Any active SCA stations left in Los Angeles?

[yeoldeschool]

With virtually every service SCA once hosted now being possible to send subscribers via the internet, I'm curious if there are any FM stations still running analog SCA subcarriers at all in the Los Angeles area -- or generally in any markets as a whole. Has anyone with an SDR or physical receiver capable of demodulating them actually checked in recent times?

The last I remember learning about SCA was that the loudness wars killed it off of most commercial stations, who were desperate to avoid anything that might force them to lower their main audio's modulation levels to make the necessary headroom available for it.

 

[TomásEstefan]

With virtually every service SCA once hosted now being possible to send subscribers via the internet, I'm curious if there are any FM stations still running analog SCA subcarriers at all in the Los Angeles area -- or generally in any markets as a whole. Has anyone with an SDR or physical receiver capable of demodulating them actually checked in recent times?

The last I remember learning about SCA was that the loudness wars killed it off of most commercial stations, who were desperate to avoid anything that might force them to lower their main audio's modulation levels to make the necessary headroom available for it.

I'm probably wrong but I thought SCAs disappeared decades ago...maybe someone can clarify...

 

[K.M. Richards]

The only stations I was involved with during my "hands on" career only used SCA for meter readings. it introduced a high-pitched, low level "warble" into the main signal, so we minimized its use (thankfully, the noise only transmitted if you were actually taking readings).

That included the first station I worked at, as the producer/board op for a nightly Classical music program ... I always took the readings during the tape-delayed network news update halfway through. Never during the music.

 

[Mark Roberts]

I'm probably wrong but I thought SCAs disappeared decades ago...maybe someone can clarify...

At least last year, Berkeley's KPFA was leasing out 92 kHz to a South Asian broadcaster. That was it in the Bay Area. Since moving to Colorado, I have found no one in the Denver area using it.

 

[Mark Roberts]

The only stations I was involved with during my "hands on" career only used SCA for meter readings.

KFRU(AM) in Columbia, Mo. was a Missourinet affiliate. Both Missourinet and our station were dissatisfied with the audio quality of the phone lines being used. (Our ABC network line sounded much better.) So in 1980 Missourinet arranged with a Jefferson City FM station (class C about 35 miles away) to put its network feed on an SCA subcarrier for us to try out. It didn't work well. Power line interference was the main culprit. We went back to the phone lines until Missourinet went on satellite a couple of years later.

 

[BLA]

With virtually every service SCA once hosted now being possible to send subscribers via the internet, I'm curious if there are any FM stations still running analog SCA subcarriers at all in the Los Angeles area -- or generally in any markets as a whole. Has anyone with an SDR or physical receiver capable of demodulating them actually checked in recent times?

The last I remember learning about SCA was that the loudness wars killed it off of most commercial stations, who were desperate to avoid anything that might force them to lower their main audio's modulation levels to make the necessary headroom available for it.

How many L.A. FM's did that back then. I seem to remember that the old KJOI (Coca Cola Bottling Co.) (98.7) had an subcarrier agreement with Channel 7, perhaps for its Eyewitness News Department in the very late 70's.

 

[gr8oldies]

I'm probably wrong but I thought SCAs disappeared decades ago...maybe someone can clarify...

Last I knew of any SCA use near anywhere I was, an Ohio station I worked at sent farm prices via SCA in the 90s, and I volunteered for a Radio Reading Service that was still using an SCA.

 

[davideduardo]

KSCA in the LA market has a 67 kHz SCA airing Chinese programming.

 

[K.M. Richards]

My recollection was that when Robert Adams owned KUTE, he had a unique use of SCA for "storecasting". The format was generally instrumental and all the commercials were live reads. When the mike switch was turned on, it sent a signal via SCA to receivers in subscriber stores to mute.

