alma Michigan. A mere 467 miles west of here.
Day power ? Yeah, sure.
Lol O/T -- one drive around here at night I had on the similarly-hobbled WMIM 1590, another former daytimer. They were about 8 air miles away, but solid at night here on their 27.6 watts or whatever. Their Friday night PBP was of the big high school regional rivalry Mount Carmel - Shamokin game. Mount Carmel won it late when their quarterback went in on a quarterback sneak from the 1.
His OWN 1. A 99-yard quarterback sneak. It's still talked about in reunions up this way.
73!
It's merely various stations crossing their fingers and playing hide-and-seek with the FCC. Local businesses pay for the ads and mentions, and the businesses aren't liable in any way if there's ever a judgement. I don't know anyone who listens for these great broadcasts anyway except, lol, DXers. To me, a new catch is a new catch. Harrumph.
One night in December here, about 9:00, I was on 1280 listening to an English-language sports PBP. It was pretty solid, and on top of WADO.
Usually, it's regional occupant WADO over it all at night, Spanish, from NYC. So Initially I *had* thought the PBP was from WFBS Berwick PA -- an Oldies station. They're about 20 miles north of me, with some pittance of wattage at night, maybe 30 watts.
Wrong again, Green. It was ANOTHER former daytimer to whom a wee nighttime license was granted. Something like 28 watts. WFYC Alma Michigan. A mere 467 miles west of here.
Day power ? Yeah, sure.
Lol O/T -- one drive around here at night I had on the similarly-hobbled WMIM 1590, another former daytimer. They were about 8 air miles away, but solid at night here on their 27.6 watts or whatever. Their Friday night PBP was of the big high school regional rivalry Mount Carmel - Shamokin game. Mount Carmel won it late when their quarterback went in on a quarterback sneak from the 1.
His OWN 1. A 99-yard quarterback sneak. It's still talked about in reunions up this way.
73!
I first learned about this in the early 70s from an engineer at WKTY in La Crosse, WI. Near where I was living at the time. 5kw day/1kw night. He told me that they routinely did this on Friday nights after complaints from out of town listeners that said they couldn't hear "their' game. Evidently they not only got away with it, but also all but eliminated the complaining.
I don't know this for sure, but I think the FCC probably looks the other way unless someone files an official complaint. High school sports can be a vital revenue stream for struggling small town AMs.
At one small market AM/FM I was at, they used to broadcast a local high school football game each week. Sometimes the game they chose was based on which school or contest they thought could pull the biggest listening audience, and sometimes it was based on which town/school they though they could get the most advertising $$ from. The station was 1kW day and I believe 33 watts at night. Back then (early 1990s), they used one of the (modern for its time) Motorola 'bag phones' with a rather clunky interface that allowed you to push a button to kill audio coming from the handset and accept an input from a mixer. Problem was, with that particular setup, the only way the guys broadcasting the game could hear the station was to carry a radio with them. In most cases, if you dropped down to night power, the guys couldn't pick up the station at the game, so the PD basically shrugged his shoulders and said "Well, if the board op forgets to switch to night power and only happens to catch the error and reduce power after the game ends, it seems like an honest enough mistake to me..." From that moment onward, the guy back at the station became awfully forgetful most Friday or Saturday nights in the fall.
Those "Friday Night Lights" STAs may be fun for the locals, but they interfere with other stations that people are trying to listen to. Full-time AM stations spent upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensed Night operation. And if the station has an FM translator, they should definitely go to licensed power and pattern.
