Engineering Radio

It is clear to me that radio is changing, in some ways it is changing for the better, in many ways it is changing for the worse.  In spite of many bad business decisions made by over priced MBAs, large consolidated radio groups seem to be hanging on, if only by their finger nails.  It is very likely that the investment banks, who have the most to loose, are not interested in seeing their loans written off in a bankruptcy proceeding.  As we all know, the consolidators that paid multiples of 15 to 16 times cash flow for stations, way over extended themselves.  There is no hope that values will ever return to those levels, so the banks are now in the radio business.

Sure, the banks are not the owners of record, and the FCC never would consent to transfer all those licenses to so many investment banks. However, they are calling the shots, making “suggestions” on how best to run things.  Offering perhaps a 1/4 percent reduction in an interest rate if the expenses can be reduced below a certain level.  Unfortunately, for the communities like Ellenville, NY, their local radio station means nothing to the banker living in Manhattan.  It is a number, and more than likely, a negative number on a spreadsheet.  It means nothing to the group owner in San Antonio, other than some miscellaneous real estate assets.  Same can be said for all the radio stations in the Hudson Valley if not the entire country.

Why is this important?  I mean, who really cares?  The apparent answer is no one seems to care.  Local news, or what used to be local news such as town board meetings, high school sports scores, police blotter, and all of the many other small town things do not get the hearing they used to.  Town boards; well if no one shows up for the meeting to pass the new zoning laws, so be it.  School boards; sure, raise the taxes, most home owners will just pay the new higher amount and not say anything.  It is for the children, after all.  Seems that the local constabulary is spending more time at the Dunkin Donuts than out walking around checking doors?  Thats the way it goes.  With the demise of local newspapers, detailed in a previous post, who is keeping an eye on things? Who lets the community know when something doesn’t pass the smell test?

Receiver tuned to local AM station playing good sounding music

A small AM radio station can be made profitable, just not at the margins expected by the big boys.  There is a niche for perhaps 1 KW or 5 KW non-directional station with it’s own real estate that is not in too bad shape can be turned into a community radio station.  Those type stations are fairly low maintenance, most have some type of PSRA and PSSA to keep them on at least during drive times if they are daytimers.  Others have minimal amounts of night time power.  Almost all of them cover their city of license, even with small night time powers.

I have been looking into good quality AM radio receivers and there are a few out there which are not too expensive.  Most GM car radios and older Chrysler radios have good AM radios.  A group formed to promote AM radio, ensure that auto makers install radios that are at least as good as their older versions, work with manufactures to make better small table top receivers and such would go a long way to improving the unjustly bad reputation that AM broadcasting has received.  Further, working with the ARRL (amateur radio) to reduce and keep noise levels from things like BPL and other noise making technologies that do not comply with current FCC regulations would also help.  It is true that our environment has become electrically noisier, one might not be able to listen to the 50 KW clear channel station 500 miles away, but the local station should come in well enough to enjoy, especially if the programming is good.

FM radio is becoming over crowed with translators, adjacent channel HD radio interference, LPFMs and whatever else can be shoe horned into the band.  The quality of FM is set to decline precipitiously in the next few years.  It seems that with the right combination of good local programming, good receivers and radio station owners/operators that are not looking to get listed on the NASDAQ, small AM stations could survive, if not thrive on the business that the big stations turn away.

There are a number, a small number, of stations already doing this.  As long as there is free local news and free quality programming, people will listen, no matter what band it is being broadcast on.  Free trumps paid any time, any day.

My former employer thinks he knows better than anyone what to do in every given situation.  ”Mister,” as he is “affectionately” known, has a legendary cheap streak.  When I worked for the company, every year there would be a debate on whether we should plow and maintain the road to a certain transmitter site.  Mind you, this is not just any transmitter site, but the transmitter site of the number one billing station of the entire group of 35 stations.  It is located in the wealthy suburban setting of market Number One and bills more than most of their other markets combined.

Naturally, when I was there, I put up a stiff fight to make sure the road got patched and plowed.  Oh they would scream and nash their teeth about how unfair it was, and can’t we do this or do that, etc.  This went on every year for the entire ten years I worked for the company.  For my part, I just ignored it.  Back in October of last year, when I was first starting to see the handwriting on the wall, there was this clandestine meeting with the other residents on the road which I was not invited to.  You see, the lower half of the road has houses on it.  Mister thought that the residents of the road should chip in for the road plowing.  When they refused (because they were already plowing the lower part of the road themselves) he said we would absolutely, positively ,100% not be plowing the road this winter.

