Karen Johnson’s article reinforces discussions a fellow engineer and I had in the 1980-90’s. The discussions addressed all broadcast, cell phone, amateur radio, and a common band plan for public service – government communications.

Digital AM/FM/TV was in its infancy. Cell phone modulation was in a state of flux. Amateur Radio Operators and engineers were experimenting with digital. We discussed the increasing volume of users and need to optimize spectrum use.

Changes in the Band?

Was realignment of assigned bands in the future? What would be the fiscal impact to broadcasters and how would consumers react to the analog to digital changes? Weaker analog TV gave you snow, but digital signals would either be strong or not make the receivers work.

And Who is in Control?

Would mega companies rule with unlimited funding? Would lobbyists influence FCC, and Congress, or would citizens and broadcasters be sheep unto slaughter and given no real voice? Analog broadcasting was still king, though AM was having fiscal and real estate problems. There was a concern over exposure to all forms of RF radiation. Cell phones, RF, MRI’s CT scans, and X-Ray radiation all were said to cause brain and other cancers.

We questioned if all this was a ploy by mega companies to intimidate citizens and tacitly and overtly control Congress and the FCC. What did the FCC and government want to do with all forms of broadcasting? Were they planning to shift all entertainment and communications to the Internet, effectively silencing all broadcast and private radio communications?

We realized the importance of radio in our lives as the cornerstone of quickly informing the public in emergencies, and it’s value as entertainment. Broadcast AM was plagued by natural and man-made interference and propagation.

We concluded all radio was on its death bead and it was only a matter of time before broadcasting and amateur radio met its death. It appeared cell phones would survive and most communications be shifted to other modes (the Internet.)

Broadcasting’s Headstone would read: RIP – You didn’t die without fighting.

– – –

Ronald Johnson
ronald@w2wu.com

It is the fourth quarter of the year, so – yes – we were expecting some kind of movement in the C-Band/5G battle over Mid-band spectrum, but the information recently released by the FCC was a shock.

In fact, it is not a stretch to say that those who have been following the proposed 5G expansion into the Mid-band spectrum were completely floored by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s abrupt announcement about the C-band spectrum — and the broadcast community’s reaction to said announcement.

Auction!

On Monday, November 18, Pai indicated that the FCC has decided to move forward with the C-Band Alliance’s (CBA) idea of auctioning off 280 MHz of the Mid-band frequency and giving it to broadband industry, without the assistance of the CBA.

So, Where Does the Money Go?

Instead of having a private auction of the 280 MHz (as urged by the CBA) with funds raised going to the transition of all incumbents into the remaining 200 MHz of space, the Chairman stated there will be a public auction of 280 MHz of C-Band spectrum, with the monies going into the US Treasury.

Even more surprising? The repack and planned public auction has gained the support of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and eight major broadcast compan-ies. This, in spite of no real plans announced as yet on how much of the funds raised in the repack will go to protecting the signal of C-band users in the remaining 200 MHz, and who will be in charge of distributing these funds.

The emerging plan would see satellite-delivered audio and video services currently operating on the C-Band repacked into its upper end. The downsizing of audio and video content distribution from 500 to 200 MHz will involve more than just the relocation of the Mid-band frequency (3.7-4.2 GHz). FCC officials said the plan is based on a 20 MHz “guard band” that would serve as a barrier between broadcasters and the 5G services.

A Conditional “Thumbs Up”

Though the NAB and major broadcasters (which include CBS, Fox, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Univision, NBCUniversal, A&E Television Networks and Discovery) throw their support behind the FCC, their joint statement subtly holds the FCC accountable to the incumbents who have operated within this spectrum for over three decades.

In the letter, the NAB stated, “We appreciate Chairman Pai’s commitment to protecting services delivered via the C-Band, including working to make the transition effective and workable for satellite operators and their customers, thus ensuring that services that rely on the C-band can be maintained and protected throughout the transition.”

A Task of Epic Proportions

The clearing of 300 MHz of spectrum for broadband use will be a major undertaking.

