Any active SCA stations left in Los Angeles?

[davideduardo]

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.

And there have been as many as a dozen pirates in Kreyol there until the FCC started taking more dramatic action. Running unlicensed stations in Haiti is rampant/common/endemic in Haiti itself, so many immigrants arrive with no understanding about the enforced illegality of such stations.

Miami has had Kreyol FM pirates for 20 years or more. Around 2002 or 2003 when I was working with WAMR/WRTO/WQBA/WAQI I was on a plane landing at MIA when we abruptly had the landing aborted because the cockpit lost communication with the flight controllers due to interference by a pirate.

 

[davideduardo]

Source for SCA-capable receivers: Metrosonix SCA Radio Receivers, SCMO radio, SCMO Radios, SCA Radio, SCA radios, Songs, Satellite radio, SCA Car Radio, SCA Car Radios, SCMO Car Radio, SCMO Car Radios, receivers, fm receivers, fm

 

[ente]

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.

DTV has additional audio programs, usually it's used for audio description or to simulcast a radio station. Every TV has a different way to select the audio channel. My Element and Insignia TVs have a MTS button on the remote, while the Sony TV has it in the options menu.

 

[yeoldeschool]

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.

I remember when Mike Horn's "Cable Radio Network" (CRN) started leasing the analog SAP channel on KPXN-30 in Los Angeles for some reason. To my knowledge, they never tried going any further beyond cable TV than that. I always thought it was such a strange move and wondered who the audience would be, as at the time, CRN still existed in the form of one audio program -- a "soft AC with gold" format meant to be universally appealing to people reading Prevue Guide EPGs and public access channel Texscan MSI barker billboards on their cable systems.

DTV has additional audio programs, usually it's used for audio description or to simulcast a radio station. Every TV has a different way to select the audio channel. My Element and Insignia TVs have a MTS button on the remote, while the Sony TV has it in the options menu.

ATSC allows stations to define how many alternate audio programs each channel will have. 13-1 might have just one, while 13-2 might have four, and 13-3 might have two. @Weiserguy, it is possible one of the buttons on your remote does allow you to change between the available audio choices, but that if you tried pressing the correct one while tuned to the "wrong" channel (a channel without alternate audio feeds), you simply would have heard no difference and/or observed no OSD reaction on the screen.

Source for SCA-capable receivers: Metrosonix SCA Radio Receivers, SCMO radio, SCMO Radios, SCA Radio, SCA radios, Songs, Satellite radio, SCA Car Radio, SCA Car Radios, SCMO Car Radio, SCMO Car Radios, receivers, fm receivers, fm

I never would have guessed that something like this would be available in so many models and styles from a single manufacturer. They have more choices than the old Radio Shack catalogs offered for their plain AM/FM portables!

(Incidentally, XenForo doesn't document this at https://radiodiscussions.com/help/bb-codes/, but you can do (url unfurl=false)url goes here(/url) to prevent this forum software from grabbing and auto-inserting crazy remote link page titles like that into your posts. Replace the parenthesis in my example with angle brackets of course.)

 

[johndavis]

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.

IIRC, when the power was turned up on the HD sidebands at KUHF, it killed reception of the 67 SCA. So they put the radio reading service on HD-4 and on the TV subchannel and dropped the SCA.

I worked at a station where SCA was used to switch a translator to play a :30 spot to support paying the translator's tower rent in a mountain community well outside our metro, and another place where we used it for remote IFB.

But if the choice is between HD and SCA to lease out, there's more money in HD subchannels.