I departed the company in January.  Since then, the upper part of the road was not touched.  Then came last week’s blizzard.  Prior to the blizzard, the generator fuel tank was 9/10 full.  The power went out on Wednesday during the first storm.  I called the General Manager for the radio station on Friday and told him that the generator would need fuel soon and asked if the road had been plowed.  He said they were working on it and it should be done on Saturday.  I told him that we needed a fuel truck up there ASAP otherwise they would be going off the air.  He said he was on it.

Sunday morning at 6:30 am, the generator ran out of fuel.  Naturally, my phone rings.  I begin calling around all the fuel oil companies in the area to see if I can get a Sunday delivery.  I finally arrange something and we also get a 4WD pickup with a 100 gallon day tank to meet us there.  When I arrive at the site at 9:30 am, a backhoe was just starting to clear the upper part of the road.  The snow is knee deep and there is a layer of ice under it.  It took until about 1:30pm to get the road cleared enough to get the 4WD pickup, with tire chains near the generator to transfer fuel.  Then, because the fuel pump sucked air, we had to bleed the injectors, reset the faults, etc.  We finally got the generator started around 2:00pm.

So, let us compare costs:

Plowing the road cost about $800.00-$900.00 per storm.  This year, there were five to six storms where the road needed to be plowed. Total $4,500.00

Last Sunday, the station was down for about 7 hours.  I’d say that station likely bills $150.00 per unit on a Sunday morning, 10 units an hour so they lost $10,500.00 by being off the air.  Then there is the backhoe needed to clear the road.  A backhoe was needed because there was so much snow on the road that a regular snow plow could not move it, especially plowing up hill.  That cost $1,500.00.  Then there is my overtime and the guy with the 4WD pickup, another $1,440.00.  Total cost to plow the road and get the station back on the air, somewhere in the neighborhood of $13,440.00.

So, yeah, Mister is really saving money.  How’s that working out for you, a$$hat?

When I was a young lad, still impressionable I might add, I would listen to the big AM powerhouses at night with my little transistor radio.  I have eluded to this in previous posts.  I have also written an article for Radio World in which I suggest turning AM transmitter off on overnight hours to save money, with certain caveats.  I still listen to AM radio quite often.  I have a Kenwood R-2000 MF/HF receiver which, while not the best technical receiver, is the best sounding AM receiver I have ever heard.  It’s wide AM IF bandwidth is 6.5 kHz, which seems to work very well with the high end pre-emphasis curves most good AM processors employ.  Music, especially oldies, which were recorded in AM’s hay day sound spectacular.  There is no other AM radio that sounds as good as this unit.   Right now, the sun has just set and I am listening to WFED 1500 KHz in Washington DC.    They are airing a VOA program called “Issues in the News.”  It’s real red meat radio.  We are 250 air miles from the transmitter site.

I think there is a place for AM stations, not just merely being satellite repeaters, but making a meaningful contribution to their communities of license.  Unfortunately, I am one of the few that thinks so.  For as long as I have been in radio, AM has been declining.  It is a matter of economics, most GM’s would tell me.  That being said, the two three letter calls signs that I worked at were consistently in the top four in the rating book.  Clearly, live local programming was the key to this success.

The notion that they sound bad may or may not be true.  An AM station that has a properly tuned and matched antenna can sound very good.  Using a good receiver, one that has good fidelity, good selection and sensitivity can also increase listening pleasure.  Unfortunately, most  all AM radios being sold today have an IF bandwidth that is only slightly better than a telephone around 2-3 kHz.  This is because… I don’t know.  Originally receiver manufactures began limiting bandwidth to reduce interference.  NRSC-2 was supposed to limit interference by reducing out of bandwidth splatter.  Apparently the manufactures didn’t get the word.

Who knows, as the FM band gets filled with shit (interference from adjacent channel IBOC, translators shoe horned in, LPFM’s on third adjacent channels) AM radio might be viable again.

Once the money men got a hold of the broadcasting industry, everything was geared toward making money.  Not that making money is wrong, it is certainly good to make a profit, however, with the margins on the FM stations, usually between 25-50%, AM stations were relegated to second place because their margins were much less than that.   Even so, many AM stations were initially profitable during the consolidation and still had some ratings.  Not so any more.  AM stations also require more maintenance, because of directional antennas and all that is associated with those systems.  What a banker or an accountant sees when he looks at an AM radio station is a money pit.  And, if the station has been run into the ground, it is a money pit.

Still, a small AM at a fire sale price might be fun to rehab.  Launch some type of community radio format, put AM radio back were it was 30 years ago, solidly in the community.  It might be fun.

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.