Getting rich off EAS

[Les]

Career opportunity for one who wears shirts made of horse hair:

EAS consultant.

Applicable in any market with 10 or more stations, especially
those where what engineering being done is contracted out or
run by some central office in another state.

Individual would become intimately familiar with the ever-changing
EAS rules and the participation in the system of the various
federal, state and local agencies. Also becomes intimately
familiar with the EAS equipment in use at each (contracted)
station.

Visits each station once per week to review logs and ensure
operators know how to deal properly with EAS.

Stocks supplies required by the stations (paper, print-heads,
etc.) and retails them at extortionate prices as required.

This service should be worth $1,000/month per station with,
perhaps, a 20% discount for stations clustered in a single
location.

Major impediment: To keep 10 stations fully compliant logically
might require 60+ hours per week with no holidays or vacations.

It becomes clear how the Medicare Prescription Durg Plan came
to be so difficult to understand; they modeled their manuals
on those for EAS!<P ID="signature">______________
Misanthropy:

Not just a hobby...a WAY OF LIFE!</P>

 

[tpt]

You jest, but that's just another anti-competitive advantage the chain owners have over the small independent stations.

The FCC's regulatory focus is more and more on paperwork compliance. Indeed, the new brand of "compliance specialists" don't seem to have that much engineering background. (They have engineers somewhere who can investigate particular complaints of an engineering specficic nature). A group owner can hire a secretarial type, train her how to organize the public files/EAS records, etc. to comply with FCC rules, then send her around to several clusters on a monthly schedule to insure all of these local public files are in order.

Remember the "chief operator" doesn't have to know anything about engineering. Just check logs. Although it must be a fulltime person for an AM DA.

The typical independent station doesn't have the personnel to keep up with all this nonsense.