The FCC has adopted a Report and Order that it says will streamline and improve FM translator interference complaints. The problem has ballooned ever since the FCC started handing out FM translators to anyone who pulled up to the Commission’s drive-through window.
Currently, even one listener complaint can result in an FM translator station having to cease operations. Then there’s the fighting over whether that complaint was even valid.
Here are the details in the Order approved today:
– Allowing translator operators to change frequency to any available same-band channel as a minor change in response to interference issues.
– Establishing a minimum number of listener complaints, proportionate to the population the complaining station serves, that a station would need to submit with any claim of interference.
– Standardizing the contents of each listener complaint.
– Establishing interference resolution procedures that permit, but do not require, complaining listeners to cooperate with remediation efforts, and implementing an alternative, technically-based process for demonstrating that interference has been resolved.
– Establishing an outer contour limit for actionable interference complaints while allowing waivers of that limit for interference complaints that meet specified criteria.
How about pirate complaints?
On a typical weekend at the north end of Manhattan and the west Bronx, I’ve counted up to twenty pirate signals, nearly all of them on first adjacent channels to local New York stations. One near me on 101.3 makes WCBS-FM/101.1 unlistenable. Another does the same on 94.9 to WNSH/94.7. Sometimes two flank WFAN-FM/101.9 on 101.7 and 101.9. If New York was like Los Angeles or any other region with huge signals coming off high transmitter sites, this wouldn’t be a problem; but New York is a signal maze of shadows and multipath, and the biggest stations only pump out a few thousand watts from atop the Empire State Building, which is already looking sideways at several taller buildings along 57th street alone, with more in the works. It’s a real problem for broadcasters that needs more serious attention than it has been getting.
I say this, by the way, with appreciation for the cultural phenomenon that pirates surely are. Narly all are in Spanish, and appear to express, and perhaps also to serve, local broadcast needs. Far as I know, this has been studied even less than the FCC has studied the whole subject.