Total posts : 45366
If only there were more channels, even if those channels were only up to 10 watts (effective). With the location I have at school, I could cover most of our desired area with about 1 watt and a good antenna. We are a community college, so all but about 400-500 students commute everyday (we added some dorms this fall) which is about 8000 total students this semester. It would be really nice if we could reach our students with things like class cancelations, morning traffic, parking issues, etc., and reach them before they arrived. But there are NO FM channels in our area, and there is no LPAM class yet, so this leaves part 15 and the internet. The problem with the internet is that it is difficult to get in your car. The infrastructure just isn’t there yet (in our market).
So when the big broadcasters start yelling about things that don’t really effect their protected curves (while they get their 3 for the price of one with digital), I get a little irritated. Now if those devices really do have too much signal strength, then the manufacturers should be made to correct the problem. If they don’t really have too much power, all the big broacast funded organizations should leave well enough alone. The end all be all judge of this has to be the ruling body (the FCC). And making a summary ruling about unknown devices should not be allowed, what if the end user illegally modified that transmitter. No one knows if the transmitters in those cars had been modified, and they don’t even know if more than one car on the same channel went by. At least the NAB sponsored test had a clear cut methodology with know tranmitters. I would have been a little more happy with the NAB report if they had used an antenna that was meant to be used with their spectrum analyzer. This NPR report should be completely discounted for it’s lack of error correction and unknown variables.
