when analog TV ends

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:46:59 -0400, Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com> said:

> The FCC has never considered DTV licenses as separate licenses from 
> their analog parents - so the license held under facility ID 65684, 
> holding the callsign WCVB-TV, has both analog authorization on channel 5 
> and digital authorization on channel 20.

I asked an FCC representative (attorney) at NAB about this, and I was
told that the "-DT" was just an administrative convenience on the part
of the Media Bureau, and that all of this will be clarified when the
Commission rewrites the TV rules next year.  (They are keeping rules
changes to a minimum while the staff are occupied with the
transition.)

What makes this more confusing is that:

- Low-power stations are supposed to have separate callsigns ("-LD",
"-CD", and just plain "-D"), but for the most part have not been assigned
such callsigns.  On the other hand, "-DT" is not named anywhere in
Title 47.

- Section 2.302, which theoretically specifies the assignment of
callsign formats to different services, has not been updated in a
decade, and doesn't even reflect the adoption of "-LP" for LPFMs.

- There are some digital-only TV stations where the callsign desk has
changed the call to "-DT", for reasons which have never been
adequately explained.

-GAWollman