K287BQ-FM has been operating in full compliance with all FCC regulations. You should cease and desist with all accusations to the contrary. You should expect legal action
Funny thing about actual attorneys - they're usually pretty quiet, and they don't tip their hand.
Funny thing about the engineering community in Houston - it's been quiet about all the transmitter impropriety here for the better part of a decade.
I assure you, the very last thing any of the translator operators wants is to put actual broadcast engineers, or their associates, in a position where they must defend themselves. The stuff that has been whispered about all this time would most likely end up in official filings.
Many of the translators on the air in Houston were hopped into town without any of the hop sites having been built, and there is a paper trail that proves it. The very last thing you want is for someone who knows how to put that paper trail together, then present it to the FCC to actually do so. It seems the Commission is taking candor issues seriously as of late.
That, and you should know that even though the large station ownership groups here have chosen not to involve the FCC, a substantial amount of data about improper translator operations has been collected, mostly at the request of the legal departments at those large ownership groups. For those of us who've had to do the collecting, it has been an enormous inconvenience.
Here's how it happens:
Most of the time, the translators are more or less inconsequential. They run niche formats that don't compete with any of the big radio groups.
But occasionally, one of the translators will drift out of its lane, and launches a format intended to compete with one of the big stations. This is always a very bad day for engineering managers here, because at this point, we know what we're in for. We get called in for a meeting with the GM and program director of the station being targeted by the translator to discuss the signal. By now, all the GMs in town know the translators operate outside licensed parameters, so the next ask is that we contact the corporate engineering managers to see what can be done about the offending operation.
Meanwhile, the program director is taking the new challenger up the chain on the programming side, and getting the corporate programming overlords riled up.
Next, legal is involved, and gear arrives from the corporate office. We then get to spend a few days driving the offending signal, mapping the signal strength by GPS coordinates and creating maps.
That's followed by the creation of videos that prove the translator isn't rebroadcasting the station specified on its license, and trips to the translator's transmitter site to photograph the antennas that don't match the license either.
After several more meetings and dozens of emails, now with local management, local engineering management, local programming management, corporate programming management, corporate engineering management, and legal all involved, the legal department will eventually say that we have the offending translator dead to rights...but we don't want to involve the FCC.
At the end of the day, the whole exercise is to make the GM and programming department feel like engineering and legal "did something."
But by now, we're fully aware going into it what the outcome will be, so the whole exercise is rather tiresome for everyone involved.
The end result is the station being targeted by the translator gets a few more bucks to spend on billboards.
And everything is quiet until the next time one of the f&&5#@g translators gets leased to someone delusional enough to think they can take on a heritage, full market signal with it. Then we get to do it all over again.
But that's our problem.
The takeaway here for any translator operator dumb enough to back anyone into a corner with threats of legal action, is that a lot of data sitting quietly in storage would inevitably come out.
