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Translator station coverage question

J

jd

I'm not in television. I'm familiar with FCC rules for radio, so perhaps someone on the TV side can answer this one. Are the rules for serving a "community of license" that much different with a TV station that isn't "full-power"?

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area on channel 25 you'll find K25FW, transmitting from one of the towers at Cedar Hill. It's officially listed as a low-power UHF translator licensed to Corsicana. Here's their "service area" on a map from the FCC website: www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/FMTV-service-area?x=TX494289.html

Okay, Corsicana isn't even on the map. Get a bigger map and you'd find it about 45 miles southeast of K25FW's transmitter site. How is Corsicana "served" by this station if their on-air signal comes nowhere close to it?
 
jd said:
I'm not in television. I'm familiar with FCC rules for radio, so perhaps someone on the TV side can answer this one. Are the rules for serving a "community of license" that much different with a TV station that isn't "full-power"?

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area on channel 25 you'll find K25FW, transmitting from one of the towers at Cedar Hill. It's officially listed as a low-power UHF translator licensed to Corsicana. Here's their "service area" on a map from the FCC website: www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/FMTV-service-area?x=TX494289.html

Okay, Corsicana isn't even on the map. Get a bigger map and you'd find it about 45 miles southeast of K25FW's transmitter site. How is Corsicana "served" by this station if their on-air signal comes nowhere close to it?
Click to expand...

FCC regulation 73.685(a) establishes minimum field strengths which full-power stations must provide across the "...entire principal community to be served:". There is no such regulation for LPTV stations; 74.737(a) says the applicant for a new LPTV "...shall endeavor to select a site that will provide a line-of-sight transmission path to the entire area indended to be served..." but doesn't seem to prohibit the issuance of a permit if that endeavor fails.

I think it was acknowledged from the start that TV translators wouldn't always serve an entire community, and wouldn't always need to. For example, several translators were built in NYC in the 1970s to cover areas of the city whose reception would be blocked by the World Trade Center. They didn't *need* to cover areas that *weren't* blocked. Out West, often the area covered by a translator would be a number of ranches, or the lodging area of a national park - there would be no municipality that could qualify as a "principal community". So it made sense to not extend the city-of-license rules to translators.

Of course, the LPTV service arose from the TV translator service.

What happened in Corsicana/Dallas is by no means unusual. For quite some time, the FCC would allow someone to move a LPTV a considerable distance as a minor change - just like moving to a different tower 2 miles away. One example is a Ludington, Mich. LPTV which received permission to change channel and move across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee, becoming WBWT-LP 38. This is nowhere near the longest move ever authorized.
 
Thanks for the explanation. I had a feeling the FCC rules were rather liberal on this kind of thing.
 
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