Engineering Radio

So, the other day I was in the convenience store near my house.  I had not picked up a copy of the local newspaper in quite some time, so I looked around for one.  I couldn’t find it anywhere so I asked the checkout clerk, who looked at me rather dead pan and said “they went under about a year ago.”

What? I hadn’t even noticed my own local paper was gone, for a year?

A quick Google search and I found a notice on their website saying that the newspaper was no longer published and a blog entry from a former reporter summing up the end of the newspaper.

Sadly, the Millbrook Round Table was just one of scores of local newspapers forced to close down, because the holding company of many of them, Journal Register Co., defaulted on loans and was de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange. However, despite the sympathy I feel for all of those reporters, editors, photographers, graphic designers, proofreaders, ad salespeople and delivery people, no one can say we didn’t see this coming. The truth is, newspapers have been an antiquated technology, and try as they might, they haven’t been able to find a new business model that would enable them to be profitable in the post-paper world of instant, online publishing.

Sound even vaguely familiar?  All of the small local newspapers bought up by a big consolidator, who then defaults and cuts costs.  Caught behind the technology curve, unable to make up the lost ground, local institutions that have been in place for more than a century fold and disappear in the wink of an eye, sometimes completely un-noticed.

Sadly, I will say that the radio business seems to be on the same trajectory.

Okay, a few weeks have past and I suppose a little blog posting may clear up things a little.  A lot of this is going to be personal, including my observations about the company that I worked for for the last almost eleven years.

Here is what happened:  Long about October or so, one of the big wigs was around the studio building.  I’d always gotten along reasonably with the guy, we had our occasional differences of opinion, but nothing that I would consider out of the ordinary.   So anyway, Mr. Big Wig was acting a little strangely.  On a side note, I observe people, I can almost always tell when someone is lying or being less than truthful (except compulsive liars, they are harder to spot).  At the time, I thought it a little strange.

Then, around three weeks later, I noticed a help wanted ad in Radio World.  Something for Western Massachusetts, which again, I thought was odd because there are no radio groups in Western Massachusetts.  My gut reaction was that is either my job, or the contractor in Albany.

Finally, around the middle of November, the general manager at my location began to act shifty as well, and the jig was up.  I knew that I was on the way out, likely because I refused to do any more work without more pay.

I am fortunate for the following reasons:

1.  The contracting company that took over my position immediately hired me to work for them.  Truth be told, I have better benefits, better working conditions, and a better over all outlook now than before.

2.  About three years ago, I started a side business installing solar systems.  At that time, it was a way to make up for the money I was loosing by working at the radio stations.  It has grown into something that is more than I expected, faster than I expected.  The new work arrangement allows me to still pay the bills and grow my company.

The contractor in question is somebody I have known for twenty years.  He is a good guy and I am happy to be working with him.

I am still, however, deeply deeply disappointed in the way it was handled.

So, my advice to anybody reading is to watch out for yourself.  Keep your eyes and ears open and have a plan B or even C.

As for me, I plan to transition my way out of radio, because as I have opined here, and others have stated as well, there is no future in it.

The house passed the “LOCAL COMMUNITY RADIO ACT OF 2009 ” (aka HR 1147) last night in one of the last legislative acts of 2009.  This is the companion bill to S. 592, which is still in committee.

The need for LPFM stations is justified thusly:

