FCC
Public TV seeks exemption from FCC translator requirement
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The new requirement is “regulatory make-work” that “does not serve any necessary or legitimate purpose,” PBS and America’s Public Television Stations argued.
Current (https://current.org/tag/translators/)
The new requirement is “regulatory make-work” that “does not serve any necessary or legitimate purpose,” PBS and America’s Public Television Stations argued.
Engineers at public TV stations in the Mountain West are still coping with wintry weather as they try to complete their pieces of the national conversion of translators to new channels.
By the time the FCC’s extended filing deadline passed June 1, operators of 688 translators carrying programming of 55 PBS member stations had applied for new channels.
The wireless carrier and a team from PBS are working under tight deadlines to find new homes for public TV translators that are being displaced by the FCC’s repack of TV channels.
The agreement covers equipment, engineering, installation and legal fees.
Translator operators may not be able to find new channel space after the auction is over.
Pubcasters fear that hundreds of translators could be threatened by the spectrum auction planned for next year.
The FCC formally adopted rules today for the television spectrum auctions slated for mid-2015. Most of the provisions align with what the FCC has said leading up to today’s announcement. The commission formally declined to provide protections to low-power TV stations and TV translators. Neither facility category is eligible for protection under its current rules, the commission’s order said, and shielding them would “unduly constrain flexibility in the repacking process and undermine the likelihood of meeting the objectives for the incentive auction.” The commission will open a special filing window for LPTV and translators that provide “important services” to select new channels, and establish an special process for relocating displaced stations. The report and order also lays out a timetable for participating broadcasters to vacate their channels.
CPB Board members got an ominous preview Monday of the corporation’s upcoming white paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. At a meeting at CPB’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry Hawkes of Booz & Co.’s media and technology practice told board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even if their operators don’t participate in the auction. “That means that one-third of the system could have to change channels,” noted Vincent Curren, CPB’s c.o.o. “This will likely be more disruptive than the digital transition. This will be a major undertaking for our industry over the next several years.”
CPB commissioned the white paper, due out early next year, to inform policy discussions within the system about spectrum issues. The FCC announced last week that spectrum auctions will be conducted in mid-2015; repacking of the remaining bandwidth is expected to occur soon after.
Arizona PBS in Phoenix is bringing seven new digital translators online between June 24 and late September, extending its service to rural areas of the state. The repeater transmitters will bring HD service and extended channel access to viewers in and around Prescott, Flagstaff, Cottonwood, Sedona, Globe, Miami, Williams, Snowflake, Show Low and Yuma. Once initial work is complete, the station plans to request FCC permission to maximize coverage of its digital signal, said Karl Voss, chief broadcast engineer at KAET. For example, the new transmitter in Flagstaff will initially broadcast at 15 watts but go up to 100 watts when the station maximizes its digital signal. Grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Public Television Digital Transition Grant Program, CPB’s Digital Distribution Fund and the Kemper & Ethel Marley Foundation covered the $410,000 cost of buying and installing the translators.
The FCC took another step March 19 toward licensing more low-power FM stations, a move long advocated by community radio leaders. The agency will work through a backlog of thousands of applications for FM translators under a new system that it formally adopted, modifying a proposal floated last summer (Current, July 25, 2011). The pending translator apps must be processed before any new LPFM licenses can be awarded. The commission will toss out FM translator apps in larger markets to make way for LPFMs in those areas while continuing to process requests for translators in less-populous areas. Applicants can seek no more than 50 translator licenses nationwide, a new limitation cracking down on speculative filings seen in the past (Current, March 28, 2005).
Translators — the lonely relay-runners of broadcasting — are a rural institution under siege. While pubcasters use hundreds of them to reach remote pockets of their audience, they are being bumped off, one by one, by competitors for the frequencies that they use. In both radio and TV — particularly radio — they’re sitting ducks, vulnerable to being shoved aside by any applicants for full-service stations on the same frequencies. And religious broadcasters are filing apps by the hundreds. In TV, many translators will soon be knocked off the air as sheriffs, fire companies and DTV stations start using the UHF channels the FCC has given to them.