A business decision.
Fair, except you said “the real corpse is KGO.” That signal is on the air. All that’s gone are a failed format and a set of call letters.
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Cumulus shutdown tracker
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
A business decision.
Fair, except you said “the real corpse is KGO.” That signal is on the air. All that’s gone are a failed format and a set of call letters.
KZAC’s like
I reconsidered.
I can tell you the couple in my area that were rumored to be candidates for signoff were operating as of 5:30 yesterday evening.
Appears the FCC.today website is having trouble pulling info from the FCC database today, so somewhat in the dark about filings in the past few hours. Probably an issue on the FCC end of things.
Michi is reporting that several FCC systems are out of service today. I hope Musk’s script kiddies aren’t mucking about in there, breaking things. More at the REC Networks Substack, which, sorry, I can’t link to at the moment due to an iPad issue.
Here you go: Some system outages at the FCC
Script kiddies? No matter your current opinion of him, Elon Musk didn't become the richest man in the world by hiring and surrounding himself with stupid people. And I thought we didn't do "political" posts on these boards.
No, he became the world's richest man via his stock holdings in Tesla, a company already up and running when he took over as CEO. That wealth (on paper) exploded after the 2024 election given his access to Donald Trump as speculation drove his shares in SpaceX higher.
At the rate Tesla stock is dropping, he could fall back to the second-richest man in the world (behind Jeff Bezos):
Elon Musk to lose 'world's richest man' title? Here's what is making a huge dent in his net worth
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's empire has been shaken. Is Musk going to lose 'world's richest man' title? It was a brutal Monday for the Trump ally as Tesla stocks nosedived 15 percent and his social media platform X suffered global outages thrice in a day. Tesla investors have expressed concerns...
There are legitimate concerns about the inexperience (not stupidity) of the people working on Elon's behalf for DOGE. Here's the latest (minutes ago) from WIRED, with this somewhat unnerving pull-quote regarding his people, some as young as 20, accessing the Social Security Administration:
Sources have told WIRED that one of the tasks the DOGE cohort will be assigned is how people identify themselves to access their benefit payments.
Experts with decades of experience at the agency are now worried that DOGE operatives working across multiple agencies increases the risk of SSA data being shared outside of the agency or that their inexperience will lead to them breaking systems entirely.
These Are the 10 DOGE Operatives Inside the Social Security Administration
The team working at the Social Security Administration appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.
Some of that can be laid at the feet of the antique government computer system...much of it using systems that were obsolete by the time these guys were born.
Still, it doesn't matter how good you are with A if what you're working with is Z.
I'll risk it.
To bring it back to radio, the reason Musk's name came up was because of issues at the FCC, and thoughts that the chaos in government had led to problems at the FCC database.
Certainly there's less reason for profit making radio companies to keep operating money-losing AM stations. The companies don't own the frequency. Just a license to use it. The chaos at the government doesn't help. The falling stock market affects radio companies and their advertisers. It also affects listeners and their ability to buy products advertised on the radio. So I expect to see more AMs shut down this year. Not just from Cumulus.
Certainly there's less reason for profit making radio companies to keep operating money-losing AM stations. The companies don't own the frequency. Just a license to use it. The chaos at the government doesn't help. The falling stock market affects radio companies and their advertisers. It also affects listeners and their ability to buy products advertised on the radio. So I expect to see more AMs shut down this year. Not just from Cumulus.
There are legitimate concerns about the inexperience (not stupidity) of the people working on Elon's behalf for DOGE. Here's the latest (minutes ago) from WIRED, with this somewhat unnerving pull-quote regarding his people, some as young as 20, accessing the Social Security Administration:
Sources have told WIRED that one of the tasks the DOGE cohort will be assigned is how people identify themselves to access their benefit payments.
Experts with decades of experience at the agency are now worried that DOGE operatives working across multiple agencies increases the risk of SSA data being shared outside of the agency or that their inexperience will lead to them breaking systems entirely.
These Are the 10 DOGE Operatives Inside the Social Security Administration
The team working at the Social Security Administration appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.www.wired.com
Some of that can be laid at the feet of the antique government computer system...much of it using systems that were obsolete by the time these guys were born.
