"Satellators" in 88-92 only?
I presume this is in response to
@fybush 's post, so I'll tag him here.
They serve no purpose except for a waste of FM spectrum that could be bought out to translate an AM, an HD2, or better yet, off the air entirely!
LOL about having three CSN's in your town, but exactly my point as well.
At least the 107.9 K-LOVE in Sunnyside is relayed from KRKL-93.3 in Walla Walla. With Positive Life Radio (the local Christian station here), all translators are also relayed directly from full-power stations in-state or in a nearby state (like the 105.5 in Union OR that relays KGTS-91.3).
And yet any translator of a national station misses the point, and even the FCC's definiton, although better, still fails to prevent the overkill of the FM band.
Going back to the FCC rules would be a good place to start, but an overhaul would be better. A good chunk of the translators exist because building an FM booster station would be a big amount of interference (just ask Greenville, North Carolina, and Rapid City, SD), but hopefully some useful research goes into that new Max-casting protocol, which would allow translators to switch to boosters without the interference factor (or have it severely limited).
Crain, I have heard your town described as a "desert inside the mountains". Is that how you would describe it? Anyways, the Yakima valley would be a useful test for those CSN translators because of the terrain. Then, you have a lot of FM translators of AM stations. Clearly, this is a different category altogether, but they can also be improved. Of course the ideal is to have a full-power FM, like WSBB Atlanta, or WCFS Chicago, or WFAN New York, to compliment the AM, but even I have to admit that we just don't have the space necessary to do that. Even so, AM translators can do better. Specifically, KRVN Lexington and WAKY Louisville employs several FM translators to cover a wider area than what one full-power FM can reach anyways. In WAKY's case, some translators are even outside of the AM's coverage area (because of that nasty directional null). I feel like the way forward would be to allow translators up to the 0.5 mv/m signal on AM, in the style of KRVN, or even KOA, instead of just one translator. It might actually be time to allow an upgrade on the wattage of some rural translators.
As for translators of HD subchannels, we wouldn't need them if we marketed HD correctly, but considering that a poll of consumers would get a lot of "What's an HD radio, isn't that Satellite?" type of responses, then we will need translators for the long run, but again, they could be overhauled. I consistently complain when a parent station isn't on while the translator is blasting away (hence this thread), however we all might have to consider a future where the AM station or HD subchannels just sign off, leaving us with the translators being the only form of operation.
Going back to that AM one, I forgot to mention that it would be nice if the FCC went back to doing its job of reducing the overall RFI noise on the bands, and that would solve half the problem right there. Unless that occurs, we need to rethink our translators.
