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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

The FCC does not monitor broadcasts for presence or content. They do respond to complaints (typically interference), but a missing signal creates no interference.

If someone else wanted that AM allocation, they would have filed a complaint that the licensee was not operating, and the license would be cancelled.

It's also not typical to monitor your own signal directly. You have telemetry coming back from the transmitter site. This includes antenna VSWR which would spike if the antenna disappeared. Or no telemetry at all, if the transmitter building lost power or was raided etc.

There is zero possibility that a compliant licensee would not be aware of an antenna loss within seconds of it happening. So the question becomes what level of noncompliance this licensee was operating under. Sounds to me like they were cheating because AM transmissions are low ROI.

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A tiny operation like this? I doubt they had anything close to telemetry. Rather, they probably had a tech who visited the site ever couple months. Nothing in the shack/tower would have required daily maintenance. Their only realtime "telemetry" might have been when the power bill for the site was lower than normal.

Fair points, but:

Telemetry is cheap in the scheme of broadcast expenses.

If the station is operating on a shoestring budget, you have at least one human who cares that the revenue-generating operations (broadcast signal) are happening.

Similarly that person would notice the change in power expenses.

Even in the lowest-tech, least-compliant of stations, someone would notice an antenna and/or tower loss within a day. This reads like a case of severe neglect, almost certainly intentional, and possibly fraudulent.

This charitable explanation hinges on the assumption that they want to run an AM station.

Given that their license is for a FM rebrodcaster, it seems like the FM business is the one they care about more, and the AM signal was just being used as a means to an end.

You're right. They clearly did not want to run the AM station, and it was likely a negative ROI operation.

My assertion though, is that there's no chance that they were unaware that the AM station was down.

The only path to plausible deniability requires extreme non-compliance, which risks fines and could even threaten their ability to hold other licenses / operate other stations.

So they're in trouble either way, but this story of surprise is absolute crap.

I'm not familiar with the rules here but is not caring a complaint route to a defense? It can be in many other fields.

I.e. purposefully don't have any monitoring, purposefully don't go to the site often etc. then only respond of someone tells you there's a problem.

I've dealt with a few contracts in the past that have stipulated that we must respond within xx hours of becoming aware of an issue, if I didn't want to run the service it would be in my interests to do everything in my power not to avoid becoming aware of any issues.

You appear to be conflating a few things. The 'contractor' timeliness of xx hours is typically stipulated in a contract as an Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameter.

There are regulatory causes for 'xx' response times as well, outside of a contract.

The first part you brought up was willful ignorance[0] which would likely come into play with licensing, insurability, as well as tort and criminal liabilities.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_ignorance

No. If you hold a license, you are obligated to operate the station at the licensed power. Not caring is not allowed.

In this case, they were required to operate the AM station to keep their FM license. In addition to the usual threats to license and fines etc, they were also risking their FM license which persumably was ROI positive.

What a stupid arrangement. Why didn't they get a normal FM license and let the AM license go?

That’s a lot more expensive.

Assume the AM is a negative-ROI operation. Thus why would they care about quality? Why would there be *any* form of quality check? Any check requires effort and thus makes the ROI even more negative.

I can see scrappers stealing the tower and nobody bothered to find out. I can also see scrappers stealing the tower, the station knew but since it's negative-ROI they pretended they didn't.

Because the part of their operation that presumably is ROI-positive (the FM transmitter) is technically a rebroadcast of whatever they are transmitting on AM. If the quality of the AM signal is actually so bad that nobody can receive it, then they will forfeit their FM license too.

They don’t have a FM license, they have a translator license that is contingent on their AM license.

Even without a proper modulation monitor, simply tuning a radio to the station will tell you if you're on-air or not.

The operators knew. They just didn't care. Or they may not have known that the tower had been stolen and assumed the transmitter was broken and were procrastinating to fix it.

Moreover, I can't imagine anyone successfully tearing down a working antenna. My guess is the timeline went: transmitter stops working, site sits idle for a few months, thieves notice it's turned off, raid the place, station owner finally decides to do something about it, discovers they've been cleared out.

A more likely scenario is the owner was strapped for cash and arranged for a crew to take the tower.

Especially because the transmitters disappeared, too. ALL the station equipment disappearing? Wonder who's got it now, or what it's been parted out to for other AM radio stations scraping together gear to keep running.

Smash and grabs of transmitter building equipment are relatively quick. They set off alarms (usually) of course, but you can get out in 15 minutes with a few racks of gear.

Taking down a tower requires more time and care. And tools. And it pays less for scrap, although the black market for the kind of equipment you find in a transmitter building is small and not well-capitalized.

What do you mean they don’t monitor for silence?

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2022/07/articles/fcc-cracki...

You should read the linked decisions in the article.

The FCC learned about the dead air because the stations themselves filed Special Temporary Authority paperwork with the FCC specifying that the station carrier was not active during that time.

So, it was not active monitoring, but passive paperwork review, triggered by the license application itself, that caused the ruling.

The FCC does not actively monitor stations in any way.

That article does not talk about the FCC monitoring ordinary licensees for "silence" (which I assume means off-air i.e. transmitter turned off, and not dead-air i.e. broadcast of silent audio).

(Dead air is actually a bigger sin than off-air. Off-air happens. Dead air should almost never happen.)

The article talks about monitoring stations who have a history of poor usage of their license. And it's not clear that "monitor" here would mean any active steps, vs just requiring the usual mandatory reporting of unscheduled, unpermitted, extended off-air events.

But the FCC does not routinely monitor for dead air or any other violations. They do respond to complaints of all kinds. In competitive markets, licensees monitor each other.

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