To make it happen, the NAB and broadcast companies emphasize that everyone involved must work together, and that, somehow, the FCC will need to get all parties on board, including the satellite companies that make up the rejected C-Band Alliance.

How much involvement the FCC will grant the CBA in the Mid-band repack remains to be seen. This, in spite of the fact that the CBA has spent three years and millions of dollars in research and development to create not one, but two transition plans – the only plans developed, in fact, designed to both embrace 5G and allow C-Band users to continue to send and receive programming unhindered.

To complete this transition correctly, a complex plan involving testing and oversight must be developed. To do so requires clear leadership and money – lots of it.

In their proposal, the CBA had stated that stations and satellite owners should be compensated for all costs they incur in the transition, including the purchase of filters and high-price tag items like the launch of new orbital satellites. Whether or not the FCC agrees remains to be seen.

Taking Sides

Throughout this process, the desire to quickly facilitate the deployment of 5G broadband has been the goal of nearly everyone inside the Beltway, including the White House, Congress and the FCC.

And, yes, protecting those who continue to use C-Band for content delivery has been listed as a FCC “to do.” But is this lip service, or is the FCC serious?

In his letter to Congress outlining his plan for Mid-band, Chairman Pai seems to clearly be reinforcing the import-ance of 5G and broadband users over C-Band incumbents who are contractually in the space.

Identifying the True Priorities

Pai writes, “First, we must make available a significant amount of C-Band spectrum for 5G.

“Second, we must make C-Band spectrum available for 5G quickly.

“Third, we must generate revenue for the federal govern-ment.

“And fourth, we must protect the services that are currently delivered using the C-Band so they can continue to be delivered to the American people.”

A New Favored Child

Ever since Marconi’s first transmissions in 1895, radio – followed closely by television – have been the backbone of broadcast communications in the US.

They still are.

Yet Chairman’s Pai’s list of principles the FCC plans to advance in their upcoming Rulemaking clearly gives 5G – as usual – the distinction of “favored” child.

What exactly that Rulemaking will encompass will be made evident in the next few months, perhaps sooner. But for this to work for the American public, the FCC must develop a plan that equally protects C-Band users and the rights of the satellite owners while embracing the expansion of 5G.

– – –

Karen Johnson at Linkupsat

What do you think? Let us know what is on your mind

I have been at this game pushing 60 years and today while making up Type N jumper cables with RG214 for an STL project I started thinking: “If I had a dollar for every one of these connectors that I have assembled … ”

Well, I probably did but I have spent all of those dollars.

Who Can Do It?

But here is the question: how many guys are there who can still put these together?

I am not talking about the crimp-on ones that fall off when you get them 500 feet up on a tower, but the nice Amphenol ones with the nut, the washer, the red rubber washer, and the solder on pin.

You know the ones I mean.

A Work of Art

I spend about 20-30 minutes on each one of these little jobbies – carefully measuring so the pin is exactly where it should be – that I have cut all of the wayward strands of the shield with my trusty scissors and then tightened the backing nut just right.

Ahhhh, a work of art – it should be hanging in the Louvre. I would sign it…

I would bet that a 4-foot grid dish could fall off of a tower and hang there only by the cable if it were one of my connectors.

The Attraction of the Industry

These are the kind of things that keep me in this business.

Not the digital crud. That stuff is never fixed, its just “made to work.” That is not like the 5 AM calls from the morning man at the AM daytimer in the dead of winter that the rig will not come on. You get out of a nice warm bed and race to the site to find the AC line fuses blown because the morning man was late and did not let the 575’s or the 866’s vaporize and a flashover took out the AC fuses.

Yes, that is the stuff that makes it fun, it can be fixed and I earned my keep.

Lost Art

Changing pinch rollers and motor bearings in cart machines was another engineering “high.”

Or, getting to the football stadium 5 minutes before game time to change a 12AX7 that went out in the remote amp, That is what we do.

Someone once told me that if you replace the capacitors in an ITC cart machine cue board at the same station more than once, you have been there too long. Well, I changed them three times at one of the stations I was at.

