Broadcast Engineers Oppose Allowing New Stations in AM Band
There’s a growing concern that allowing new stations in the AM band will further stifle operations and incumbent stations in that band, broadcast engineering consultants said. In comments in the ongoing proceeding to revitalize the AM band, some engineering firms said new licenses are granted in areas that are cluttered with other stations and many new stations tend to operate at substandard levels.
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Limiting new applications would allow the incumbent users some flexibility to maximize their service, said Stephen Lockwood, senior electrical engineer at Hatfield & Dawson. “It’s probably more reasonable to let the folks that already have licenses and already have investments in facilities ... be able to adjust their facilities to provide better coverage of their communities."
Newer stations tend to be underpowered with restrictive directional antennas, said Edward Schober, executive director of the National Alliance of AM Broadcasters. Some of them are Class C stations with poor nighttime coverage, he said. “They really don’t provide good service and the band gets noisier.” The allocations are tight and close together, he said: “In a lot of places it causes problems to other stations on the band.” Some operate with their daytime signal at night and as a result, certain stations around the country get hit pretty hard, he added.
The band is “essentially full” except for areas that don’t have enough people to support a new station, said Jack Sellmeyer of Sellmeyer Engineering. When new stations are permitted, they cut into the service area of existing stations and cause interference, he said. “It’s a very serious matter if it happens in an area that’s heavily populated.” A large percentage of newer stations that were new outright or have been moved from smaller markets “generally cannot get close enough to a large market because of the existing allocations to provide a sufficiently strong signal across the market to be a viable station,” Sellmeyer said.
The NAB doesn’t agree with the engineers on new stations. “We appreciate the FCC’s focus on AM radio, and the proposals it has offered to help alleviate some of the technical challenges faced by AM stations,” a spokesman said. “We think there are probably better approaches to addressing nighttime interference on the AM band than closing the door to new AM stations."
Due to the maturation of the AM band, nighttime coverage is already full, Lockwood said. Trying to add another signal at nighttime in most locations in the country would result in poor coverage, he said. In places like parts of Montana, there may be options, he said: With small towns that are spread out, “the ability to put in an AM station there and not gore anyone else’s ox is probably workable."
The engineers bemoaned the FCC filing window process as part of the problem. “Historically the last three times the commission has opened up the filing system to allow for new applications, that whole process has not gone well,” Lockwood said. “It has been opened to folks who either made lots of applications that were ungrantable or applications that were mutually exclusive with numbers of other applications and it has caused the FCC a great deal of problems in trying to process all the applications,” he said. Many facilities that were granted were flawed and wouldn’t provide any additional service to the public, he said.
The issues with AM stations are a result of the FCC’s shift from a demand-based policy for obtaining new stations to the current filing window system, Sellmeyer agreed. The older system will eliminate the need to protect the new short-form applications based on their assumed facilities, he said.
This week, the FCC released frequencies and minimum opening bids for 22 new commercial AM stations to be bid in Auction 84 (CD Jan 29 p14). The auction will be May 6. Because of the hardship of AM analog stations, it’s difficult to determine whether all the applicants will bid, said Schober. “The value of AM radio station construction permits has gone down,” he said. “The cost of building an AM station has gone up partly because property value has gone up.” Some AM stations are “handicapped,” Sellmeyer said. “They can’t cover enough of the big market to attract enough advertising revenue to do anything with it.” At $25,000, the 1500 frequency in Culver City, Calif., is the highest minimum bid (http://bit.ly/Lkvs9i). That is low for the Los Angeles market, Sellmeyer said: “It will always be a handicapped station because of the allocation situation there.”
Schober supports digitizing the AM band as a step in the right direction, he said. “The few frequencies we have left need to go for digital,” he said. “There isn’t a real need to add additional AM stations in most markets from a programming point of view.” In many markets, it’s difficult to make any money with an AM station, he said: “If you had a combined digital companion station plus an analog station, you have a shot at being able to have a going business when you're done.”