Reading your editorial regarding the LPFM third-adjacency report, I couldn't help but wonder that the “great translator flood of '03” has all but rendered the point moot. Indeed, if the third-adjacency restriction hadn't been imposed at the onset of LPFM licensing, a number of viable allocations could have gone on the air in the greater Cleveland market. But if even half of the translator applications recently filed with the Commission are licensed, potential slots for new LPFMs will be nearly wiped out, third adjacency relief or no. Many of these applications filed in our local area are on second, not third adjacent channels.

Can anyone explain how this blatant abuse of the FCC's somewhat Byzantine translator rules is going to serve the public interest? I worked with a local high school trying hard to set up a school radio program and had to explain that there were no LPFM allocations available. Can someone now explain to them why it is that the same geographic area can support licensing of not one, but a half dozen translators?
Mark Krieger, CBT
contract engineer
Cleveland, OH

Good show

I just wanted to thank you for posting a link to our website and mentioning the dates of our conference in the Radio magazine Currents Online Weekly E-mail newsletter.

This year's event was fantastic with more than 170 attendees. We had engineers from coast to coast and an attendance increase over last year of 20 percent.

We have already started to plan for September 17, 18 and 19, 2004.

On behalf of the executive of the CCBE I thank you for helping get the word out to make our most successful conference to date.
Harrie Jones
president
Central Canada Broadcast Engineers

Quality audio for IBOC

After reading your editorial in the June issue, I decided to record and send you an audio sample. The short MP3 that I sent is a standard C-Quam analog AM station, received in Toledo, OH, using just a loop antenna. Toledo is 82 air miles from the CFCO 10kW transmitter site in Chatham, ON, Canada. Toledo is not in CFCO's primary area of coverage. The audio was received on a Fanfare FTA-100 tuner and recorded directly to a Philips home CD recorder without any equalization. Despite using the loop antenna, I was quite impressed with the relatively low noise level and decent stereo separation, as well as the frequency response.

After listening to CFCO and WJR in AM stereo on this tuner, I'm convinced that if all the effort devoted to creating a broadcast system with dial-up Internet quality audio — the IBOC scheme — was instead invested into making a decent AM receiver, broadcasters would be saved a ton of money. Broadcasters should consider putting their money into purchasing a tuner/radio manufacturer that could produce superb AM radios, just like Crosley Radio did while owning flame-thrower WLW-AM (hint, hint Clear Channel). The broadcaster's company could build a tuner with an AM section similar to the Fanfare with frequency response to the 10.2kHz limit with a 10kHz whistle filter, throw-in a noise-blanker, stereo AM, and then work on DSP decoding to further improve noise issues, as is done with the Motorola Symphony or Omega chipsets.

If the developers still want to go proceed with IBOC on the FM band, they could make a tuner/radio that would include the new “HD-AM” with features listed above and an IBOC-FM. To help current AM stations avoid wasting money on their experimental IBOC/HD Radio hardware, Ibiquity could write the software code to generate C-Quam with the existing IBOC hardware, thereby keeping their broadcast system compatible with the millions of existing Chrysler minivan soccer-mom car radios listening to Radio Disney in AM stereo.
John Pavlica
systems engineer
Innovative Controls Corporation
Toledo, OH

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