http://www.engineeringradio.us/blog/2009/08/more-failure-please/ When I was 10, I caught the radio bug, it appears to be terminal Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:11:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.engineeringradio.us/blog/2009/08/more-failure-please/comment-page-1/#comment-221 J. Aegerter Sat, 09 Jan 2010 10:31:04 +0000 http://www.engineeringradio.us/blog/?p=3928#comment-221 Yes, radio was better when there was more competition, If the FCC would have kept the old "7-7-7" rule, things might be different today. With the retirement of many old time station owners not passing stations on to their families, sellouts for big money occurred, which brought in the big money boys. And what do the big money boys want to do? Obviously, they want to make more big money. With a limited bandwidth domestic AM band, the Reagan FCC had a good idea in expanding the band, but it took way too long to implement. And all of the special breaks and incentives for minorities along with the stupid idea of preference toward existing stations wishing to move out of the standard band to lessen interference poisoned the application process. And because of this there are stations that have kept operating today in both the standard band and the extended band because the FCC has not lived up to the original 5 year requirement to turn in one license or the other! This has kept many good new qualified candidates locked out. The NAB in many ways is a 'glutton for punishment' when it shoots itself in the foot on many proposals before the FCC. The DTV ploy and the typical government mandated channel transition put a lot of money in the economy but will contribute to free TV's coming death. The same thing for AM-HD which is another FCC sanctioned boondoggle! Many TV broadcasters, I believe, wished that DTV with its huge investment expenses maybe shouldn't have happened. Yes, radio was better when there was more competition, If the FCC would have kept the old “7-7-7″ rule, things might be different today. With the retirement of many old time station owners not passing stations on to their families, sellouts for big money occurred, which brought in the big money boys. And what do the big money boys want to do? Obviously, they want to make more big money. With a limited bandwidth domestic AM band, the Reagan FCC had a good idea in expanding the band, but it took way too long to implement. And all of the special breaks and incentives for minorities along with the stupid idea of preference toward existing stations wishing to move out of the standard band to lessen interference poisoned the application process. And because of this there are stations that have kept operating today in both the standard band and the extended band because the FCC has not lived up to the original 5 year requirement to turn in one license or the other! This has kept many good new qualified candidates locked out. The NAB in many ways is a ‘glutton for punishment’ when it shoots itself in the foot on many proposals before the FCC. The DTV ploy and the typical government mandated channel transition put a lot of money in the economy but will contribute to free TV’s coming death. The same thing for AM-HD which is another FCC sanctioned boondoggle! Many TV broadcasters, I believe, wished that DTV with its huge investment expenses maybe shouldn’t have happened.

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