Where is the Next Gen?

I hope the next generation of broadcast engineers can have as much pleasure as I have had. But in my eyes, with this digital stuff, I think most of the future engineering travel time will be to the post office or UPS to ship items back for repair, since most of the products now come without a schematic – and most studio gear can be replaced for less than employing an engineer anymore.

Repairing the transmitter seems to be the one place where an engineer can save a lot of money for the station.

Where is the Next Gen?

The problem I see here in the Midwest anyway is a lack of the younger people interested in RF.

I think in my time, every broadcast engineer was a ham, built his own rigs and knew at least CW and AM theory. Today, I only know of one high school age person who has a ham license and his experience is the two meter HT he bought from China.

I think its imperative that we ,the few remaining real broadcast engineers search out suitable replacements before we “sign off” for good. Yea, the pay is not great, and the hours stink.

But it is a job that cannot be sent overseas so let us all see if we can find and mentor at least one kid in the field.

– – –

Ron Schacht
screamingeagle@wctatel.net

I started in radio at 13 on a Provisional license, 3rd Class at 14 and our Chief drove me 200 miles to Kansas City for my First and Radar Endorsement at 15. We were a little Ozarks 1kw daytimer but I remember feeling like I owned the airwaves. At 16 we added an FM, automated during the day, but live free-form at night. I went off to college, worked part time at some major stations in the East and Southeast then settled into a career as an Engineer for a semiconductor company.

I retired early and had an opportunity to grab up an LPFM license … and felt like I’d never been out of the driver’s seat. In the city where is live, AM is a wasteland of interference, sodium and MV lights, unregulated electronics and substations so leaky they can stall your car when driving by. I had a chance to be in the small town where I started out. Kids still gathered at the local hamburger joint and cruised the square…and I was stunned to hear them listening to the local AM station (which had obtained night time authority of 61 Watts) playing oldies rock (real oldies from the 60’s and 70’s) and the kid were loving it. The signal was clean (in my 66 Mustang) and the jock was obviously a high school kid that was having the time of his life.

AM is still there, but it’s rural, where it matters that folks get to hear the local football games, local voices on the air, and ads for burgers and shakes at the local hang out. I could go into a technical dissertation about what will save AM, technically, but I’m thinking that what IS saving AM is little local stations, with real voices, having fun…with the same magic that drew me to radio as a kid.

Yes, the FCC needs to crack down on interference, No, we do not need a proprietary HD scheme to go digital AM and break more little radio piggy banks. I had the great fortune to be in India and experience Digital Radio Mondale (DRM) and was simply stunned at the quality of broadcast and even more impressed that the station I was listening to was a traditional AM station retrofitted (inexpensively I might add).

Perhaps “old” AM is dying, but AM as a broadcast medium is still alive, thriving in small towns and has the capacity to be revived with a little forward thinking, some minor investment, and understanding the need this country has for AM broadcasters in the middle of the country where FM just doesn’t have the range or penetration that we need. The FCC requires that broadcasters operate “as a trustee of the public interest”…why not let us do so?

– – –

Gary Northrup
engineer@foxgrape.org

20+ years in service and “still needs to be worked on” ?!?!

A friend owns several stations in the mid south. According to his people the audio announcements were undecipherable.

This is Radio folks. Unintelligible audio does not work for emergency messages. I suppose those folks with Babel Fish or FIPS decoders in their ears were well served.

(Perhaps we should require that EAS messages – not tests – be sponsored. Then there would be incentive to get the audio quality right.)

I have been hammering away at this for years. More squeaky wheel : Either fix it – now – and test it to be sure (lots of effort and probably money spent) – or get rid of it! (Less expensive.) I do not take this position purely from a save-money perspective. Fire departments are expensive and necessary – but the fire truck hoses have to squirt water. Otherwise its only good for a parade.

Emergencies are – by their nature – uncontrollable and unpredictable. (“Emergency Management” is a funny and silly concept when you understand this – it should be “emergency response”.) EAS can only – at best – respond after the fact. (A tornado or flash flood warning may be exceptions to this.) A system for disseminating lifesaving information MUST be robust, reliable, and understandable.

