Re: Fwd: Re: Expanded band query...?

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Dan Strassberg wrote
>Believe me, I was _there_, being moved to a channel
>above 1500 was _not_ like winning the lottery!
<snip>
> by March 1941 and NARBA, there
>were _some_ radios that could tune past 1500, but not
>many. Remember, this was the Depression. People were NOT
>making unnecessary purchases. So owning a radio station
>that was reassigned to a frequency above 1500--even if
>you were granted significantly improved facilities--was
>not calculated to put money in your pocket for quite a
>few years. And just eight months and seven days after
>NARBA, the US was at war. Consumer items, such as
>radios, were difficult or impossible to obtain. It
>wasn't until after the end of the War that large numbers
>of radios that could tune past 1500 became available.
<snip>

Maybe I was a little too enthusiastic with the winning-the-lottery analogy
:). But, after several years, KSTP, WKBW, WTOP, WLAC, etc., had much better
facilities than if they stayed 5 kWs on 1470 or some such frequency.

The way the classification of channels in the 1510-1600 exbanded band was
agreed on, and which countries got the clear channels, was all part of the
compromising to get NARBA done. Some of the other countries, notably Cuba
but also Mexico, thought the U.S. was getting too many of the clear-channel
assignments in the first place. The inference I took from reading some
material was that the U.S. took some of the assignments in the 1500s in
return for letting go of some others. In the 1500s, originally, the U.S.
got four channels to itself, Mexico got one, Canada got one, Mexico and
Canada shared one, and Cuba (1540) got one. Someday I'll figure out exactly
what the almost immediate fiddling around with 1540 was all about, that
ended up giving it to the Bahamas while Cuba got something else (?), but
that also let the U.S. put Waterloo onto the channel as a I-B.