Licensed to non-actual locations

[Dan.Strassberg]

Back in the 50s, WFLY 92.3 Troy (then owned by the Troy Record
Newspaper), though not one of the five Class B's you mentioned, was
nevertheless a member of the network you referred to. For quite a few
years, that network was known as the 'QXR Network. It had begun life
several years earlier as the Rural Radio Network, and in that
incarnation, I don't think it included WFLY. The 'QXR Network relayed
WQXR-FM's classical music programming across central and western New
York via over-the-air pickup and rebroadcast. WFLY would pick up
WQXR-FM over the air from New York City at its Tx site in the
Helderbergs, southwest of Albany (a distance that probably exceeds 130
miles). I think the next station in the chain was the one in DeRuyter,
but I'm not sure about that.

When WFLY started the over-the-air pickup from New York, Class B FMs'
maximum ERP was 20 kW at an HAAT of 500'. (50 kW at 500' was nearly a
decade in the future and 50 kW at 150m was about another decade away.)
The FM band was, of course, very sparsely populated, FM was still all
in mono, and Docket 80-90 was what? three decades in the future?
Nevertheless, when the over-the-air relay began, the designers of
the network envisioned situations when the over-the-air signal from
New York as it was received in the Helderbergs would be inadequate and
they built in a backup--an over-the-air pickup of WQXR (AM) 1560, then
only 10 kW-U and broadcasting from its present (horrendous) site in
Queens. Indeed, cut-overs to the AM pickup did happen every now and
then and when the skywave and groundwave cooperated, the audio quality
could be quite acceptable. Alas, the skywave/groundwave cooperation
was not especially dependable, but the receivers were usually
able to produce pretty good audio despite the presence of 50 kW-U WPTR
only 20 kcps (no kHz yet) away from WQXR. No doubt, WPTR's directional
pattern, with deep minima to the south and west (more or less in the
direction of WFLY), made the receiver selectivity less critical.

-----
Dan Strassberg (dan.strassberg@att.net)
eFax 1-707-215-6367

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>
To: "Scott Fybush" <scott@fybush.com>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 12:16 AM
Subject: Re: Licensed to non-actual locations


