At the turn of the twenty-first century, proponents of HD Radio sold the technology to the FCC by claiming that it used “no new spectrum.” Advocates of low-power FM (LPFM) radio made a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful challenge to this claim. They worried that the digital sidebands of FM-HD signals would interfere with the new wave of community stations the FCC was preparing to unleash. HD supporters dismissed these concerns.
Ten years after both HD and LPFM took to the air, the conflict between the two services is crystal clear.
Brad Johnson is a lot like me: a former participant in the corporate media who made the decision to step away from it following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. One of the careers decimated by post-Telecom radio consolidation was broadcast engineering – Brad was the chief engineer at several Citadel and Clear Channel-owned stations in central California until he was let go in the repeated rounds of downsizing the companies conducted during their station-buying frenzy. Continue reading “LPFM vs. HD Radio: The Curious Case of KGIG”
Month: August 2012
Hiatus Ahoy
I’ll be taking a short break from updating the site, as I prepare to move from Wisconsin to New York next week to begin life as a professor at Brooklyn College. Plans for the move itself have been fraught with difficulty – more than I had expected, but things are (finally) beginning to come together. Boxes are being packed, loose ends squared away, and I’m test-dosing the cats with tranquilizers to see how they’ll handle the 16-hour drive.
Once I’m in NYC, I’ll be hitting the ground running. I’m teaching two classes in the fall: one intro-to-TV-production class, and another called “The Broadcast News Process.” The latter should be fun, as I’ve set it up to revolve around two key questions – do you really want to work in the corporate media? If not, how can you find/make the opportunities to be a working journalist without having to turn off your brain and/or sell your soul? Continue reading “Hiatus Ahoy”