More Miscellaneous News of Note

About a week and a half left until dissertation-research formally concludes. Then a short break after which it’s time to organize the ~800 pages of notes collected from FCC dockets, trade publications, and related materials into formal prose. In the meantime:
Pirate Radio: Pally-pal Paul Riismandel wrote two excellent articles this week for Radio Survivor on unlicensed broadcasting. The first looks at a spate of FCC enforcement actions in Massachusetts, and especially around the Boston area. Continue reading “More Miscellaneous News of Note”

LPFM: Thanks For The Memories?

Much was made last year of the Local Community Radio Act’s passage in the House of Representatives. But since then, no news: what’s going on?
As you may have heard, most of the telecom-policy wonk-world is all agog with the FCC’s promulgation of a National Broadband Plan. Some have felt, since Chairman Julius Genachowski took the helm of the agency, that he’d be much more focused on “new” media than “old.” This seems to be playing itself out to some degree. Continue reading “LPFM: Thanks For The Memories?”

AM-HD Undergoes Radical Redesign

Judging from the demonstrations at the National Association of Broadcaster’s convention, the system seems to deliver as promised and offers enormous potential for FM and AM stations….The systems are just emerging from the R&D stages and still need fine-tuning before real-world implementation is possible….Once a recommendation is made, the Federal Communications Commission then has to decide how to implement technical parameters for a DAB system. So the industry is still a few years away from a wholesale DAB implementation – but not that many. (Radio World Editorial, “A Little DAB’ll Do Ya,” May 17, 1995, p. 5.)
With little fanfare and less than two weeks before the National Association of Broadcasters’ Broadcast Engineering Conference in Las Vegas, iBiquity Digital Corporation (the proprietors of HD Radio) announced a radical redesign of its hybrid analog/digital AM-HD waveform. Continue reading “AM-HD Undergoes Radical Redesign”