> Hi Scott-
>
> I have an interesting case in the works that rests partially on the
> CDP issue. I can't comment on it now because it is "ongoing."  The
> attorney for our side says CDPs are accepted prima facie, and i've
> seen a number of cases to support that position.  It never hurts to
> include the local governance and economy stuff in support of the
> case, though.
>
> I think you are right about Mt. Washington and Mt. Mitchell being
> licensed to Boston and Charlotte way back when.  Of course in those
> days if you had today's receivers and 1950's FM station counts,
> there would be hardly any interference and you could probably pick
> up both stations in Maryland!
>
> I remember sitting in the ham shack at RPI late at night in the
> early '70s and listening to the NYC FMs 150 miles down the road.
> Today, you'd be lucky to hear any of them.
>
> I don't know what the principal community signal requirements were
> in the 1950s. I think the 70dbu requirement was laid down in the mid
> 1960s.  But until the era of dereg, the studios had to be in the
> principal community. For WMTW there was no real community, so I have
> no idea how they handled it.
>
> This brings to mind the case of the Upstate NY network of Class B
> stations licensed to Cherry Valley, Weathersfiled Township, and
> other places. My understanding is that there was only one studio for
> the five or six stations in that network.  When I was a teenager in
> Delmar, I was able to pick up the Cherry Valley station. It was a
> kind of background music format, as I recall. The owner or his
> estate eventually transferred the stations to CBN, who ran Christian
> programming, and eventually sold them when they made their
> commitment to TV and the CBN University project. They are now
> individual stations, and not all retained the religious affiliation
> that came with CBN.
>
> Tuck is a kind of Catch-22. Cambridge already has a station, so it
> qualifies as a community. But it would be really hard to justify a
> move from Provincetown to Cambridge under 307(b) because Cambridge
> already has a station. The most convincing 307(b) showing includes
> the fact that the community does not have a local station, thus
> justifying the removal of the service from the current community.
>
> Brooklyn is intriguing, but WKRB probably works against the case.
>
> -d
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Scott Fybush" <scott@fybush.com>
> To: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>
> Cc: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org>; <paul@derrynh.net>;
> <boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:59 PM
> Subject: Re: Licensed to non-actual locations
>
>
>> Dave Doherty wrote:
>>
>>> CDPs were meant to add substance to concentrations of population
>>> that were not incorporated in the traditional sense. They are
>>> accepted by the FCC as licensable communities without any further
>>> documentation. If the community is not a CDP and is not
>>> incorporated, then there are qualifications hoops to jump
>>> through - local governance, local school district, local police
>>> force, band existence of local businesses all help to establish a
>>> place as a licensable community.
>>
>> I'm not sure I agree that the FCC accepts a CDP as prima facie
>> evidence that a community exists for allocations purposes. My
>> understanding (and I am not a communications lawyer, or any type of
>> lawyer at all!) is that further documentation is still required,
>> but that the presumption is heavily in favor of licenseability if a
>> community is a CDP.
>>>
>>> The peak of Mt. Washington is in Sargents, but the slopes include
>>> Crawfords (where the base station is located), Beans, Chandler,
>>> Thomson and Meserves, Cutts, and arguably several others. I doubt
>>> anybody actually lives in any of these "towns," and not one is
>>> included in the census places table. I am totally guessing here,
>>> but I suspect that these "towns" represent the original
>>> landholdings granted by the King or the territorial Governor way
>>> back when.
>>>
>>> So, could you license WHOM today to "Mount Washington?" Probably
>>> not. Gorham would a piece of cake, though.
>>
>> The standards were much, much looser in the very early days of FM.
>> I'm pretty sure that the Yankee FM on Mount Washington was actually
>> licensed as a "Boston" station at one point. I think the Mount
>> Mitchell FM in North Carolina may have been licensed as "Charlotte"
>> around the same time.
>>
>> What's interesting to me is that the "Mount Washington" COL was
>> allowed to be reused when the current FM signal up there was
>> licensed in 1958. A few years later, and it would have to have been
>> licensed somewhere else - probably to Poland Spring, Maine, where
>> its sister TV was licensed. As WMTW-FM, it must have had a
>> main-studio waiver to put its studios first in Poland Spring and
>> later in Portland, right?
>>
>>> Tuck showings are intended primarily to establish that a community
>>> is not a made-up entity within a larger community. It works mostly
>>> to prevent wholesale moves of stations from small communities to
>>> large metros. When you move a station to a new community, you
>>> can't propose to serve more than a particular percentage of any
>>> recognized urbanized area. As an example, you could not propose to
>>> move a station from, say, Provincetown to Norwood, if the station
>>> would serve more than half the Boston urbanized area.
>>
>> That's not quite my understanding. The "more than half the
>> urbanized area" test is what triggers the Tuck analysis. If you're
>> proposing to move a station from outside an urbanized area to an
>> urbanized area (by way of a COL change), the Tuck analysis is
>> required when that 50% threshold is reached. It's a multi-prong
>> test that looks at factors like whether the proposed COL has its
>> own media (I've seen even local websites cited to meet that prong
>> of the test), whether people who live in the community also work
>> there (as little as 10% can fulfill that criterion), whether there
>> are businesses that identify themselves by the community's name,
>> whether the community has its own phone book, post office, local
>> fire/police/schools, and so on.
>>
>> One could argue, with quite a bit of validity, that the Tuck tests
>> don't really accomplish what they were meant to do (as Dave so ably
>> lays it out above) - I'd have no problem writing a convincing Tuck
>> analysis that would demonstrate that Cambridge, for instance, is a
>> community separate from Boston for allotment purposes. (Actually,
>> that one's almost a gimme, since the FCC has a presumption that any
>> community that already has stations licensed to it is therefore a
>> licenseable community.)
>>
>> The one I've always wanted to try is Brooklyn - except for the fact
>> that it's governmentally part of New York City, it meets all the
>> Tuck criteria and then some. (And I could probably spin the
>> existence of the Kings County government and the Brooklyn borough
>> government, not to mention noncomm WKRB-FM Brooklyn, to get over
>> that hump!)
>>
>> s
>>
>>
>