neilkaz wrote:
Scott "There was a time when the FCC would not have licensed
53-degree towers for a 50 kW stations."
KAZ replies that there was a time when our FCC had integrity and
wasn't a pawn of big corporarations and wasn't 100% clueless in
regards to both AM and FM engineering and propagation.
It's not the big corporations who want signals like KPWX on the air. The
big corporations already have their good 50 kW signals with
properly-designed antenna arrays, and they don't want the extra
interference that stations like KPWX add to the dial.
It's the little guys who've been pushing the FCC for many decades now to
find ways to cram more signals into an overcrowded dial. And all the way
back to the Communications Act of 1934, there's been that mandate (you
can look it up under section 307b) to provide a "fair and equitable
distribution of broadcast service," a mandate the FCC has consistently
equated with more and more signals serving smaller and smaller areas.
This is not a new debate, and it goes back many decades to the days when
the FCC really did have engineers running it. If Mark Durenberger's
around, I'm sure he can offer links to the excellent writing he did a
while back about the lengthy process by which the original clear
channels were broken down.
And having said that, there's never really been a time when the FCC has
been entirely independent of what the large corporate broadcasters want.
There's a long history of corporate broadcasting executives becoming FCC
commissioners or vice versa; look back 60 years to the days when Charles
Denny moved straight from a chair on the FCC to a cushy executive job
with RCA, just after he'd conveniently quashed the CBS color TV system
in favor of RCA's, or to the more respectable service of Jim Quello as
FCC chairman after a distinguished career running WJR in Detroit.
s
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