 

[yeoldeschool]

My recollection was that when Robert Adams owned KUTE, he had a unique use of SCA for "storecasting". The format was generally instrumental and all the commercials were live reads. When the mike switch was turned on, it sent a signal via SCA to receivers in subscriber stores to mute.

Amazingly, the reason I posted this question was that I had just finished reading the words of former KFI chief engineer Marvin Collins at the bottom of this long-lost article about mutable storecasting and KUTE in particular.

KSCA in the LA market has a 67 kHz SCA airing Chinese programming.

KSCA? Are you serious? That's almost too KUTE to be true.

At least last year, Berkeley's KPFA was leasing out 92 kHz to a South Asian broadcaster. That was it in the Bay Area. Since moving to Colorado, I have found no one in the Denver area using it.

I was thinking that if any stations were liable to still be running SCAs, public ones would be the largest group. Simply for the funding, and their lack of a need for maximum loudness.

How many L.A. FM's did that back then. I seem to remember that the old KJOI (Coca Cola Bottling Co.) (98.7) had an subcarrier agreement with Channel 7, perhaps for its Eyewitness News Department in the very late 70's.

What could they have been using it for? In the analog TV days, the television audio carrier wasn't just equipped with one secondary subcarrier (for SAP), but two. The second was called the "pro channel" and was often used for IFB, among other things. Wouldn't KABC's signal (and Pro channel) have had a much further reach than 98.7 at that time?

 

[BLA]

What could they have been using it for? In the analog TV days, the television audio carrier wasn't just equipped with one secondary subcarrier (for SAP), but two. The second was called the "pro channel" and was often used for IFB, among other things. Wouldn't KABC's signal (and Pro channel) have had a much further reach than 98.7 at that time?

Don't know the answer to either of those questions. However, I do recall seeing some written agreement about 98.7 and there was a CRT monitor in the Channel 7 newsroom at Talmadge with a dark screen and a homemade sign reading KJOI tacked to it. I can't recall much else.

 

[bigdonho]

The only stations I was involved with during my "hands on" career only used SCA for meter readings. it introduced a high-pitched, low level "warble" into the main signal, so we minimized its use (thankfully, the noise only transmitted if you were actually taking readings).

That included the first station I worked at, as the producer/board op for a nightly Classical music program ... I always took the readings during the tape-delayed network news update halfway through. Never during the music.

Don't think that was the SCA. Moseley and TFT used "sub-audible" tones for over-the-air readings. The problem was, if the level was high enough to be useful, it modulated the audible audio. (Remember the 25 Hz tones used for staring the next event in automation systems?) The thing that really sucked was if you were of the air, you couldn't get meter readings to help you determine why you were off the air.

 

[JeremyAndrews]

WGTD here in Kenosha, WI has a "Radio Reading Service" on the analog SCA. The station also transmits in HD but the Radio Reading Service is only on SCA and only on the air for certain hours of the day. They have specifically tuned radios that they offer for people who need this service.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Don't think that was the SCA. Moseley and TFT used "sub-audible" tones for over-the-air readings. The problem was, if the level was high enough to be useful, it modulated the audible audio. (Remember the 25 Hz tones used for staring the next event in automation systems?) The thing that really sucked was if you were of the air, you couldn't get meter readings to help you determine why you were off the air.

The remote control was indeed a Moseley and I remember from looking at the old Belar modulation monitors that activating the RC turned the SCA carrier on and the "warbling" effect from the meter data would be audible until we deactivated the RC after taking readings.

I do not recall any instance where we were ever off the air from a transmitter problem. It was pretty much always a power failure at the studios which fail-safed the transmitter off when the STL signal was no longer received at the mountain. (In one of those weird coincidences, the first big rain of the season always resulted in a power failure the first evening of same. For every one of the four years that I was employed there, said rain and power outage happened on my watch.)

 

[fybush]

WGTD here in Kenosha, WI has a "Radio Reading Service" on the analog SCA. The station also transmits in HD but the Radio Reading Service is only on SCA and only on the air for certain hours of the day. They have specifically tuned radios that they offer for people who need this service.

