I apologize if this topic has been brought up in the past (probably several times). When the FCC went to the effort of repackaging the UHF TV spectrum was there any consideration given to expanding the FM band? Given the crowd on FM it would seem the answer would be to move TV channels 5 and 6 from 76 to 88 mhz and auction the space to AM stations that want to relocate to FM.
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Expanding the FM band
- Thread starter jimbo
- Start date
It has been brought up and the response is always the same. Sales of stand-alone radios have slowed to a trickle and, while radios are still standard equipment in most vehicles, it will take many, many years to put a sufficient number of expanded-band cars and trucks on the road. Additionally, there are a tiny number of formats with enough audience and advertiser appeal to prove viable on FM, and most markets have all those formats already on the existing band.
There were some who suggested allowing the AM's to migrate to a 'new band'....before the AM's are all dead...
The only receivers that can tune 76-88 MHz for anything but digital TV are SDR dongles and ancient portable TVs with CRTs and radio-dial channel selectors -- if any are left. There is no consumer market for standalone radios for any band anymore. AM stations that want an FM service will have to be satisfied with a sister-station's HD2 or HD3 feed (if they exist), or build a low-powered translator if there's room on the band.
The FCC has made it 100% clear, repeatedly, that those frequencies will not be used for anything but digital television, while the aircraft band above 108 MHz is about as sacred and immovable as any band in the spectrum. It will never be reallocated for anything else.
Many Tecsun AM-FM-SW portables with DSP chips (in other words, most of them) will tune as far south as the OIRT band. My Grundig G2 will. But not everyone has such radios, obviously. I'm sure the capability is built into many of the DSP chips in car radios, and other radios. The firmware isn't programmed in most such radios to tune to a lower FM band.
Other than switching the FM band to all digital which will not happen for many years, a change they could make is do what Canada does and let commercial go on the whole band instead of just 92.1 and above. I think that would be better use for the band. For most areas non-commercial part is just full of religious broadcasters with many taking up multiple frequencies because no one else can use them.
Not exactly. The non-commercial band has college stations, NPR stations, and community stations. And actually EMF has being buying stations in the commercial band lately because there are no buyers at the price being asked.
But I doubt a Republican FCC will consider doing anything that might hurt religious radio.
Sad but true,
but if what you suggest were to be done,
then the existing college and public stations would need to be
proscribed permanently from EVER selling to any commercial
interests or we would end up with all commercial stations.
Brown University sold its commercial FM to EMF last year. In that case a commercial FM, owned by a college, switched to non-com.
http://www.insideradio.com/free/lon...cle_12eb6960-8c13-11e7-87fc-ef2a4db2fb81.html
Whatever the use, legitimate non-com broadcasters have filled the below-channel-221 frequencies every bit as densely as the commercial channels. There is little or no free space, other than in highly rural areas.
In the larger metros, there have been competitive applications for non-commercial channels.
There are a lot of FM stations that are underperforming, if they can't fix those then what would be the point of adding more to the dial? More stations does not often mean more format choices usually it would be just more of the same. A cluster of stations in Albuquerque that were purchased for 22.5 million in 2002 were sold last year for 5 million. So the value of FM radio appears to be dropping quite a bit each year. But the competition now would be the growing use of streaming services in cars. I recently got a new phone and have been connecting it to my car radio to stream audio and it has actually been working really well, better than I expected! 
As has been stated earlier, it'll never happen. But the argument that there are no radios doesn't hold water in my book. AM stations in the 1600 to 1700 band today are in no worse shape than the ones from 1300 to 1600. HD radio finally has some listeners. Both services were launched with pretty much zero radios. If the FCC wanted to they could make the FM service far more useful for everyone by expanding that band and maybe taking a realistic look at terrain factors when allocating licenses. I realize it won't happen, but hey - I can dream.
Dave B.
Dave B.
The big catch in all this is the fact that radio is a business, and requires companies to invest in these stations. Optimistically, it would at 15-20 years for an expanded FM band to begin to get a ripple of action, based on your HD radio example. Not many companies, especially radio-only companies, have that kind of spare change to devote for that kind of lead time. It's more likely that they'll spend those dollars on more realistic investments, such as podcasting, streaming, and other non-broadcast business. On the other hand, if the FCC just wants to give away those frequencies, with the promise that companies won't pay any fees or expenses until there is a level of documented listenership, it might be a different story. But that's not usually how the FCC works.
EMF doesn't count as the type of non-com that we have been talking about.
Actually, there are only a couple of stand-alone HD-2 "stations" that show in the ratings. The rest of the "HD-2" stations that show in Nielsen are driven by listening to FM translators; Nielsen lists what the FCC considers to be the key station of a simulcast of this type.
I can't think of a single truly successful X-band station, either (whether in ratings or revenue).
Portland has one running IHeart 60s. It's shown up for the last four ratings with the infamous 0.1. There's no translator.
Until we can get something like THIS on commercial radio, I will say NO WAY to that! http://www.wmot.org/
Why not? They are buying stations, regardless of classification, which disproves the OP's point that the FCC needs to open the non-com part of the FM band.
If there was a shortage of available commercial frequencies, this would not happen.
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