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WSB vs WABC
- Thread starter Radig
- Start date
Primarily because they became billionaires for a reason. It wasn't from throwing money away.
If the local county or city will give you money to build or renovate a new stadium, isn't that a better deal than owning a bunch of radio stations? These days, that's an easy answer.
1) I never got the attraction of "Cousin Brucie" and am happy he is off SXM
2) The future of AM is digital, many of us won't live long enough to see it happen, but if you have ever listened to a AM in HD it is pretty damn good. I miss WBZ-A news radio in HD, and in Boston WSRO is digital only at this point and has a great coverage area with not a lot of power or tower...and it sounds really good
3) WABC-A is the ultimate vanity project.... it exists only because someone is willing to run it at a (huge) loss without having to worry about making payroll, etc etc etc. .
4) as real estate in outlying areas where AM towers are becomes more valuable than the station itself, licenses will be turned in. When I was at MRBI the VP of Engineering came in one day and started spouting off about building a new tower site, I looked him right in the eyes and said it was never going to happen, there was nowhere where we could cover our COL on 76 watts night power that could be bought,let alone constructed for under 2M and that is assuming you could get past the NIMBYS. the tower that was in the middle of a junk yard, where our radials were disturbed and when cars got piled too high our signal went to sh*t is now in the middle of a commercial development as the junk yard was closed, remediated, and now is commercial property that a friend of mine owns.
Very similar to the pre Ed Perry ( he has since sold WMEX) situation 1510 WMEX Boston had.
AM Stereo didn't work, Expanded band is a joke, many AM HD's shut the HD off as there were not enough receivers to justify the cost. It is time to mandate HD recievers in cars on both AM and FM and give AM owners a reason (or a fighting chance) to survive..... there are only so many voids where a FM translator can fit... and even then many applicants were denied.... the future if any is digital IMHO
2) The future of AM is digital, many of us won't live long enough to see it happen, but if you have ever listened to a AM in HD it is pretty damn good. I miss WBZ-A news radio in HD, and in Boston WSRO is digital only at this point and has a great coverage area with not a lot of power or tower...and it sounds really good
3) WABC-A is the ultimate vanity project.... it exists only because someone is willing to run it at a (huge) loss without having to worry about making payroll, etc etc etc. .
4) as real estate in outlying areas where AM towers are becomes more valuable than the station itself, licenses will be turned in. When I was at MRBI the VP of Engineering came in one day and started spouting off about building a new tower site, I looked him right in the eyes and said it was never going to happen, there was nowhere where we could cover our COL on 76 watts night power that could be bought,let alone constructed for under 2M and that is assuming you could get past the NIMBYS. the tower that was in the middle of a junk yard, where our radials were disturbed and when cars got piled too high our signal went to sh*t is now in the middle of a commercial development as the junk yard was closed, remediated, and now is commercial property that a friend of mine owns.
Very similar to the pre Ed Perry ( he has since sold WMEX) situation 1510 WMEX Boston had.
AM Stereo didn't work, Expanded band is a joke, many AM HD's shut the HD off as there were not enough receivers to justify the cost. It is time to mandate HD recievers in cars on both AM and FM and give AM owners a reason (or a fighting chance) to survive..... there are only so many voids where a FM translator can fit... and even then many applicants were denied.... the future if any is digital IMHO
Since the HD technology is proprietary, and all who produce receivers capable of tuning HD stations must pay a fee to one company, I'm pretty sure the government cannot mandate that any more than it can mandate SiriusXM capability or, for that matter, analog AM. And we're already seeing radios being produced for in-car use without that band. The government should have no role in what is a technological evolutionary struggle. Let the strongest live, the weakest die.
Certainly. I was making the same point about "why did no local owner step up to run these stations as a hobby?" The ones that are here weren't interested.
And the real estate gets really attractive if it's a nice large tract of land containing a directional multiple tower array, versus a single tower. And it's the stations with complicated night patterns with nasty nulls that seem to be struggling the most.
There was one directional station in Marietta (can't remember which one) that sold its land (or had its land sold out from under them, literally) and moved (or had to move) to a single tower and lost most of their night coverage and even some of their day coverage.
The exception is when the land is in a flood plain (WDWD, WCNN, all those AM towers off of Cheshire Bridge including WQXI's array) and isn't usable for much else.
Has anyone tried using DAB on AM? I think DAB is an FM-only standard.
You make a good point--I thought that maybe the FCC could mandate HD Radio like it mandated the AM x-band (for all AM receivers, but not a mandate for the AM band altogether), but not if it mandates paying royalties to HD Radio. The FCC never mandated FM stereo, which (IIRC) was patented by GE and Zenith, although it did say that it (the GE/Zenith system) was the only FM stereo system authorized.
When do the HD Radio patents expire? It's certainly been out long enough. That has to be a factor.
Incidentally, Tesla removed the (analog) AM radio from its cars because all that electrical gear causes an incredible amount of RFI. How much can AM HD Radio withstand RFI? How much error correction does it have? I would imagine most electric cars would have similar issues.
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It depends on when they were registered. Typically a patent is good for 20 years. Patents can be renewed. The only reason the FM patent wasn't renewed is the Armstrong family chose not to renew it. The fact that iBiquity was sold recently to a patent licensing company says to me that they intend to renew it.
You assume AM has a future. The fact is that most AMs in larger (top 100) markets don't cover the whole metro, so going digital or doing anything else will not help.
I doubt he looses money; the business contacts the owner has pay big dividends.
