In this letter to the editor, the author responds to Carl Dabelstein’s letter, “Use Your Call Letters!” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.
With all due respect to Carl, acknowledging him both as a radio amateur and DXer, it’s my opinion that the station identification rule is obsolete, for the same reason that he is upset about the way most stations handle the same.
I understand why he would have an emotional attachment to the top of the hour legal station identification, but even the FCC itself relies on other means to identify stations in the field.
Call letters are pretty much just a tracking method for the paperwork these days.
Some stations — including the one I program in Albuquerque, KRKE(AM)— do use its calls around the clock, but this is a case where we are running a classic hits format using the branding of what was the top-40 station in the market “back in the day”.
But that’s not a reason to make their use mandatory, as Carl appears to suggest, throughout the hour.
Sorry, Carl, but out here in the real world, where we have had to adjust to the changing landscape with competition from non-broadcast platforms, making DXers happy is the least of our concerns.
I’d be happy to do away with the legal ID just so there’s one less thing for me to worry about in terms of FCC compliance.
A word cloud of approximately 13,220 U.S. FM station callsigns, scaled for ERP and market size. From the RadioLand app project.
I read with much interest the K.M. Richards’ Letter: “The Art of the Top of the Hour ID” appearing on Radio World’s website.
As a long time broadcast band long-distance “DX” listener, I find that the TOH Rule is perhaps the most violated of all the FCC’s rules.
When I began participating in the BCB DX listening hobby as a teenager at the close of the 1950s, it was quite easy to identify a particular station to whom I was listening. There was so much live, local programming that IDs were often made every few minutes.
Even if there were not frequent call letter IDs, identification of the station was fairly easy because of the locations given in various advertisements, weather information or news reports.
In recent years, local programming has become a thing of the past, so for much of the broadcast day, the only IDs that occur are at the top of the hour, which as most DX listeners know, often comes about 15 seconds after the signal has faded out!
Many stations fail to ID at the TOH as required, or ID only with a slogan, such as “Country Corners 1510,” or only with the ID of their FM sister station, which may also only be a slogan, such as “The Canyon 95.3.”
At least on the FM band, those stations with RDS capability, may actually be reporting their call letters, even if not vocally.
In this letter to the editor, the author responds to our SmartBrief Tuesday trivia question on what the FCC considers as a legal top of the hour identification. If you aren’t subscribing to our free daily newsletter, you definitely should!
The SmartBrief trivia question this week and the example of WGTZ’s legal ID that mentions “Eaton Dayton alive” — which has been doing that TOH legal with that added verbiage for decades now — reminded me of how I buried a legal ID way back in 1978.
I was the program director at KAAP(AM/FM) in Santa Paula, Calif., in the Oxnard-Ventura market, just north of Los Angeles.
The AM and FM simulcast most of the time, only breaking the AM away for California Angels baseball, Los Angeles Rams football and UCLA football and basketball, and some paid religious programming that followed the Sunday morning public affairs block.
But the owners hated our community of license, largely because Santa Paula was generally regarded as a small town centered around agriculture, mostly citrus and avocados.
And our competitors would deride us as “that little Santa Paula station” to prospective advertisers.
We had a Ventura post office box as our mailing address and a foreign exchange phone number which was a local call not only to Santa Paula but also to both Ventura and Oxnard.
But that legal ID still stood out like a sore thumb. Until I got there.
Before KAAP-FM had even gotten on the air, the AM had been successful with the ill-fated NBC’s News and Information Service.
The owners kept some semblance of that after the simulcast was established post-NIS by continuing to do top of the hour news every hour, 24/7, with ABC Information and local news in both drive-times and noon, three-minute local newscasts the rest of the day and one-minute headlines from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m.
So I “hid” the legal. For example:
“(time) at KAAP. Ventura County weather: (forecast) Current area temperatures from KAAP AM & FM: Santa Paula __ degrees, __ in Ventura, and in Oxnard __ degrees. I’m (name), KAAP News. Now more of Ventura County’s favorite music on FM 97 and AM 14, KAAP!”
And, we got the call letters four times over about 20 seconds.
We even fooled the FCC field inspectors, which is another story from my chequered past.
A photo collage provided by the author. Click to enlarge.
Dear Editor: In the Opinion section of the Dec. 17 issue, you printed my comments on tower safety. In that letter I noted that radio services beyond broadcasting would also do well to enforce safety practices in their tower work.
As I noted then, the San Diego contest club, NX6T, has access to the “antenna farm” at WA6TQT’s mountaintop location in Anza, Calif., but had suffered for years from a failed 160-meter TRI-Square phasing cable.
Here’s a quick update.
A couple of weeks ago, a tower climber was hired to replace the phasing cable. The center conductor had literally come apart.
Instead of paying $1,000 or more, it cost us about $800 for four hours of tower climbing (and rappelling back down) to replace the cabling.
I tested the antenna during Saturday evening’s Stew Perry 160-Meter contest. While the antenna now radiates better than it ever has in years, the phasing network at the base still needs adjustment: pointing the antenna S-E seemed to make no difference, while several stations in the Caribbean and on the north tip of South America were worked with the antenna pointing N-E. Go figure.
As I said in December, if the wires had been hoisted properly in the first place, it would have been a simple matter to lower them and make repairs. But the important thing is that our repairs, when finally completed, were conducted safely with no accident complications.
