[no subject]

*LATE UPDATE: Big City Radio - the folks behind the "Rumba 107"
quadcast of WYNY (107.1 Briarcliff Manor), WWXY (107.1 Hampton Bays),
WWYY (107.1 Belvidere NJ) and WWZY (107.1 Long Branch NJ), as well as
stations in Chicago and Los Angeles - announced Monday night that it's
putting all of its stations up for sale. Details in the next NERW!

Out on Long Island, students at Long Island University's C.W. Post
campus are upset about a cutback in their broadcast time on WCWP (88.1
Brookville), which has turned into a nearly full-time simulcast of
WLIU (88.3) from LIU's Southampton campus. The "Long Island University
Public Radio Network" now programs jazz and NPR news on WCWP 21 hours
a day, leaving only 10 PM to 1 AM for the students, and they say the
university plans to eliminate even that timeslot.

Heading upstate, WTBQ (1110 Warwick) has been granted a power increase
from 250 watts to 500 watts, still daytime non-directional.

In Albany, "DJ Biz" (aka Irving Bynum) is recovering from gunshot
wounds he suffered when he was attacked as he left the Latham studios
of WAJZ (96.3 Voorheesville), where he's the night jock, early on the
morning of October 30. Bynum was shot four times and slashed. Police
arrested a club DJ named Aristelle Thomas, charging him with attempted
murder in the attack.

Also in Albany, Ed Levine's "K-Rock" (WKRD 93.7 Scotia) has applied to
boost power just a bit, going from 1150 watts at 218 meters to 1300
watts at 215 meters.

A Utica LPTV will be changing channels: religious W27BJ has been
granted a move to channel 40, where it will be known as W40BT.

Here in Rochester, Entercom's stations (news-talk WROC 950, country
WBEE-FM 92.5, oldies WBBF 93.3 and classic hits WBZA 98.9) are
settling into their new home in the High Falls district. As of today,
they're out of the longtime WBBF/WBEE facility on the fifth and sixth
floors of the B. Forman building at Midtown Plaza and into a new
streetfront studio complex right behind public broadcaster WXXI in the
happening High Falls neighborhood. Phone numbers don't change, but
mark down the new address: 70 Commercial Street, Rochester NY 14614.

We're now a two-DTV city: your editor noticed WROC-DT (Channel 45) on
the air Monday evening, which was apparently one of its first nights
on the air, having signed on at 4:00 Halloween afternoon with 1.74 kW
under special temporary authority. (Two DTVs now, and we're "Made for
Living," too...)

(One more Rochester move: "Busta," the music director at CHR WPXY
97.9, gets moved from late nights to the earlier evening shift at
98PXY...)

Where are they now?: Cary Pall, a veteran of several stations in
Rochester, is on the beach after a long run as director of programming
and operations at Clear Channel's Toledo cluster.

And we're very sorry to report the death of Darrian Chapman, who's
still well remembered in Buffalo for his stint as sports director of
WGR (550) and WWKB (1520), where he was also the play-by-play voice of
the Buffalo Bisons. Chapman headed for the big time from Buffalo,
doing sports for WRC-TV (Channel 4) in Washington from 1995-2000 and
then moving to Chicago as lead sports anchor at WMAQ (Channel 5).

Chapman died Wednesday (Oct. 30) of apparent cardiac arrest while
playing in a pick-up hockey game at a Chicago-area rink. He was 37.

*Two bits of NEW JERSEY news: "Captain Jack" Aponte and Donna Rose
have a new radio home; the Jersey Shore radio vets are now doing
mornings on Press Broadcasting's WBHX (99.7 Tuckerton), the first big
hires for the station's new AC "Breeze" format.

Over in Warren, Ibiquity is doing day and night IBOC testing on
50-watt WI2XAM (1700), which is being heard in Warren and adjoining
towns with a loop of musical bits and frequent station IDs.

*In PENNSYLVANIA, WKAB (103.5 Berwick) has slid back to classic hits
after a stint with oldies aimed at Wilkes-Barre. Down the road in
Bloomsburg, Joe Reilly's WHLM (930) has changed its plans to build a
permanent transmitter site (it's been on an STA since returning to the
air last year), applying for 1000 watts day, 18 watts night from a
single tower and ending its plans to build a directional array.

