Radio Waves

The FCC may change the way it licenses stations. But even if it does nothing, radio will never be the same.

Jesse Walker from the June 1999 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Such devices are not science fiction: The Philips Clevercast, used for converting data broadcast from satellites, works on a similar principle. So, for that matter, does DirecTV, which lets a TV set built to receive UHF and VHF signals pick up broadcasts made in the SHF band. But if you want to bring down the price of the converter, you'll need a highly integrated device without a high parts cost, and to get companies to invest in developing such a machine, you'll need a regulatory regime that will allow the product to be put to the use for which it was devised. In the pithy words of Bennett Kobb, author of the widely used SpectrumGuide: Radio Frequency Allocations in the United States, "Manufacturers will make just about any gizmo if they see a mass market." Until then, Kobb notes, "We're using a 60-year-old technology with FM, and it's creating an artificial scarcity, when we could accommodate for all practical purposes an unlimited class of stations."

The FCC hopes to come to a decision about the micro radio proposal later this year. The NAB and the state broadcasting associations have begun a concentrated lobbying effort to stop it--although there have been some defectors from the fold. On March 3, Radio World shocked its readers by editorializing on behalf of the Kennard plan. "Some broadcast supporters," it wrote, "including friends of the NAB on Capitol Hill, argue that new competition will damage the economic prospects of license-holders. Indeed it could, if existing stations don't serve their audiences well. But it's not the job of Congress to protect the economic interests of a certain group of existing broadcasters."

Even as Tauzin pushes Congress to stop the smallest steps toward opening the airwaves, other congressmen--Democrats, mostly--have supported Kennard's proposal. David Bonior (D-Mich.) and 27 other representatives recently sent the FCC a letter endorsing a micro radio service. Several city councils have passed pro-micro-radio resolutions, from towns as small as Salida, Colorado, to cities as big as Detroit. The Michigan legislature, too, has issued a call to start licensing low-power stations.

Perhaps the FCC will listen to these voices. If it doesn't, of course, the unlicensed stations will persist. And no matter what, the DARS broadcasters will soon be active, radically changing the economic face of radio.

"By adopting a licensed, advertiser-supported, limited-channel broadcasting system," the social theorist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote in his 1983 book Technologies of Freedom, "America has penalized itself for half a century. It has undermined its tradition of free communication, and it has limited broadcasting to mass provision of the few most popular formats of entertainment." We may be--just maybe--on the edge of something better.