Was it worth the 3-1/2 year wait for the right opportunity? We shall know with more certainty on the weekend of March 27 when we run the CQ WPX SSB contest.
I stand four square opposed to the major tenets of Dr. Jamison’s thesis of disbanding the Federal Communications Commission.
The venerable institution is already wracked with the debilitating disease of deregulation with its predictable negative effects on the public which, it must be emphasized, owns the U.S. spectrum.
In contradistinction to all other media which can proliferate without limit, the RF spectrum is a limited and precious resource. That the public is viewed as tepid about OTA radio is spurious and obviously wishful thinking by non-OTA interests.
The most egregious abandonment of technical responsibility occurred with the reduction in field engineering offices and engineering personnel.
We technical practitioners witness commonplace cynicism with regard to the FCC rules and regulations as mere suggestions to be ignored if inconvenient to obey, in AM and FM broadcasting as well as land mobile and marine frequencies.
The reason?
Identical to the effects of “defunding the police” resulting in increase in crime. Fewer cops yields more criminals. Intuitively obvious except to some.
In earlier times, operating a broadcasting station involved adherence to the notion of public interest, convenience and necessity as justification for licensure.
Stations served their communities of license with valuable news and information as well as entertainment and commercials.
The Local Studio Rule gave the public access to their air waves for a variety of purposes. Both now gone; many stations thumb their noses at their COL but wonder why their shunned and disowned audience fled to other more friendly media.
Sharp limits on multiple station ownership ensured a variety of content and political viewpoints on the radio.
Loosening those restrictions resulted in group conglomerates airing homogenized voice tracked plastic pap, devoid of any semblance of “live-and-local” flavor which once endeared listeners to those stations.
Currently the call is going out for total freedom of station aggregation, while the two big players contemplate or re-enter bankruptcy.
Dr. Jamison’s most egregious recommendation is to fragment the numerous functional entities of the FCC and distributing them among other existing federal agencies. It would appear he fails to realize the need for unit cohesion within the ranks.
Having those functions under one umbrella provides the opportunities for cross-pollinating of thoughts and ideas contributing to problem resolution, et.al., facilitated by simple physical relatedness within one facility. In contrast, federal agencies are notoriously indifferent or downright hostile to extra-departmental influences.
In conclusion: I recommend fortifying the FCC with sharper focus on its core missions of fair licensure; prosecuting flagrant rules violators; streamlining online reporting applications which seem to grind to a halt at deadline time; maintaining language and image censorship rules, etc.
Furthermore, I recommend reintroducing PICN as fundamental to retaining licensure; reintroducing the Local Studio Rule; retaining present ownership limits; hiring more engineers and fewer lawyers; and focusing more on RF OTA than wired media.
More cops mean better rules compliance when it’s understood that big brother is watching. Big brother has been asleep for a while.
A strong FCC is more needed today than anytime in history.
— James B. Potter, owner, Cutting Edge Engineering of Missouri
As a meteorologist in the heart of the U.S. “tornado alley”, it is disheartening to see a radio-based alerting system deemed unnecessary because cell phones and internet are naively trusted to replace it.
This cost-saving decision is destined to bring grief to Canadian families.
Weather radios can alert for more than just weather. Raging wildfires, wind and floods destroy cell phone towers, fiber optic cables, phone lines and electricity wires.
Yet, via weather radio, a radio frequency broadcast can be sent into homes, schools and businesses year round to announce evacuations, shelter-in-place and weather warnings. Public alert-certified weather radios have battery backup, so they will run several days even when power is completely out.
Will your cell phone or internet be operating in that power outage? It’s a vital question because there are numerous examples of such tragedies.
Anyone who went to bed thinking their cell phone would alert them had no idea their cell service was cut off.
Weather radio broadcasts, on the other hand, awakened residents eleven minutes before the tornado arrived, saving many lives. Nineteen people died in this well-warned tornado.
A strongly worded flash flood warning was sent out via weather radio almost two hours before the river breached its banks, but no one in the camps was using a weather radio. As in Cookeville, they were relying solely on their cell phones, which failed to adequately alert them.
The Heaven’s 27 Foundation, named for the 27 girl campers who drowned, persuaded the passing of a state law in Texas that now requires weather radios in all camps and RV parks.
Similar legislation is proposed in four other US states.
Fire weather
Finally, a story about wildfires, which may be Canada’s most impactful threat.
Sonoma County, on the north end of San Francisco Bay, is part of California’s wine country. In the overnight hours of Oct. 8–9, 2017, shifting 60 mph winds redirected a wildfire into the city of Santa Rosa.
Despite the best efforts of a cell phone alerting system, many sleeping residents were unaware the fire was coming. Almost 3,000 homes were destroyed and 22 people died.
One does not need a crystal ball to see that tornadoes, floods and wildfires will continue to affect Canada, and with these threats comes the specter of death.
When your nearest cell tower, your fiber optic internet connection, your landline phone and your electricity are burned, flooded or blown out, only a radio-based alert signal will be able to get through.
Time and again, when all else fails, radio works. The cost of maintaining, improving, and expanding Weatheradio Canada is a pittance in comparison to the cost of lives lost when warnings are not received.
I hope the people of Canada can persuade Ottawa to reverse course and continue Weatheradio Canada, before they up with their own Heaven’s 27 group.
— Bruce Jones, meteorologist/national spokesperson, Midland Radio Corporation
Connexion