Over in Reading, Regent made some changes at its new acquisition,
WIOV-FM (105.1 Ephrata), ousting PD Jim Radler and bringing Dick
Raymond in. Raymond's last gig was at WWFG (99.9) in Ocean City MD.

*And there's just one piece of news from CANADA, while the CRTC keeps
itself busy with the ongoing hearings for new FM licenses in
Kitchener/Waterloo: the sale of Telemedia's Quebec and Maritimes
properties to Astral Media has closed. Astral gets Telemedia's
Rock-Detente network and the other half of the Radiomedia news-talk
network (it already owned half) in Quebec (with Radiomedia then being
spun off to TVA), as well as several stations in New Brunswick and
Nova Scotia.

*And with the week's news out of the way and a week's vacation looming
(we'll be in New York City and eastern Pennsylvania November 6-14,
with the next NERW coming on November 18), we'll give you something to
think about in the meantime: a NERW Mini-Rant on digital radio and TV:


"Let's Kick the Transition Up a Notch"

I've always had a fascination with the early days of any given
broadcast technology, wondering what it must have been like to listen
to (AM) radio in 1921-22, FM and TV in the late forties or UHF around
1953-54. But I came along too late, and all those technologies were
fairly mature long before I learned how to use them. Until now, the
best I've been able to do is to boast about having been on the
Internet since 1990, and that's not quite the same thing. 

Now we're on the verge of something truly new: the move of our entire
broadcast spectrum from analog to digital. And if you're in the right
frame of mind about it, the whole thing just might be as exciting as
those early days of analog broadcasting.

Up here in backwater Rochester, digital TV has just arrived on the
scene within the last few weeks, and in fact it was just tonight that
I had my first chance to see the local DTV signal. (Make that
"signals" - the second DTV in town signed on just last week, it
seems. See, I told you this was exciting!)

Yeah, the tuners are expensive. Are you ready to plunk down $450 for a
box that gets just a couple of channels, none of which sign on before
8 at night? You'll find yourself in the same boat as the TV pioneers
of 1948 or 1949, for whom even the test patterns were thrillingly
exciting. But you know what? It works. Even on a little 14-inch NTSC
set, there's a distinct difference with the DTV receiver: no ghosting,
no multipath, no sparklies - you either have a perfect signal or you
don't, which is downright remarkable when you're tuned to the NBC or
CBS affiliates 70 miles away in Buffalo.

Add into that the multicast capabilities (Buffalo's CBS affiliate, for
instance, runs weather radar and its co-owned independent, WNLO
channel 23, on its sub-channels) and the electronic program guide and
all that, and this is something distinctly better than the NTSC analog
we've been living with all these years - even before saying a word
about HDTV. $450 better? Maybe not. $50 or $100 better? Show me the
receiver and I'll buy one yesterday (and then two more for the other
TVs in the house!)

Then there's digital radio. We've discussed XM and Sirius before, and
there's not really much for me to add: they're neat for niche markets
(truckers; fans of obscure formats, especially in small markets;
buyers of luxury cars) and some of the programming sounds interesting,
but we're not looking at a huge threat to broadcast radio as we know
it. Now we add to that mix "HD Radio," the marketing name for the
technology we in the industry have been calling "In-Band, On-Channel"
(IBOC) digital. While DTV's been on the air in some big cities for
four years now, the FCC just gave IBOC the go-ahead last month, and
most people - even in the industry - have only heard it in trade-show
demonstrations, if even that. (One of the reasons I'm headed to New
York this week is to hear WOR 710 in digital, and yes, you can expect
a full report here when I return!)

The benefits of IBOC are a bit harder to quantify: FM stations say
they'll sound "as good as CDs," but there are a lot of lousy CDs out
there, and even more lousy FM radios and less-than-ideal listening
environments (any automobile, just for starters) where the slight
benefit in sound quality offered by IBOC digital will be tough to
notice. On the AM side of the equation, the improvement in sound
quality ought to be more dramatic - at least while the sun is
shining. There are still good reasons to believe that the technology
as it now exists simply will not work under nighttime medium wave
propagation conditions - at least as long as simultaneous analog and
digital operation continues.