• In part due to consolidation of media ownership, there have been strong financial incentives for some companies to reduce local programming and rely instead on syndicated programming produced for hundreds of stations, though noncommercial educational radio stations, including FM translator stations, currently provide important local service, as do many commercial radio stations. A renewal of commitment to localism–local operations, local research, local management, locally originated programming, local artists, and local news and events–would bolster radio’s service to the public.
• Local communities have sought to launch radio stations to meet their local needs. However, due in part to the scarce amount of spectrum available and the high cost of buying and running a large station, many local communities are unable to establish a radio station.
• In 2003, the average cost to acquire a commercial radio station was more than $2,500,000.
• In January 2000, the Federal Communications Commission authorized a new, affordable community radio service called `low-power FM’, or `LPFM’, to `enhance locally focused community-oriented radio broadcasting’.
• Through the creation of LPFM, the Federal Communications Commission sought to `create opportunities for new voices on the airwaves and to allow local groups, including schools, churches, and other community-based organizations, to provide programming responsive to local community needs and interests’.
• The Federal Communications Commission made clear that the creation of LPFM would not compromise the integrity of the FM radio band by stating, `We are committed to creating a low-power FM radio service only if it does not cause unacceptable interference to existing radio service.’.
• Currently, FM translator stations can operate on the second- and third-adjacent channels to full-power radio stations, up to an effective radiated power of 250 watts, pursuant to part 74 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations, using the very same transmitters that LPFM stations will use. The Federal Communications Commission based its LPFM rules on the actual performance of these translators, which already operate without undue interference to FM stations.
• Small rural broadcasters were particularly concerned about a lengthy and costly LPFM interference complaint process. Therefore, in September 2000, the Federal Communications Commission created a process to address interference complaints regarding LPFM stations on an expedited basis.
• In December 2000, Congress delayed the full implementation of LPFM until the Federal Communications Commission commissioned and reviewed an independent engineering study. This action was due to some broadcasters’ concerns that LPFM service would cause interference in the FM radio band.
• The Federal Communications Commission granted licenses to over 800 LPFM stations despite the congressional action. These stations are currently on the air and are run by local government agencies, groups promoting arts and education to immigrant and indigenous populations, artists, schools, religious organizations, environmental groups, organizations promoting literacy, and many other civically oriented organizations.
• After 2 years and the expenditure of $2,193,343 in taxpayer dollars, the independent engineering study commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission concluded that concerns about interference on third-adjacent channels were unwarranted.
• The Federal Communications Commission issued a report to Congress on February 19, 2004, which stated that `Congress should readdress this issue and modify the statute to eliminate the third-adjacent channel distance separation requirement for LPFM stations.’
• On November 27, 2007, the Federal Communications Commission again unanimously affirmed LPFM, stating in a news release about the adoption of the Low-Power FM Third Report and Order and Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that the Federal Communications Commission recommends `to Congress that it remove the requirement that LPFM stations protect full-power stations operating on third-adjacent channels’. Until the date of enactment of this Act, Congress had not acted upon that recommendation.
• Minorities represent almost a third of the population of the United States. However, according to the Federal Communications Commission’s most recent Form 323 data on the race and gender of full-power, commercial broadcast licensees, minorities own only 7 percent of all local television and radio stations. Women represent more than half of the population but own only 6 percent of all local television and radio stations. LPFM stations, while not a solution to the overall inequalities in minority and female broadcast ownership, provide an additional opportunity for underrepresented communities to operate a station and offer local communities a greater diversity of viewpoints and culture.
• LPFM stations have proven to be a vital source of information during local or national emergencies. Out of the few stations that were able to stay on the air during Hurricane Katrina, several were LPFM stations. In Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, low-power FM station WQRZ remained on the air during Hurricane Katrina and served as the Emergency Operations Center for Hancock County. After Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of evacuees temporarily housed at the Houston Astrodome were unable to hear over the loudspeakers information about the availability of food and ice, the location of Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives, and the whereabouts of missing loved ones, volunteers handed out thousands of transistor radios and established an LPFM station outside of the Astrodome to broadcast such information.

Similar to S. 592, the bill aims to:

1. Increase the number of LPFM station by doing away with the 3rd adjacent protections.
2. Mitigate interference by creating a 1 year period during which a new LPFM station must broadcast “periodic announcements that alert listeners that interference that they may be experiencing could be the result of the operation of the new low-power FM station on a third-adjacent channel and shall instruct affected listeners to contact the low-power FM station to report any interference.”  LPFM licensees are then tasked with solving interference complaints with in a licensed full power FM station’s protected contour.
3. Protect translator input signals.
4. Protect reading for the blind services.

I am not finding fault with any of the justifications, they are all true and make a good point about the decline of Radio in general as I have discussed in previous posts.

The potential increase of LPFM stations is in the thousands.

The proposed interference mitigation is a pipe dream.  The FCC enforcement bureau is overworked as it is.  We have had a pirate on one of our frequencies for years, every once in a while they drive out and bust the guy, only to have him return a week or two later.   Somehow this group of overworked people will be able to process hundreds or thousands of interference complaints?

Unless there is increased funding for the FCC enforcement bureau, I am skeptical.  There is no specific discussion on funding, only specifying that the cost should be below $139 million.

We live in interesting times.