Or it is of no value.

James Walker
fusceris@gmail.com

Yes James, unfortunately you are 100 % correct.

But that’s not only the case with the AM stations – also FM’s.

We all know that when listening to the alleged “live and local” stations be it AM or FM, the voice tracked weather from 3 days ago is still running and the voice-tracked out-of-date comments are still running. Yes, 10 stations in one building with a total of 3 on-air employees who do nothing but voice-track is what made local radio sound as bad as satellite radio and the rest of the streaming crud.

Fortunately there are still some one-owner AM stations (the big guys don’t know what AM is because most of them are fresh out of college) that still believe in live, real people on the air at least for most of the day – and they serve their community. Their loyalty shows in, like you said, listeners stopping in with pies, sold out commercial inventory, and a dedicated staff.

The hope is that the destined to fail groups with 50 stations in one building will sell off their AM holdings to local people who want to own a radio station and things will get better.

Remember back in the 60’s, FM was a toy. The guys who owned stand-alone FM’s experimented because they didn’t know what else to do, AM was the big business. Now that has reversed, FM is the big business (in this case, though, run by investors not broadcasters as AM used to be) and AM is becoming the innovative band.

I worked in radio as many did through the era of 24/7 live jocks, a News Department of a few people, maybe a record librarian, at least one First Class Radiotelephone operator, plus the myriad of support people, traffic, billing ,sales. The stations made money and were great.

It can still work, it’s just greedy investors that are the problem.

Like any physical product you buy, make more with fewer people, cheaper components and make a big profit. In 1960 you could buy a television made in the US and if you turned it on today, it would still work because the tops of the electrolytics wouldn’t have blown out like the televisions you but today do after a year.

Money, Money, Money – make as much as you can, quality be damned!!

Ron Schacht
Contract Engineer – Northcentral Iowa and Southcentral, MN
screamingeagle@wctatel.net

the Live-n-Local factor. There are many towns in rural and suburban America that would welcome and could benefit from a really local radio station […]

The real problem with EAS is not the latency or the audio quality or any other internal problem.

It is the audience – or lack thereof.

The public (the audience) neither knows nor cares what EAS is or what it does – or is supposed to do.

Mr. EAS guru: leave your office or den of preparedness and go out into the real world: a bar, a county fair, a church meeting, gather up a few non-broadcasters, and ask them what they think EAS is and does.

You will get mostly blank stares.

People are not sitting next to their entertainment radios alertly waiting for OFFICIAL NEWS AND INFORMATION. I just checked with two people here at my local public library and they didn’t know what EAS is and they’re not rushing out to buy radios.

Do you get “push” notices on your cell? Betcha do. And even if cell towers are less reliable than broadcasting (pretty risky speculation) there are lots more of them and whatever kind of hell breaks out more cell towers are likely to survive and keep working than broadcast towers just based on the population statistics.

Any system – no matter how perfect and reliable (which EAS is demonstrably not very) is of little value if people do not use it.

Maybe they should (coulda, shoulda, woulda) but that’s not the point.

Without a MASSIVE program of advertising, education, and politicking you’re not going to get the majority of the public’s attention or compliance. And that’ll cost a bunch of money. Better to spend that money, if at all, on systems already in place that people are moving to rather than away from.

5G is here now.

Also, in a free society, folx are free to be as uninformed as they wish. They may bitch and moan at the consequences of such behavior and that’s part of the freedom. The First Amendment also guarantees your right not to say anything and not to listen either.

One final point: When EAS was still a gleam in the eyes of its procreators, one of those fellows – whose office was next to mine at the time – avowed that in addition to all of the wonderful features the EAS boxes for broadcasters would have that there would be (indeed they were under active development at the time) radios for the consumer which would turn themselves on when an EAS alert was received. Like a weather radio.

In the 20+ years since I have yet to see such a consumer product. (see paragraph 7 above) Its actually kind of hard to find a stand-alone radio for sale outside of a hamfest anymore.