And that's my thesis today: that if the industry is serious about a
digital conversion, it needs to figure out how to get receivers -
hundreds of millions of them - into consumers' hands quickly and
cheaply enough to allow for a full-fledged conversion from analog to
digital without spending decades in transition, because it's that
transition period that could doom these technologies to failure.

Back to DTV for a minute: the TV spectrum was already getting crowded
before digital came along. In most communities, the table of
allocations for full-power stations that was put in place in the early
sixties was finally filled out by the mid-nineties. Take away channels
70-83, as the FCC did in the seventies, add to that the flood of LPTVs
that began in the mid-eighties, and add to that the UHF channels from
14-20 that found double use for public safety two-way communication,
and there wasn't a ton of open space on the UHF dial by the time DTV
came along.

So the need to allocate a second channel to every full-power station
for DTV use brought with it some technical compromises: interference
standards had to be rewritten to allow for previously-forbidden uses
such as first-adjacent TV channels in the same location. And - call it
politics if you will - the FCC had to cut some corners to squeeze in
channels for everyone. That's how WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Maryland and
WHRO-DT in Norfolk, Virginia ended up uncomfortably sharing channel
16, and how WCVB-DT in Boston and the police in South Jersey ended up
together on channel 20.

The situation on the radio dials has the potential to be even uglier,
because "IBOC" signals aren't really entirely "on" channel. On the FM
dial, the subcarriers that hold the digital data occupy spectrum
beyond the +/- 100 kHz mark that separates one FM channel from the
next one up and down the dial. On the AM dial, the digital data
spreads well into - and beyond - the first-adjacent channels on each
side.

("HD Radio" proponents point out, quite correctly, that the "IBOC-AM"
signal is still well within the NRSC mask that governs the bandwidth
of signals in the medium-wave band, and that's true. But I'd contend
that the mask's designers assumed the use of analog signals throughout
the band, and that the effect of digital "hash" heard against an
analog signal is far more destructive to enjoyable listening than
interference from a neighboring analog signal would be.)

Here in Rochester, we have no locals below 950 kHz. For eighty years,
that's been a boon to radio listeners here: at night, we can tune
across a broad spectrum of distant skywave AM signals. For instance,
at 650 we can easily tune in WSM from Nashville, followed at 660 by
WFAN in New York and at 670 by WSCR in Chicago. Put IBOC on all three,
add typical skywave fading, and the analog signals of each of the
three will become unlistenable because of the digital hash from the
others. Switch to a digital radio, and it's reasonable to expect that
the strong analog signals on the adjacent channels will wipe out the
desired digital sidebands - and in digital, there's no such thing as
graceful signal degradation. It's either there or it's not, and it
won't be there in that case - and this is why the FCC still hasn't
approved IBOC for nighttime AM use. (And let's not forget that up
here, sunset won't come later than 5 PM again until February, so that
knocks out IBOC on PM drive, too!)

The industry - at least, the proponents of IBOC - want to believe that
these problems are limited to long-distance AM reception, and that
stations will eventually be able to broadcast with IBOC 24 hours a day
to local listeners. Ironically, if this were 1960, it just might work
- but the radio industry dug its own grave in the decades that
followed by massively overpacking the AM dial.

That story - all about the breakdown of the clear channels, the power
increases on the regional and local channels, the granting of tiny
night powers to former daytimers and the near-abdication of
enforcement duties by an overburdened FCC, exacerbated by the sprawl
of metropolitan areas far beyond the service areas envisioned when so
many stations were built in the forties and fifties - is one that has
been told elsewhere and is outside the scope of this discussion. But
its lessons are obvious any time you turn on the AM dial at
night. Interference on medium-wave frequencies in AM broadcasting is
cumulative; just listen to any of the "graveyard" channels (1230,
1240, 1340, 1400, 1450 and 1490) to hear what it sounds like when 300
stations are each throwing a kilowatt into the ether. 

What this all means in real life is that far too many AM stations
reach just a few miles from their towers before their signals are
overcome by all the other noise on the band. Adding IBOC to that mess
won't help, and at night has the potential to make things even worse. 