Citadel is prepping for chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, according to this inside radio article.  The jem that I most like is this:

Lenders have until Tuesday to sign the deal, which would cut its $2 billion debt to $760 million. Shareholders would see their ownership stake wiped out.

So lets see, if you kept your Citadel Broadcasting stock (CTDB: trading at $0.041 per share) because you though it might go above a $1.00 per share again, you are screwed.  Notice, 60% of the debt is just going away.  Amazing!  How do they do that?  If I decided that I didn’t want to pay my mortage, would the bank entice me to start paying again by reducing it by 60%?  No they would not.  They would simply send me a foreclosure notice and eventually some guy would stand on the county courthouse steps and read my foreclosure warrant out loud to the passers by.  If I am lucky, it will be lunch time and somebody might actually hear it.

No, what happens when a lender writes down $1.24 billion in debt is it gets passed on to all the other bank customers in higher interest rates, larger fees, etc.  After all, the CEO needs to make his margins to earn that end of year bonus.

To recap, shareholders are loosing everything and we all are going to pay more because Citadel Broadcasting Corporation over paid for a group of radio stations, then ran them into the ground.  Fuck us all.

Internet Neutrality has become a big topic among some groups.  The fear is that some ISPs will filter internet users content, arbitrarily excluding whatever items they want without explanation or disclosure.   The temptation is too great for some ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, ATT, et. al.) not to block certain IP addresses, say for example, that of a competitor.

This amounts to corporate censorship.  If I have a Verizon account and I want to research other telephone companies, will I get accurate results?  What about some potential regulation change that the company didn’t want to have congress pass?  How about adverse rulings about Verizon from the state public service commission?

In light of the NBC/Universal – Comcast deal announced last week, those concerns appear to carry even more weight.  If the internet is going to replace radio, TV, and newspapers as some suggest, access must be unfettered.  Any member of the public should be able to search through any ISPs infrastructure and find all relevant data.

There have been FCC hearings on the matter, there is a NPRM,  a web site has been set up, there is a wikipedia entry.  Recently, senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have come out against the idea of Net Neutrality, although I cannot imagine why.

I decided to do a little experiment myself.  At my official job, we have to ISPs, each on a separate T-1 line.  The first ISP is a local company, Best Web.  The other ISP is Verizon.  On the Best Web circuit, I did a Google search for some innocuous term, with safe search turned off.  I then used the same search terms on the Verizon circuit.  I was surprised to see different results for each search.  I did specific searches for items based on a geographical location, e.g. “widgets, Washington DC.”  In each case, the Verizon search results were missing some of the pages that the Best Web search results had.  This is going through Google.  I have Verizon at home also, and noted the same differences there.

By this relatively brief research, it would seem that Verizon is filtering out some pages they don’t like.  It is difficult to say why, and if I didn’t go through the trouble of changing ISPs and repeating the search, I would have never known about it.  Clearly most people don’t understand:

This is already happening!

This is one of the key problems with the “internet” future.  Access to data can be very easily controlled by programming fire walls and gateways at the IPS’s data center.  Users searching for items will never know what they are missing.  Having a diverse broadcasting industry has fostered freedom of the press and advanced our democracy.  Loosing that will put us on a slipper road to Corporatocracy, if we are not already there.

You know how, sometimes you go into one of these radio station’s conference rooms, there is some picture with waves crashing around a light house or some such with some motivational saying that is supposed to inspire everyone to go above and beyond?

Here is mine:

Welcome to reality, now get to work, there is a lot to do

This is getting ridiculous. Now the Congressional Black Caucus wants a bailout for radio. minority owned radio stations. Inner City Radio, Inc.  It seems that the group owner of 17 radio stations finds themselves $230 million dollars in dept.  Is that all?

Never mind the fact that helping only minority owned radio stations and Inner City Radio, Inc.,  in particular seems, I don’t know, what would be the appropriate word for it… racist, or at least discriminatory.  Never mind the fact that in this day and age, $230 million in dept is a mere drop in the bucket, especially for a group that owns stations in major market like New York (WBLS, WLIB) and San Fransisco (KBLX), not to mention several other stations in smaller markets.

Why should my tax money go to another corporation that was poorly run?  Why should I reward somebody else bad behavor?  I said it before:

No bailouts for radio.  No bailouts for big corporate radio, no bailouts for minority radio, no bailouts.  Let the markets and the financiers sort it out, the only way it can get better is if it gets worse.

