Re: DID ANY STATIONS END, SIGN OFF THIS YEAR?
dhett said:
I do believe they were once on the air. Your transport stream read is almost 18 months old; are they still on the air?
I just e-mailed my source and asked him to check it for me. He should hopefully get back to me sooner rather than later. I've asked him if he can nab me updated TSReader data on it as well, but last time I asked he was having trouble getting TSReader to work.
My skepticism isn't aimed at you, or at SiliconDust, but rather the owner of KPIF, KM Communications, who seems to have a bad reputation, based on a comment from another local LPTV operator I spoke with, and I can personally attest to this - an even worse track record. This is the company that takes their station off the air and never notifies the FCC. Or, in the case of KCFG Flagstaff AZ, never operates the station, but tells the FCC that it's on air, even after closing down its local studio/office. They recently lost their license for KPIF satellite KBEO Jackson WY.
Ah, I follow you. Yeah, KM doesn't have an amazing track record, but they definitely had KPIF converted to digital, which is more than can be said for most of their other stations.
KBEO probably wasn't making any money and never would have. It's one thing to have KCFG, which could at least claim satellite carriage into Phoenix, but KBEO would have been only on satellite in a tiny market by comparison. I don't blame them for that letting that one lapse.
All of that said, there really is no excuse for KCFG.
As I said, I'm surprised that KM hasn't already filed the license to cover or petitioned to restore the license. It's been well over a month since the FCC revoked it. Has the station been on the air lately?
I'm tempted to believe SiliconDust. If a station vanishes, it usually disappears from their listing within a week, tops. WEAU is already without screencaps after only a day.
As for SiliconDust, the readings for Flagstaff and Prescott show KAZT as RF channel 36. That's only in Phoenix. Prescott gets KAZT on RF channel 7 and Flagstaff shouldn't get it at all - except in analog on channel 30. The Flagstaff listing misses KNAZ, KTVW-CD and KFPH, while the Prescott listing misses K39IT. Only KTVW is a recent addition. That's what I'm claiming as inaccurate.
Ah, okay. What you're observing is that nobody is using a SiliconDust device in those areas. That's why you're missing most local stations.
As for KAZT, I don't know this for sure, and it's pure speculation, but here goes my guess. I've seen this in a few areas, and it's especially problematic in places like Salt Lake City. I think that SiliconDust uses the TSID to determine what station its receivers are looking at. So it knows that KAZT is licensed to Prescott, and knows it should cover an area roughly surrounding Prescott, but the only TSID it's seeing for KAZT is on channel 36 in Phoenix. So the server is duplicating the channel 36 listing into areas where it thinks KAZT should be, even though it's not actually seeing the main KAZT signal. Does that make sense?
- Trip
In fact, it removes stations that go off the air pretty quickly, usually. I'm watching to see how long it takes to remove WEAU from its listings; so far, 13-1 already has no new screencaps, and 13-2 is down from 3 last night to just one left today. 
