Not Enough FM Channels For Boston Proper & Close-in Suburbs

[Laurence Glavin]

I have an el-cheapo rotary-dial radio in my salle de bains, and it absolutely positively cannot pick up WBOS-FM 92.9 (not that I would ever want to) thanks to nearby WXRV-92.5. Other .4-separated stations do better: 104.1 Boston/104.5 Fitchburg; 106.3 Nashwah*/106.7 Boston. *(When 900 AM returned to Nashua after a lengthy period of silence, the station was then known as WMVU, and its jingle went "WMVU, Nashwah)

 

[4CX1000A]

say we used an outdated mode like AM, and 15khz wide audio like FM. and left 5khz on either side of it for filter rolloff (like the 5khz between WBZ's audio and IBOC sidebands). this would be one station every 40khz, or 20 times as many stations. say we switched to a mode that didnt duplicate sidebands, and fit this in 20khz of space.. 40 times as many stations. or how about DRM at 10khz per station... 80 times as many stations. then say say we used 64 to 88 MHz, putting us around 200 times as many stations as now

Here's the deal: you can have relatively few stations, run locally, with live announcers, real news departments, and people who support their communities and play active roles in local affairs; or you can have lots of automated jukeboxes and satellators programmed by people hundreds of miles away who don't know Medford from Medfield and can't tell you the time of day, let alone keep you informed about important current events. Beginning with Docket 80-90 back in the 1980's, the trend has been toward ever more, ever cheaper channels of programming, and Sirius XM, HD-2, and Internet streams have only accelerated the process.

The problem with more and more stations serving thinner and thinner slices of population is that few of any of them will be able to deliver more than minimal service: wall to wall music, satellite-delivered talk shows, maybe network news at the top of the hour, if that. Even if you consolidate half of them under a new owner and call it "Radio, Incorporated", the principle still applies, because no single channel is going to generate enough revenue to make any level of service beyond the bare minimum worthwhile.

The people of greater Boston may need more and better access to the pubic airwaves, but they surely don't need any new radio stations. Not in my view, at least.

 

[carmen]

understandably, are only so many stations per market. why should you need to be in the market to hear it?

lets look at alternatives. a 3G phone with unlimited data run about 90 dollars a month. on top of this, you are still capped at 5GB. at 0.016 MB/second you will hit your bandwidth limit in 3 days. so you can listen to out-of-town stations at most 10% of the time, or risk being charged exhorbitant over-limit fees or being capped at 56k and no longer able to listen due to bandwidth

think of all the power consumption of all the PCs and phones, cell towers, wireless routers, and cable modems vs a simple radio reciever, which can be implemented with a few transistors or a commodity pennies per unit IC

my proposal is 15khz wide FM stations in mono, at 20 khz spacing from 64 to 88 MHz. existing chips in cellphones can already recieve this. these 1200 new stations will each broadcast from the top of the Pru or 1 financial at 10 watts a piece, at a total power output roughly equal or slightly less than a single commercial station currently located there. since your station will only incur 10 watts of power consumption besides it's miniscule share of the commodity PC+FPGA powering the 24 MHz sample-rate DAC, and there are 1200 channels available, they will be quite cheap. and WFMU will for example pay the nominal fee to get their signal on air in other markets besides NY. so you will no longer need your battery-hungry phone and expensive data plan to listen

of course it goes without saying that other stations besides WFMU will discover this free market opportunity and we'll soon have a full XM Style menu of stations on air, but a much more organic set of actual stations with actual histories and libraries and passionate participants, not robo-programming simulacra which would have baudrillard itching to crush up an ipod or twelve

it's obvious we should do something like this. why can i only get BBC worldservice for a few hours a day in the middle of the night? come on.. ridiculous