[BC] Regulations For AM Station DX Te sts

[Cowboy]

On Friday 30 December 2005 05:51 pm, Steve wrote:

>From: "Cowboy" <curt at spam-o-matic.net>

>>  Well, if it did no harm ( think interference ) then you wouldn't have
>>  a night pattern at all, and your day pattern would be authorized
>>  for full time operation !
>
>Read my post about this.

 I did.

>You'll probably be one of those out to lynch me. 

 If you are truly advocating a blatant disregard of the rules, yes.
 Whether or not I may agree with the rules is not relevant.
 The rules are what the rules are. That I am able to make a living
 by playing within the rules, for good or ill, is the hand that I have
 been dealt. 

 At the time, the powers that were thought that a radio station on
 every street corner, shoe-horned in by any means, was a good
 idea, for whatever reason.
 That "harmful interference" may have been the direct result of
 that line of thinking, requiring night time pattern authorizations
 that differ from daytime authorizations in order to make these
 stations "fit" is no justification for ignoring the rules, and somehow
 justifying unauthorized daytime facility operation at night.

 The licensees of these stations have agreed to play by those rules.
 Therefore, I can not see playing by the rules previously agreed to
 by the players as "too much government" in any case.

 HOWEVER, if your comment is meant as a political disagreement with
 the number of radio stations as a result of this shoe-horning in by use
 of complex pattern adjustment and maintenance by which many of us
 put food on the table, then no, I'd not be one out to lynch anyone.
 In fact, in light of the result of decades of questionable political decisions
 by the Commission apparently based on a narrow view of immediate 
 financial return with no regard for the future, financial, technical, or
 otherwise, you may find more agreement with your position than you
 apparently realize !

 For my part(s) in building, tuning, and in the past, maintaining stations
 to provide maximum coverage within their legal authorizations, I will
 make no apology.
 True, some of them probably should not have been built, depending on
 one's point of view, but that decision was made by others for whatever
 legal reasons.

On Friday 30 December 2005 06:29 pm, Milton R. Holladay Jr. wrote:
>Unless there is an extremely compelling reason not to, DAs should be able to
>take the maximum xmtr power available, 'cause _you know it's gonna happen_,
>someday, er, night, when an interlock or something fails or, more likely,
>when some human errs. Or, maybe you'll get a night power increase.......
>M

 Ah, well....
 While I generally like a 5/1 safety margin, there are direct costs measurable
 in real dollars in doing such, and for a 10/1 margin in the case presented,
 my experience is such that few if any owners will bear the burden of building
 for 10 times the power that should never be used under any circumstances
 whatever.
 Many owners will balk at the costs of even a 2/1 safety margin, and many of
 us have worked on arrays with no safety margin at all !

 *Could* they justify 50kw into the 5kw ATU during the experimental period
 for tests and/or maintenance ?
 Probably.
 I merely submit that based on what I've seen in the field would be the likely
 result of such test.

 As RM suggests, building a simple network that
 would handle it is no big deal.
 Justifying the costs to the owner for what purpose would be the harder part,
 perhaps even more difficult that justifying the legality of such test !

 If a night time power increase is anticipated, then yes, by all means, it is
 far more economical to build it than to RE-build it.

 In the case of an interlock failure, the stuff I build would pretty much take
 deliberate tampering in order to defeat fail-safe.
 More likely, would be that any failure would allow only the lower power mode,
 if allowing the transmitter to come on at all.

 ( special cases would include a 3DX50, where *every* mode of the transmitter
 is capable of full power. I believe this is poor design, and so long as the
 owner knows that a morning man could simply hold the "raise" button and
 thereby reduce the entire site to off-the-air-scrap and still chooses to use
 that transmitter, well, an informed decision has been made by the one with
 authority to make that decision. )

 In the case of deliberate tampering, such as manually defeating interlocks
 all bets are off !
 In the case presented, a wanna-be engineer with a clip lead could probably
 do a million dollars worth of damage in very short order.
 We are professionals working in a professional industry.
 I have little sympathy for an owner or manager who would allow such
 incompetence unsupervised access to such a potential loss.

-- 
Cowboy

http://cowboys.homeip.net

Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it
needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
		-- Kipling