KKBQ HD-3

[Michi]

The reason all maps don't match the signals is that Houston is notorious for having translators that do not conform with their license.

There's is actually a technical reason. When you enter a directional antenna pattern into the FCC form, you enter 36 field values that represent the amount of power in each of 36 cardinal directions, spaced every 10 degrees. Since 1999, a system called CDBS was used for electronic filing for FM. This was changed to the LMS system in 2019. One thing that CDBS had was the ability to enter the tabulations for a directional antenna and then you could take those values and "rotate" them a certain number of degrees. CDBS also supported "standard patterns" for commonly used directional antennas. LMS, on the other hand, does not support rotation. The translator above was granted their construction permit in the CDBS days and at that time, they did request a rotation (which is reflected in the RadioLocator map). When it came time for their license application, electronic filing moved to LMS and since LMS does not support the ability to rotate, we ended up with the non-rotated pattern you see on FCCdata.org. We show what the FCC gives us. This is one of many shortcomings that I have identified with the conversion of CDBS to LMS. The FCC and their outside contractors really dropped the ball on this. I offered to provide user acceptance testing of LMS from an industry standpoint.. the FCC wanted nothing of it. I think they were just in a rush to get a half-baked product out and now to get something fixed, it takes a major federal bureaucracy.

 

[Michi]

The home.recnet.com URL has not been used for over 10 years... it's from back in the days when the database services and the content based services were on different servers. No one should be using that URL, but since the links are out on many other pages, I have kept the redirect up. I just tried to address the certificate issue.

On the issue of fccdata.org not working with VPN providers and some ISPs, I think the issue has to do with timeouts that are imposed by those providers. Sometimes, fccdata.org does have to go to third party providers (such as the FCC's contour API) and that can result in delays. In some cases (such as the dialscape-display of all stations around a particular city), multiple database inquiries slow down the search. This site is built for content and not necessarily for speed. Honestly, I do not receive many complaints about this timeout issue and I personally, have never experienced it.

 

[davideduardo]

There's is actually a technical reason. When you enter a directional antenna pattern into the FCC form, you enter 36 field values that represent the amount of power in each of 36 cardinal directions, spaced every 10 degrees. Since 1999, a system called CDBS was used for electronic filing for FM. This was changed to the LMS system in 2019. One thing that CDBS had was the ability to enter the tabulations for a directional antenna and then you could take those values and "rotate" them a certain number of degrees. CDBS also supported "standard patterns" for commonly used directional antennas. LMS, on the other hand, does not support rotation. The translator above was granted their construction permit in the CDBS days and at that time, they did request a rotation (which is reflected in the RadioLocator map). When it came time for their license application, electronic filing moved to LMS and since LMS does not support the ability to rotate, we ended up with the non-rotated pattern you see on FCCdata.org. We show what the FCC gives us. This is one of many shortcomings that I have identified with the conversion of CDBS to LMS. The FCC and their outside contractors really dropped the ball on this. I offered to provide user acceptance testing of LMS from an industry standpoint.. the FCC wanted nothing of it. I think they were just in a rush to get a half-baked product out and now to get something fixed, it takes a major federal bureaucracy.

Thank you for a valuable post!

And to everyone: Let's welcome Michi as a co-moderator, specializing in LPFM and translator information. This post shows how much we can all learn from Michi!