We have a few stations that are currently encoded with the Arbitron PPM encoders.  I did a little research on the encoding method, since it is not immediately apparent how they are transmitting their data.

Arbitron PPM encoders

According to Wikipedia, which can sometimes be relied upon, Arbitron used Martin Marietta to help develop the technology.  Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) is mostly known as  a defense contractor, they have helped develop several complex military communications systems over the years.

There are no fewer than 39 US patents that cover the technology used in the PPM.  The most significant of these appears to be 7,316,025 which describes the psychoacoustic masking technique employed.

It really is pretty slick, using a sample rate of 8.192 kHz, it transmits 4 bits per second in the 300-3000 Hz range by hitting specific frequencies in that range at varying intervals, adapting to the audio levels to keep the encoding below the programming content.  4 BPS is very slow and thus very robust.  After all, I believe the only formation transmitted is a six digit encoder serial number.   I did not read all 39 patents to see if anything else was changed in the encoding method, so it may be slightly different.

This type of system would have fairly low overhead, not adding to the station’s bandwidth which is a consideration for FM stations, and in the correct frequency range for most AM receivers on the market today.  Some people have said they have heard the encoding on one of our stations, most notably during silence or very quite programming.  Perhaps, especially in a dead air situation, one might hear in nearly imperceptible  low frequency slow fluttering sound.

If anything, the encoding is perhaps too robust.

Now for the deployment of the monitor technology, which has so many up in arms.  As with other Arbitron ratings methods, the main bone of contention seems to be the size and distribution of the sampling hardware.  Minority groups feel they are under represented because the PPM is unevenly distributed.

Ratings samples always seem to skew one way or another.  The data samples themselves seem to be too small to accurately predict a station’s listenership.  One anomaly and the entire month or quarter can be thrown off.  The PPM seems to correct some if the issues with keeping an accurate written diary.  One problem with the PPM however, it can also pick up incidental background noise and count it as time spent listening (TSL).

Think of the cubical environment where somebody several cubes away might be listening to a radio station.  To the PPM wearer, it is unintelligible background noise, however, because of the perceptual encoding, the PPM picks it up and it counts as several hours of TSL.

A broader sample would dilute this with other more accurate representations of radio listening.  A broader sample would also alleviate some of the complaints from the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC).  First year physics students would recognize that not enough sample data can make results wildly inaccurate.  Or, as one emergency room doctor stated while washing my knee out with a liter of sterile water after a dirt bike accident, the solution to pollution is dilution.

In one of the better TV shows about radio, newsman Less Nessman reports live on the “WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop give away”

I always liked that show. “As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

I tried to embed “Alice’s Restaurant” but you tube wouldn’t let me, so here is the link, if you haven’t heard it this year and are feeling so inclined.

Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone.

Go!

The Senate seems to have it in their mind to release the LPFM genie from the bottle:

The Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved a bill (Local Community Radio Act (S. 592)) today that would loosen regulations limiting low-power FM stations. It would abolish the third-adjacent minimum distance separation requirement except for stations that provide a radio reading service, as well as give FM translators and LPFMs equal access to spectrum. The House Commerce Committee has also cleared the bill.

The Local Community Radio Act (S. 592) official bill summary is:

3/12/2009–Introduced.Local Community Radio Act of 2009 – Repeals provisions in the Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2001 that required the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to:
(1) modify rules authorizing the operation of low-power FM radio stations to prescribe minimum distance separations for third-adjacent channels;
(2) prohibit applicants who have engaged in the unlicensed operation of any station from obtaining a low-power FM license; and
(3) conduct a program to test whether low-power FM radio stations will result in harmful interference to existing FM radio stations if minimum distance separations for third-adjacent channels are not required. Requires the FCC to modify its rules to eliminate third-adjacent minimum distance separation requirements between specified stations. Requires the FCC to retain rules that provide third-adjacent channel protection for full-power noncommercial FM stations that broadcast radio reading services via a subcarrier frequency from potential low-power FM station interference. Requires the FCC, when licensing FM translator stations, to ensure that:
(1) licenses are available to both FM translator stations and low-power FM stations; and
(2) such decisions are made based on the needs of the local community.

I would add to that list; Must be on the air at least 50% of the time and no more than 50% of that time is automated. Why not? If this is supposed to spur local (community radio) what would be the point of a whole bunch of low power automated stations? Just more clutter in the FM band.