The number of reading services is dropping fast. The one here in Rochester that was tied to WXXI was shut down a couple of years ago, for two reasons. First, its listener base was dying off, as more blind people learned how to use screen readers that gave them on-demand access to the whole web, instead of having to wait for a specific time to hear one section of the newspaper. And second, the local Gannett paper became so devoid of content that there wasn't enough left to read to fill a half hour each day.

By the time the service was killed off, a survey found there were only a dozen or so radios still being used regularly.

That was the last SCA (92 kHz on WXXI-FM 91.5) that was in use in this market.

 

[fybush]

Amazingly, the reason I posted this question was that I had just finished reading the words of former KFI chief engineer Marvin Collins at the bottom of this long-lost article about mutable storecasting and KUTE in particular.

KSCA? Are you serious? That's almost too KUTE to be true.

I was thinking that if any stations were liable to still be running SCAs, public ones would be the largest group. Simply for the funding, and their lack of a need for maximum loudness.

What could they have been using it for? In the analog TV days, the television audio carrier wasn't just equipped with one secondary subcarrier (for SAP), but two. The second was called the "pro channel" and was often used for IFB, among other things. Wouldn't KABC's signal (and Pro channel) have had a much further reach than 98.7 at that time?

My recollection is that the SAP and PRO channels didn't come along until the TV stereo era in the mid-80s. So the use of an SCA in the 1970s for IFB wouldn't have been inconsistent.

 

[radiofan2023]

The number of reading services is dropping fast. The one here in Rochester that was tied to WXXI was shut down a couple of years ago, for two reasons. First, its listener base was dying off, as more blind people learned how to use screen readers that gave them on-demand access to the whole web, instead of having to wait for a specific time to hear one section of the newspaper. And second, the local Gannett paper became so devoid of content that there wasn't enough left to read to fill a half hour each day.

By the time the service was killed off, a survey found there were only a dozen or so radios still being used regularly.

That was the last SCA (92 kHz on WXXI-FM 91.5) that was in use in this market.

I'm guessing there might be even less reading for the blind services on TV subchannels - the only one I've ever run into was Iowa Radio Reading Service, it was in Iowa City on an IPTV subchannel, but it reads the Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, a bunch of other papers (but not the Iowa City Press Citizen, for some reason) and some magazines. However their website says they only have 11,000 subscribers and run on volunteers.

There used to be several (at least 5) SCAs in the KC area in the 80's and early 1990s, but I think they're all shut down now. Telecable/TCI used to list them on the back of their printed channel guides.

 

[Mediafrog+]

I'm guessing there might be even less reading for the blind services on TV subchannels

In Houston PBS KUHT still has its “Sight Into Sound” reading service on audio-only subchannel 8.5. The service is also carried on the HD-4 of sibling KUHF. This service was carried for several decades on the 67kHz SCA of KUHF, but I understand that may have been discontinued. I still need to dust off my SCA receiver setup to verify that, as well as any other remaining SCA services in the market. We used to have quite a few of them, but only two were left when I last did a scan some years ago.

 

[Weiserguy]

I volunteered for In Touch, a radio reading service in NYC back in the late '80s (which at that time aired on the SAP channel of WKCR, Columbia University's FM). But my understanding is that got sold to/acquired by Lighthouse For The Blind sometime around 1990 and moved somewhere else. They may have transitioned to airing on a TV SAP channel, which is what was being done in that era in San Francisco, using KTVU/2's SAP.

But was SAP even implemented on DTV's? I just was looking at one of mine, not even a newish model, and I can't find any indication that there's any SAP capability built in. Probably the Internet killed off any true need for it.

 

[Barry]

I recently checked the SCA bands when I was in the New York area. There were a few stations broadcasting in Haitian Creole. I also heard KCBN, which broadcasts Christian programming in Korean.