[BC] Regulations For AM Station DX Te sts

[Robert Meuser]

guys, I think this whole conversation has gone over the top.  Many 
stations test in experimental hours for various reasons. I personally 
have limited tests to tones, test announcements and where needed music 
totally off format - (Hard rock on a country station, old school country 
on a hip hop station, etc - talk stations are the easiest). If music is 
played it is usually at the max positive peak the TX is capable of  in 
an attempt to flush out a marginal component. I have built DA-2 50 KW 
stations that also had an electrically switched full Omni mode and have 
run the omni at full power in experiemntal hours (usually for ratio 
measurements). I do not think there has ever been a station cited for 
tests in the experimental hours.  I would never call them DX tests, but 
if I were involved with some DX organization and I let them know in 
advance of some planned tests, that's a whole different situation.

As for costs and operating margins, I have never had to break a 
directional system into line items for an owner. Its here's what the 
phasing and matching package cost is and it is almost always speced for 
the highest power the plant was capable of, unless it was some extreme 
like 50 K day and 1 K night. In such cases, I would make it almost 
impossible for the 50 to feed the 1 K phasing system (certainly not 
automatically) and use a separate 1 or 5K TX.

I think the whole approach to tests is what is reasonable.  The orignal 
station in question is interesting in that they are obviously a station 
that was originally 5 K omni unlimited and were able to upgrade the day 
signal and not accomplish much by changing the night. This would mean 
that the night ATU is probably the original and would certainly blow up 
if 50 K were run into it.

R

R

Cowboy wrote:

>On Friday 30 December 2005 05:51 pm, Steve wrote:
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>>From: "Cowboy" <curt at spam-o-matic.net>
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>>> 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.
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>
> I did.
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>>You'll probably be one of those out to lynch me. 
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> 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:
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>>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
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>
> 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.
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