But the AM operators who look to digital as the last savior of a
medium in its death throes aren't completely delusional: their dreams
of having signals that can compete with FM in audio quality and signal
reach have some chance of coming true, when and if they're able to
broadcast digital-only, moving the digital signal to the core of their
spectrum and eliminating the sidebands that slop over to the adjacent
channels and end up hurting everybody (except the biggest stations,
which are generally the only ones making money these days, anyway.)

And while TV at least has a vague plan for reaching that transition,
perhaps as early as the scheduled date of 2006 (after which much of
the overcrowding of the TV dial goes away as many stations move DTV to
their original analog allocations and take their "interim" DTV
channels dark again), nobody in radio is even discussing a method or a
deadline for replacing all those hundreds of millions (billions,
even?) of analog radios that date back to the twenties. 

Nobody's disputing that the challenge is even bigger for radio than
for TV; after all, a TV is a fairly big purchase, it's stationary
(making a set-top digital-to-analog converter feasible to keep older
sets usable), and the advantages to the consumer of DTV should become
sufficiently obvious in the next few years. Add that to an
FCC/industry agreement to make DTV tuners a standard feature of even
smaller TV sets, and it's a safe bet that most homes will be able to
see DTV in time to make the analog shutoff at least by the end of this
decade, if not sooner.

Now let's look at the radio transition. So far, IBOC is in its
infancy, and the attention of the industry has been on simply getting
it up and running at a few stations. But this column believes it's
never too early to look a few chess moves ahead and figure out how
this "HD Radio" thing has a chance to get consumers' acceptance in a
world that's overcrowded with new toys all labeled "digital." So
here's NERW's modest plan for a transition that might work:

Mandatory IBOC conversion for FM broadcasters, with a short target
date. Adding IBOC digital to FM signals looks to be a fairly
straightforward process; many recent transmitters and antenna systems
can go digital simply by swapping out exciters, while lower-powered
facilities (college stations, for instance) may find it simpler to add
a second transmitter and antenna for the digital portion of the
signal. The idea here, just as with DTV, is to solve at least half of
the "chicken and egg" problem by making sure there are plenty of
digital signals out there for digital receivers to tune in. Add to
that a mandate that stations utilize the broadcast data features
(IBOC's version of the sadly neglected RDS for analog FM), and by 2006
or 2007 we could hear digital on most of the nation's FMs. (It's
reasonable to expect that translators and small noncomms would get a
longer grace period to save up for the new equipment.) 
 

An "All-Channel" receiver act for radio manufacturers. It was
discussed for FM in the fifties and early sixties, and for AM stereo
in the eighties, but the FCC has consistently declined to mandate that
receivers be able to pick up specific frequency bands or modulation
types. The "NERW Plan" would change that: by 2007, we'd mandate that
any radio retailing for $50 or more be capable of receiving analog and
IBOC signals, on AM and FM. (If the cost of IBOC reception can't be
brought down that low in five years, we don't have much hope for the
system's success, frankly.) And by the way, we'd get right in line to
buy the first radio under $100 that can tune analog, IBOC and
whichever of the satellite radio services survives...and I doubt we're
alone. 
 

An incentive to begin providing separate programming on "digital FM."
FM was around as early as 1939, and its technical advantages were
obvious from the beginning. (We'd argue, in fact, that the difference
in quality between AM and FM, even in 1939, was far more evident to
the average listener than the difference between analog FM and digital
in 2002.) FM radios were on the market, for not that much more than
the cost of a good AM table radio, in the years just after World War
Two. But the medium didn't take off for another twenty years - and it
took the passage of a rule banning AM-FM simulcasts, which forced FM
radio to develop its own programming, which finally gave the audience
a reason to seek out FM radios. If it takes digital that long, it's
dead - so here's the "NERW Plan": allow separate programming on the
digital side within three years (once there's enough of a receiver
base out there to provide some listeners!), but with some conditions
and incentives. Commercial load would be limited, say to 10 minutes an
hour - and stations that broadcast separate digital programming would
get some benefit in addition to the extra ad inventory. (We're
thinking tax credits on the purchase of additional equipment for the
digital signal, or extended license renewals, perhaps.) Yes, separate
digital programming would sacrifice the "blend-to-analog" feature of
digital FM - but it's a sacrifice that will have to be made
eventually, if consumers will ever have a reason to buy the new
radios. And the reduced commercial load is a self-disciplinary measure
the industry will have to take one of these days, if it expects anyone
to be listening to the radio 20 years from now. 
One more note here: consumers will spend plenty of money on a
technology if they view it as either essential or just too cool to
live without. DVDs overtook VHS tape in the rental stores in just a
couple of years with no conversion mandate, simply because the costs
came down quickly and the advantages over tape were so obvious. UHF
may not have been a national success until the seventies - but if you
lived in Yakima or Fort Wayne or Scranton in 1955, you spent the extra
money for a UHF-capable set because it was the only way to get local
TV. There's no reason to think consumers will behave any differently
where digital radio is concerned.