If HD is mandated, then car makers will simply stop putting all radios in cars!
In any case, as I said, most AMs in larger markets (where a huge majority of Americans live) don't cover the market fully today. Making them digital will not help. There is a Spanish saying, "A monkey in a silk dress is still a monkey".
The real solution is to adopt new standards on FM next adjacent channel separations to what is used in almost all the rest of the world, allowing ALL AM stations to migrate in their market to a permanent and competitive FM signal. Canada and Mexico have done it, and old tech regulations are the main obstacle.
In fact, if AM stations with translators were allowed to keep the translator and shut down the AM, there would be as many as half of all AMs gone within a year.
I hope AM has a future.... but "Ancient Modulation" is at the point where it has to do something or be gone
The problem is that the government is in effect giving a windfall benefit to companies that didn't have the sense to avoid AM in the first place. Plus it opens the door for LPFMs and other groups to demand equal treatment. Creating more clutter on the already-crowded FM band.
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Many AM licensees date back to before FM was viable. They also date to when signals that today are inadequate were major players in their markets. By the time they realized that nose, market redefinitions and population spread had reduced market reach, the available FMs were taken.
All it takes is for an AM rescue plan to be created and limited only to existing AM stations. It also requires changes in second adjacent overlap and other resultant tech rule modifications in many cases, just making translators permanent but with a higher power limit will suffice.
The great thing about giving AM stations translators is the power level of those translators is mostly inconsequential. So in your plan, do you propose granting Cox a 50K FM drop in as compensation for shutting down the AM? As I said, that's quite a windfall, and how does your accountant handle that government grant for tax purposes?
Patents cannot be renewed beyond the 20 year timeframe, but they can be allowed to lapse before the 20 years is up by not paying the annual maintenance fees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_States
However, after doing some research, that might be moot as a practical matter. The last critical patent in effect for HD Radio was issued in 2010 (so looking at 2030 for starters). Now, it is possible that iBiquity could keep making new novel claims on its patents to keep getting patents reissued (or, rather, have a new patent issued based on new novel claims). But eventually that will run out--and someone could challenge the novelty of the new patent claims in the meantime. How soon, and how motivated a third party might be, is another matter.
More of a barrier would be iBiquity's software, which is covered by copyright and probably the DMCA if there is encryption involved. Copyright essentially lasts forever, particularly as it relates to software (the software will be long obsolete by the time copyright runs out).
A couple of workarounds exist here; someone sufficiently motivated could pull a Linux or OpenOffice and make a clean-room clone of iBiquity's software. The encryption would be tougher to make compatible, due to the secret keys involved. If the software is encrypted, that's not a problem (see OpenOffice, and you can use the expired patents as a cheat sheet). If the signal (including the codec) is encrypted, then that is an issue. What you would then be able to make is an HD Radio clone system that's not interoperable with HD Radio, and nobody wants that.
It looks like the DRM consortium pitched to the FCC in 2020 specifically as a digital radio option for AM: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/106182...ssion-ExParte-on-MB-Docket-19-311_2020618.pdf
DRM's argument was that DRM is a more open standard and entails a lot less in terms of royalties:
If the base concept is making permanent the translators, then any addition would likely have to be restricted to the equivalent of a Class A and subject to existing stations. Probably any permanent allocation would have to guarantee a safety zone to existing stations in the event they had to move transmitter sites... something like a 10 km radius, for example.
A new station grant or an upgrade that increases value is not generally capitalized beyond costs. that is why stations that have had the same owner since founding don't have a large value on the books as they did not pay for the intangible value of the license other than small fees and legal costs.
Any major station that wanted a good FM signal likely has a full B or C they can use. The idea of "rescue" plans is to allow stations that would prefer shutting their AM down if the translator were guaranteed permanence. Right now, a move in power, height or location by an A, B or C can force a translator to move frequency, transmitter site or to even close.
The FCC has made major moves of UHF TV to accommodate cellular operators using "public interest" as the reasoning. I see no reason why t hey could not do the same for AM's by rearranging the FM band. In fact, with cellular being a paid service, granting improvements to radio which is a free service seems to be even more in the interest of the consumer.
But there is a difference in value between and AM & FM, otherwise all radio stations would sell for the same price. So if an AM owner is granted an FM as part of this plan, and then sells that new FM to someone else, there is acquired value.
The FCC would also have to change ownership rules to accommodate the new FMs in the markets. I imagine they'll get pushback on that from the usual people.
I still think that the FCC could repurpose TV channels 5 and 6 for an extended FM band (78-88MHz), as channels 5 and 6 aren't great for DTV, although that would require new radio sets. I also wonder how much room there is left in VHF 7-13 and the UHF band after the multiple truncations of the UHF band and the TV repack.
Just a friendly reminder that Japan already has established the 76-90 FM band, and there is a slight chance that your radio already goes down to 76. Two of my radios actually goes down to 64 Mhz, making me wonder just how far we could expand that FM band if we put our minds to it.
This idea has been proposed many times over the last 20 years and the FCC has consistently said no. They're not interested in expanding the FM band beyond where it is, and have placed new rules for the stations that attempt to operate at 87.7.
The question is if you're an owner, and it's your money on the line, how willing are you to be a pioneer? Because the reality is that while some radios may be able to tune lower, those radios would likely require some kind of adapter or adjustment for that to happen. And then there are all of the other radios that don't have the ability to tune lower. So the FCC says to you they're going to give you a frequency on this new expanded FM band, but they can't guarantee that everyone can receive it. It sounds like HD radio all over again.
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