I'll go one better: Some AM 'hate-talk' formatted new FM moving in next to my Pop or AC station would be the equivalent of Mary Kay Letourneau and her former student/husband Vili Fualaau moving in next door to your home.
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Thoughts on proposed upgrade for Class A FMs
- Thread starter Michael Rivers Kramer
- Start date
Where they were located, usually to COLs in the middle of nowhere, it was impossible to have the potential of one with a large population count. Some that fit in to near the center of larger cities are doing quite well, and have stronger signals than many Class Bs and Class Cs which barely cover the COL with a City Grade 70 dBu signal.
Cold Coffee
Banned
This is one of the channels I dropped in. I once owned this station. WKLU-FM Radio Station Coverage Map
This map shows it even better.
The Zone I equivalent of a C3 is a B1, but with a more generous protection contour.
The Petition doesn't mention any protected contours for any Class, nor any mention of protection ratios, in the text. I would assume Class A10 would be protected to the 60 dBu F(50,50) contour like other Class As.
Correct. That’s my thought too
There was no movement "away from AM" in Latin America except the case in the last 10 to 15 years in Brazil where they created an extended FM band where channels 2 to 6 were.
When Mexico took up the issue, they realized due to lobbying by the CIRT that AM was declining and offered ways for AMs to migrate. A somewhat better solution than translators in the US, and achieved by relaxing second adjacent spacing.
Everywhere else, AMs are on their own, from Guatemala to Chile.
Throughout the rest of the Hemisphere, talk takes many shapes and forms... not just political and not just partisan. This is a social issue, I guess, but most markets have around six or more talkers doing a variety of "focus" aspects of talk.
This is more about improving the competitiveness of existing stations, not adding more.
But still required the government to push for a move away from AM. Just because some countries didn't, doesn't mean it didn't happen in others.
Funny, I thought we were talking about a proposal in the U.S.
To the audience that doesn't ever visit the AM band, let alone even know about it, you're adding more stations.
That is still an A in a market that is composed of many counties. It only covers a portion of that market.
It happened as stations either sold to religious groups, migrated to FM or signed off.
With some exceptions in Mexico, the rest of the nations to the south of us never authorized daytimers or directional stations (unless the station wanted to be directional). So most stations were fully competitive but wanted to move to FM
Some of us early-on saw the future potential; I got licenses for over a dozen in Ecuador in the late 60's. AM station owners who did not see the future got slaughtered.
What I am saying is that such a change towards more talk programming on FM has occurred all across Latin America. The over-congestion of AM due to daytimers and deadly directional stations and the FCC's insistence in community stations (Old Class IV AMs and current class A FMs) made a lot of stations non-viable; it was due to regulations.
And that's the bottom line: Here in the States, there are plenty of owners who have had ample time to gamble that AM would remain viable forever. When it doesn't look good for the band, Commissioner Pai gives them a gift, but it's still not good enough.
As BigA and I have mentioned, they managed to trash the AM band by needless overcrowding over the years, now they want to do the same to the FM band. What's the definition of insanity?
But, you're savvy when it comes to Spanish and English. What new talk programming is being suggested by existing U.S. AM broadcasters which is being proposed for the FM band that would be so popular? Again, we're not talking about Latin Countries.
Answer: there isn't. Existing AM broadcasters will/are moving their syndicated political talk programming to translators just because it's cheap to do.
So, you don't think it had anything to do with lack of compelling programming on these stations? The Commission didn't force these licensees to file for, or purchase these shoehorned stations onto the band. If there's no room, it doesn't make any sense to make more by changing separations.
It's amazing how well some extremely directional AM stations have done in ratings over the years though, even though part of the market is not well served.
Some stations have relocated to try to get more area served where the nulls were, but it's rarely an unmitigated improvement, even with 50000 watts. One theory is that areas further out are higher elevation, drier, and lower conductivity, than the flatter, wet areas within a few miles of large bodies of water, where most cities and high population density are located.
Some stations have relocated to try to get more area served where the nulls were, but it's rarely an unmitigated improvement, even with 50000 watts. One theory is that areas further out are higher elevation, drier, and lower conductivity, than the flatter, wet areas within a few miles of large bodies of water, where most cities and high population density are located.
Cold Coffee
Banned
True, but it was worth several million dollars at the time. One needed to be born 10 years before me to be able to grab a Class B.
If one came into this world 10 years after me, opportunity would have been very limited.
So before any of us gets the big head about our success we need to give credit where it is due. Some call it lady luck. Or was it the grace of God?
This was the Land of Opportunity back then. Maybe it was the Golden Age of America that I grew up in?
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I think it was "vision" but we don't think the same way about our own mistakes!
It was the golden age for an FM if you got a bunch of "free" licenses in the 60's and managed to make them work.
As mentioned before, I filed for the first FM anywhere in northern South America (Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and put it on the air in 1966. It was profitable in its first year, and I applied for a whole bunch... 6 just in Quito alone. I spent half my time building transmitters and antennas!
The most amazing thing was to flip "plates on" and go to a tuner and find you have the only signal on an entire band.
Fortunately, at the time we did not even have a commercial TV station in the market but most of those "stereo consoles" everyone in the middle and upper income groups had at home came with FM. So there were, in 1966, more FM sets than TV sets and they were all waiting for something to listen to. But at the next Broadcaster Association meeting, I was called an "idiot" for putting "stupid" stations on the air and "distracting advertisers" from the stations that actually had audience.
Kind of like WIAA Interlochen and WWTV-FM Cadillac in Northern Michigan in the early 1960s. There weren't that many stations until the 1970s and then Docket 80-90 stations in the 1990s. Still wondering what you could have DXed with a good 10 element FM antenna and receiver there in the early 1960s. Even until in the 1980s, it was possible to get scores of distant stations regularly near Pellston. Now it's really jammed up with all the new stations and translators. DXing FM is more difficult now.
Under more recent rules, most of the Class As have been able to upgrade to Class C2 there. Very few are Commercial Class As now.
Cold Coffee
Banned
I had the Radio Shack Archer Supreme Antenna and a JVC tuner on the east side of Indianapolis in the mid 70's. I could hear the 100 KW station on 98.9 from Petoskey, Michigan just about every night. It was 400 miles away and it came in in stereo.
Cold Coffee
Banned
Kind of had to become the expert yourself to succeed. It's also been said ,"It's not just what you know. But, who you know." I can't forget those who were more successful who befriended me and shared there expertise.
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