I may do a separate thread about sports people not being able to hear the signal, and trying herculean efforts to get a signal back to the station
What's struck me for quite awhile was stations that we all know as cheaters, then still cheat while trying to secure a translator. I would think if you had any business before the Commission, you'd have your station on its best behavior
I can go first. I was engineering a 2 hour remote broadcast from an ethnic music festival in a somewhat rural location. The festival ran all day, but the hosts from our station were MC'ing it for the 2 hours their ethnic show was normally on the air, which I think was 9-11 a.m. I went to the site 2 days in advance to check everything. There was no cell signal at all there, but I was told there was a POTS line in the manager's office adjacent to the stage that I could use. The maintenance guy who was there to meet with me had no keys to the office but swore he'd checked the POTS line and it worked. I arrived an hour before we went on the air, connected to the phone line in the office and.....dead. Damn! I looked around and saw a house across a gravel parking lot. I decided to ask if I could tap into their phone line. Since it was a long-distance call, I'd call the station collect so they'd incur no charges. I knocked at the door for a few minutes, but there was no one home. I happened to have a new spool of smaller-gauge Belden wire so I did what I saw as my only real option...I set up the mixer near the stage, ran about 80 feet of Belden wire across the gravel lot, through their chain-link fence and up to the TELCO connection box on the side of their house. I checked their phone service, got a dial tone, connected up, opened up the phone jack on the side of the mixer and spliced the Belden cable in, called the station collect and voila! We were on the air. We did the full 2 hour broadcast, it went flawlessly, the people who's line I tapped into never did return home and after the broadcast ended I disconnected everything, packed up and left with the homeowners never the wiser.
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Most...but not all....of the stations that I had knowledge of sold high school sports as a package. "Sport boosters club" Sponsors got the whole season plus a few ROS spots during the week. Bonus or otherwise. Billed monthly.
Every bit of this discussion is apocryphal, don't you know this?
In a typical football season, I don't see this being done more than a handful of times per season.
Besides, if YOU know it's being done in your area, isn't it dependent upon YOU to make the call to begin the process of shutting this down?
The issue is that, other than an extreme misanthrope, nobody locally would complain about their local team being broadcast.Besides, if YOU know it's being done in your area, isn't it dependent upon YOU to make the call to begin the process of shutting this down?
I worked for a few AMs in my career that did sports.. and i can absolutely assure everyone they didnt stay on high power during my time there.
At one station in the midwest plains... i could about see the tower light 2 miles away but some nights, KRLD 1080 HD Hash and KRCN 1060 Denver on high power would wreak some havic with the signal. 1kw day and 20 some odd watts at night at that point
At another station on the eastern edge of the midwest, with 5kw day 44 watts night directional... we always dropped power. If we didnt its real noticeable in the greater ether of the universe
At one station in the midwest plains... i could about see the tower light 2 miles away but some nights, KRLD 1080 HD Hash and KRCN 1060 Denver on high power would wreak some havic with the signal. 1kw day and 20 some odd watts at night at that point
At another station on the eastern edge of the midwest, with 5kw day 44 watts night directional... we always dropped power. If we didnt its real noticeable in the greater ether of the universe
Just to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that I'm pretty comfortable in saying Football game "STA's" are a universal practice among AM stations that broadcast the games. A majority of those stations surely don't. As for those that do, I don't think it's a serious problem unless and until someone complains about interference.
I've got to think, with translators, that practice will go away for the most part pretty quickly.
The worst were the Class IV AMs back in the 1kw day 250 watts at night era. They'd stay on 1kw at night for the local HS or college game, and ruin a half dozen nearby co-channel stations.
At my first station, we sometimes had that sweet fall tropo causing interference to our Marti station. Usually when we had a Marti problem it was because we were trying to feed the game back to the station from a distance too far away, instead of getting a phone line. At one point it's the basketball championship, and the MARTI signal has gone AWOL. Bosses and operator are in a panic. Finally I'm instructed to tell the sports guys to go to the payphone, hand some kid a $20 and ask him to guard the phone booth and make sure the portable multiband radio (which picked up the Marti) so. we could send really bad phon-line of the game.
Are we talking about 1070 KFTI Wichita?
KFTI was not 1 kw day and a few watts at night
I actually think about this from time to time. From the standpoint of what allowing those stations, (most of them) to go 1kw fulltime actually accomplished. Of course, when the nighttime limit was 250 watts, you're right that the stations most affected by the cheaters were those which played by the rules. I guess, if anything was accomplished, it wasn't necessarily more nighttime effective coverage, but rather making it tougher for your co-channel "neighbor" to rain on your parade....er...football game.
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