WNBN-AM in Meridian Mississippi has a problem, and so does the FCC.
This document is somewhat garbled – it might be postscript or PDF format. The story described in the forfeiture order begins in 2007, when the FCC gets a complaint that WNBN-AM appears to not be reducing power at sunset. This can cause the AM station to skip off the ionosphere and interfere with many radio stations. Almost everything the FCC does is reactive, in response to a complaint. They rarely initiate investigations on their own. Complainer might have been another radio station, or might have been a DXer, a hobbyist who listens to AM radio stations at a long distance away and would be angry at this violation of the rules.
So the FCC investigator turns on his equipment from the office in Louisiana and hears the station loud and clear after sunset. Sometimes people make mistakes, so you like to see a pattern of failing to power down the transmitter. So the investigator listens for a second night for a longer period of time. The transmitter should have gone to low power at 5:15 PM but was still blasting away at 8:30 PM. Daylight saving time could explain a one hour screwup but not three hours. Looking more closely, he also realizes that the radio signal is not coming from the correct latitude and longitude.
So the investigator decides it is time to visit the radio station in person and see what the hell is going on. He meets with the owner and is able to get the relevant facts. The procedure the station is using is that the owner manually turns down the transmitter power at 9 PM, regardless of what time the sun is setting. The second issue is the transmitter location. The owner admits that the station is not transmitting from Its licensed location as the original plans fell through, so he built the tower at a different location, and just never got around to telling the FCC.
So the owner was hit with a “forfeiture order”, which is as close as the FCC has to any kind of ability to police anything. The language asserts that the station owner should make a “voluntary contribution” to the US treasury – or else! It would appear that the owner ignored the demand for money, and just kept on doing what he was doing. The only real sanction the FCC has is they will refuse to renew the license at the appropriate time. They can’t padlock the station, remove the equipment or anything like that. Some states have given the FCC state jurisdiction for pirate stations so that the sheriff can come out and do something, but in most states the FCC is powerless unless they can prove an imminent danger like interfering with airplane navigation. Annoying a DXer is not enough.
So in 2012, the license was up for renewal. The FCC threw out the “red light” rule, which means that if the FCC issued a demand for a “voluntary contribution” and you did not cough up the cash, they will refuse to renew the license until you do. So what if your license expires and you keep on broadcasting? Well, if the FCC thinks you might eventually pay, they can issue another forfeiture order for an unauthorized transmitter signal. So you keep broadcasting and the FCC keeps issuing uncollectible, unenforceable forfeiture orders. This little dance goes on until the owner dies or the bank forecloses. Pretty much everyone knows the entire radio station is worth less than the amount of the accrued forfeiture orders, but the FCC has no interest in taking over the radio station to operate it. So maybe the license gets deleted, maybe another party comes along and pays the fine to get the license, or it just sits in a limbo indefinitely. Deleting a license does not turn off the transmitter.
The FCC has been closing down its regional enforcement offices recently as being too expensive, which means the chance of an FCC inspector going out to a radio station in person is beginning to approach zero.
Happy MLK Junior day, and in Mississippi a happy Robert E Lee birthday to y’all.
OK, so that new commenting system didn’t work!
I like it just the way it is — no ‘up’ or ‘down’ thumb — this looks cleaner.
The old “notify me if somebody replies to my comment” plug-in broke, so I was looking for an alternative. The first one I tried sent notifications on every comment, which I figured probably was not a good idea. So that is not currently available. Right now that’s not at the top of my list to deal with. I’ve got 50 pounds of bacon to fry up before Friday
This version is supposed to have an opt in feature but I do not see it
>”Right now that’s not at the top of my list to deal with. I’ve got 50 pounds of bacon to fry up before Friday”<
L_O_L
parrott
You may not like my word filters, but I expect you to not try to circumvent them
How do you feel about comment notifications?
The same way the owner of WNBN-AM feels about it. 🙂
If I can opt-out individually, then I don’t care either way.
While the description says there is an opt out option, I don’t see one
Yeah I would pass on that commenting system, Like chairman says this is much cleaner.
That’s pretty wild that the FFC ‘ a powerless agency ‘. If I buy a station, we are putting back the top of the hour aircheck, Station Identification and it will sound like the 70’s.
People like that sh@t ! then real news for 4.5 minutes and no safelite commercial but real weather report.
I like this guys idea to stay powered up to 9pm, Hell Yeah !
power to the people !
L_O_L
Parrott
My sense is the only way you’re really piss off the FCC is if you go on a rant telling them that they don’t have the authority to tell you what to do – kind of like tax protesters who try to argue that the income taxes are not constitutional because it was not properly ratified. You can argue that all you want to the IRS auditor, but you’re not going to make any headway. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually right. The government is the government, and they have the big guns. Then you get to pay Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors to solve your tax problems, only to lose more money while you get deeper in debt
parrott’s on a roll. clear the decks. batten down the hatches.
p.s. to parrott: you should be programming your local radio station instead of some twenty-something kid in a three-piece suit who thinks-D-Day was the biggest battle we fought during the vietnam “conflict.”
The problem is that people want to get a paycheck on Friday, and salesman want to be paid a commission. Ultimately if a radio station can’t pay the bills, it will not survive. I think parents should start up an LPFM station 😉
dear fred: sending a comment notification is a thoughtful touch but, personally, it doesn’t matter to me. i come to read the comments everybody makes to everything because that’s what makes “turkeys CAN fly” so much fun.
i didn’t really understand the little “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” thing. was some computer going to keep track of the number of “up”s and “down”s? and then give us the results?
seems like the way it works here is that, if you don’t like a comment, you just say so — and why you disagree. and if you can make it funny, you get extra points.
dear fred: one more thought.
readability is really important to me — big and bold type, clean and uncomplicated design. i suspect that’s true of many of the people who come here — readers and commentors skew kinda old (lots of aging baby boomers.) not a lot of young whippersnappers on this blog.
Try Holding the Ctrl and press the + key and see if that helps. I have no control over the fonts used in the blog, at least not without a lot of research
i did it and everything got bigger. THANKS!
Eventually you will get around to the emails that are lurking in your inbox, now that you will be able to read them 😉
The up-and-down arrow thing was only live for about an hour, I didn’t write that, I was just checking it out. It was not working on my iPad, so that made it a nonstarter .
The word press blog software is what they call “open source”, which means people give away their efforts to develop the software and don’t claim ownership rights. Why do people do that? We are all socialists now.
The consequence is I am mostly dependent on the kindness of strangers, many in the scary countries all around the world. Changing the way things work is above my pay grade, and would be a distraction as long as I can find a solution that I don’t have to write myself.