So what about AM? Let the market decide. It sounds counter-intuitive,
I know. After all, that was the very policy that doomed AM stereo two
decades ago, right? But the "NERW Plan" has something the AM stereo
transition didn't, in the form of that "All-Channel Receiver Act,"
which would ensure that receivers are out there that will be able to
pick up digital AM if stations choose to transmit it. Our plan has
something else AM stereo didn't: much more market flexibility for AM
operators to decide their own fate. We can imagine big-city,
big-signal AMs wanting to go digital quickly, while small-town
stations find it hard to justify the costs of converting. And of
course we foresee a transition period when just about everyone is
suffering more interference than they've ever suffered before. So the
"NERW Plan" would be even more aggressive than current FCC practice in
letting stations buy and sell their interference rights. Under the
plan, stations would be allowed to broadcast digitally at night - but
would be responsible for any additional interference they cause. So if
some of the newer stations on 1200 are cutting into the signal of San
Antonio's WOAI, for instance, they'd have to reduce their digital
signal levels...or reach an agreement (with appropriate compensation,
of course) to remain analog-only or to go digital-only, which will
become a viable solution once the "All-Channel Act" has put enough
receivers in the marketplace. For some failing stations, the solution
might be to go silent (after being bought out by more successful
stations on the same or adjacent frequencies); for others, programming
might move to one of the new, separate digital FM services - at the
expense, of course, of the stations that would benefit from the
move. We can even imagine some big AM signals deciding to stay analog
to benefit from nighttime skywave - and paying handsomely to keep
their channels free of digital noise from other stations nearby. In
the end, what could result is an AM dial of perhaps 2500 or 3000
stations, with a noise floor considerably lower than today: a perfect
environment to then make the permanent switch to all-digital
transmission. 
 

Better enforcement. Under the "NERW Plan," a small percentage of the
prices paid in these interference-reduction transactions would become
an FCC fee, with the money raised being dedicated to a more active
Enforcement Bureau to police interference on the AM dial. Just cutting
down on all the "daytimers after dark" would go a long way towards
cleaning up the mess that is medium wave today and make digital more
viable. 
It all sounds pretty complicated, doesn't it? But I'm not convinced
the alternatives are really that much better. I spent some time in the
U.K. this past spring, where digital radio using the global Eureka-147
standard has been in place for several years - and I can report that
consumer awareness of digital radio is nonexistent. Even in the
high-end electronics shops, there were no radios for sale and no
apparent interest in them. And I'm a frequent visitor to Canada, where
Eureka-147 has been on the air for a couple of years in Toronto,
Montreal, Vancouver and Windsor, and there too the rollout of radios
has been slow and consumer interest very weak.

And if my plan still sounds too complicated to work, then perhaps
there's another reality to consider: it just may be that good old
analog radio isn't as broken as the industry wants to believe. That's
one reason my plan lacks a mandate to go all-digital on the AM band;
simply reducing the interference level and eliminating some of the
facilities that are no longer viable might revive analog AM without
the added complications of going digital. 

So are we looking at VHF TV in 1948, on the edge of explosive growth
that would put it in almost every home in America within five years?
Or are we looking at FM in 1948 or UHF in 1953 - technologies that
lacked a "must-have" factor and lingered for decades before becoming
standard? Or, worse yet, are we looking at AM stereo or the Elcaset,
technologies that might have worked just fine but weren't in tune with
what the market needed?

Your opinions are welcome; we'll share a sampling in an upcoming NERW.

-----------------------NorthEast Radio Watch------------------------
                       (c)2002 Scott Fybush
                          www.fybush.com

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