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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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