"Mark Roberts" wrote in message
...
Mark Howell had written:
|
| IBOC may be a step to eliminating AM as an aural service, with the
| allocations eventually used only for datacasting. Whether or not that
| is the plan, it is the likely result. IMHO, IBOC will assure the end
| of AM radio as we know it. Why anyone in the broadcasting industry
| supports it as the "savior of AM" is utterly beyond my comprehension.
| I find every argument advanced for it to be fallacious. If this is
| what's supposed to save AM, then AM can't, and maybe shouldn't, be
| saved.

AM-Stereo, a previous savior, didn't kill AM, so now we have IBOC.

I would think that the "savior of AM" would be to provide
programming that people would want to listen to and that can be
received well in most of one's home market.

But aside from that, the FCC needs to do a little "birth control" --
or, more precisely, "euthanasia" -- by deleting operations who
facilities are clearly too marginal to provide aural service to a
majority of any given station's market area. The FCC, obviously,
would rather not crack this particular nut -- it's easier to focus
on boobies than it is on nuts-and-bolts infrastructure -- and has
backed off the few cases where it has tried to reduce interference
on the dial: for example, how many stations that "moved" to the
expanded band actually have given up their previous facilities? Not many.

No, the FCC has a better solution - the recently-closed window which
gathered over 1500 applications for new stations and major changes.

I recall years ago there was an effort to make it easier to buy and turn off
stations. The dreamers said that this would drive up the price of
stations - making them out of reach of new minority owners. The "big boys"
quickly figured that (already owning the big stations) they'd rather split
the ad pie with lots of struggling little stations that didn't have enough
ad income to compete, rather than a smaller number of stations each of which
got enough of the pie to be "dangerous". So the big station owners sided
with the dreamers and we have more and more uneconomic stations interfering
with each other.

I know of one x-band station that gave up its old channel. Since they also
have FM I wonder how long before they turn in the x-band license. Maybe the
PC in the closet which runs the AM doesn't cost enough to matter. Going
from 3 towers to one must save money.