Licensed to non-actual locations

[Doug Drown]

I remember the QXR Network; WTAG-FM (now WSRS) was an affiliate, and used to
carry the Caspar Citron Show late in the evening.  As a kid I was intrigued
and amused that anyone could have the name Caspar Citron.   -Doug

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan.Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net>
To: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>; "Scott Fybush" <scott@fybush.com>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: Licensed to non-actual locations


> 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
> >>
> >>
> >
>