But my cell fone does. And I carry my cell with me.

Perception is reality. And everybody’s perspective is different. Both fire extinguishers and condoms are ineffective if improperly used or not used at all.

Same for EAS.

– – –

James Walker
fusceris@gmail.com

The article on FM tuners that will work in high RF environments is timely for me as I had a similar problem but with a 100 kW at 500 feet and a 25 kW at 200 feet, 1/2 wave spaced about 500 feet behind the studio, hearing our Class A 30 miles away was impossible even with the Dayton.

I got a test drive with one of those little Inovonics Ino 632. Works absolutely perfect and at about $800, it gives HD, RBDS and anything else you could want.

Meanwhile, here we go, letting the silly auto makers dictate broadcast facilities again.

Wrong People in Charge

GM did a great job with OZ4 (remember them)12 Volt plate tubes that had the sensitivity of a crystal set, horizontally polarized antennas in the windshield.

Later, AM stereo radios that picked up half of the stations (none of the 50 kW Clears that were using the Kahn system on the East Coast) and now, no broadcast antennas at all, just a rubber duckie stuck in the middle of the satellite radio antenna. (Yes, the car dealers get a percentage of every satellite radio contract they sell.)

I personally love AM radio. Why? Because FM for the most part is a barren wasteland of programming and over processed MP3 annoying audio. Yes it is a step above satellite radio quality but more and more that step is getting smaller and smaller.

AM on the other hand rolls off in most radios at 3-5 kHz. I expect that, I know what it will sound like, I am ok with that because that rolloff masks all of the rotten artifacts of poor digital audio.

AM is not dying from technical deficiencies. AM radio is still a place where I can find real formats, not the usual corporate crap on FM. By far, AM is now the “experimental” band where I can always find something that I like.

AM is what FM was in the 60’s its variety. Sure, there is a lot of talk, too much in my book, I listen to AM a lot between 1 and 6 am and if I liked sports, which I do not I would be in my glory.

Real Radio

But deep down in all of that nonsense is real radio, easy listening, classical, alternative rock, oldies, everything you could want.

I am an audiophile, having engineered several classical music stations – and those are critical listeners – but I do not care if it is FM, HD, quad or something from the Moon: if I do not like the format, I will not listen.

I am not saying that all FM stations stink. There are still some good ones around, mostly the ones not gobbled up by big money.

If people tolerate 8-track tapes, cassettes, satellite and MP3 audio and think it is good, they have no clue. AM failures were caused by its success: 40 minutes of commercial time an hour when FM had no commercials at all led people gravitated to FM to get away from the commercials.

Now the coin has flipped. I like AM for the coverage, no multipath, no picket fencing and I can tune in one station out here in the Midwest where the conductivity is 30 for 200 miles.

Besides what old timer cannot say that listening to a baseball game on AM in a thunderstorm does not remind them of a summer day on the front porch as a kid with Dad’s radio tuned to the Yankees game.

– – –

Ron Schacht
screamingeagle@wctatel.net

Yes, many auto manufacturers no longer offer AM radio on their car entertainment systems.

One reason is interference.  With more and more data running around inside today’s smarter cars AM radios in those cars would be full of locally generated gunk – just like in an office building.  Even with an external cowl  mounted antenna there would be problems.  Most gasoline powered cars nowadays use multiple coilpacks for ignition not the old distributor.  Again – more mf noise.  Finally I have experienced noise on AM car radios generated in the exhaust system on BMW’s.

One of my sons is a plant engineer for a biggie auto maker at an assembly plant.  His car – bought on the “brass hat” plan has no AM radio (nor a cd player.)  The company told him (he asked) that there was little or no buyer demand for those modes of entertainment.  (he missed the cd player way more than AM – he has no use for talk radio)  it doesn’t do iboc either.

Very few automobile purchasers are worried about the signal at the atu.  (including me – and I’ve designed and built a few atu’s)  I miss the cd player more too.

Fact is – most car buyers worry more about the color of the paint.

– – –

James Walker
fusceris@gmail.com