For context, this is what I wrote in another thread (https://radiodiscussions.com/threads/nerw-the-fcc-in-authoritarian-times.775181/page-10#post-6791554):
Then there are the government systems themselves. Many of them are mainframes, running older code. The script kiddies following Musk as their Pied Piper haven't a single clue about how the programs for those mainframes were coded. Those of us who have coded for mainframes learned techniques to manage the limited memory and storage that was available at the time. There are a lot of tricks embedded in that code, which is why it's hard to modify. The neophytes are simply not going to know about them. Whatever changes they're recklessly making could shut down things like Social Security and Medicare and farm aid payments. A failure of those systems is going to be far, far more serious than X/Twitter being down for a few hours.
Mike alludes, quite correctly, to some of the cybersecurity and privacy issues as well, which I mentioned in that same post.
Yes, I've been scathing about this. While most of my 34-year IT career was spent in cybersecurity, I started out as a mainframe and OS/2 systems programmer. I've earned the right to be scathing about this. I know the damage that can be done. If you think that's political, whether or not that descriptor is in quotes, then it's my right to think that you're trying to shut down criticism with a badly chosen epithet flung from the convenient sidelines of posting under a pseudonym.
My opinion is that the thinning out of AMs is overdue. Unfortunately, it means some signals with good coverage will be lost. That's a consequence of the haphazard American approach to regulation. It might be a little better if there were some mechanism in place whereby the remaining AM broadcasters could be allowed to move to better signals that have been vacated by others, but the perception of AM has gotten to the point where that might not even work. Then you'd get into questions of fairness, equity, selection criteria, and so on. And, by gosh, that could get ... gasp ... political.
That may happen once the numbers of silent AMs gets into the thousands. The FCC releases an annual count of active licenses, so someone might notice the huge drop in active AMs. That may be a wakeup call that maybe they should do something. But then again, maybe not.
Hard to say, and once the trend becomes apparent in a broader universe, it may just accelerate instead.
Interesting. One of the things I've noticed with those AMs that stay on the air on assigned regional frequencies is that they are (mostly) shrinking the number of towers they use to 1 and are using very limited night power. My thought after reading about that is that maybe we (along with the rest of the Western Hemisphere countries) should look at changing many of those "regional" frequencies into local ones. Specifically, if I ruled the FCC (which I don't), I would change all AM frequencies between 1230 and 1490 kHz to local frequencies and allow stations using those frequencies to operate 1kW non-directional 24 hours a day. Obviously some stations would have to be grandfathered in--but I'm willing that a lot of the stations who have higher powers on these frequencies now would be willing to give up some of those kW in order to not have to worry about turning down their power at night.
As I said, I am not in power and this idea is extremely not likely to happen. Yet if it did, I think we could see a more even flow to the number of stations leaving the AM band.
I don't. Turning down power at night is done by automation. There's little audience at night, and even fewer advertisers, so no great loss. You see that AMs are making more money with low power FM translators than with 5K AMs. So that should be a tip. Even full power FMs find they have a fraction of the audience at night that they have during the day.
One change I could see is to have the FCC define "daytime" as a minimum of 6 AM to 6 PM, regardless of actual sunrise/sunset time (if the day is shorter than that). That would allow daytimers and stations with flea power at night to cover morning and evening drive times at daytime (or at least critical hours) power.
I believe Mexico already does it this way?
I believe Mexico already does it this way?
Admin note: Keep PERSONAL politics out of this and other conversations.
But expect another ten stations to be taken silent this weekend with a few more coming later this month.
But expect another ten stations to be taken silent this weekend with a few more coming later this month.
The ionosphere cares not about the FCC's definitions. This would create a lot of slop between local sunset and 6pm, especially on the local channels like 1580 where there are a bunch of smaller stations which do not use directional antennas for their day pattern.
Mexico has a very small number of AM stations compared to the US. Most channels have 3-5 broadcasters, and even fewer at the top of the dial.
There's about 55 licenses in Mexico above 1400. In the US there's 75 licenses just on 1450.
Any upgrade to any AM facility should be a "minor change" at this point.
What I was talking about is perhaps offering the hundreds of former frequencies for use at auction.