Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Michael A. Terrell" wrote:

Courtesy license were issued to military radio & TV stations. They
were issued for place keeping only, and to prevent a commercial station
being licensed on the same area and frequencies. It had nothing to do
with politics. The differences in the two licenses we Power level:
The license stated the initial power at the time it was issued, with the
disclaimer, "OR AS DEEMED NECESSARY". The expiration date was: "UNTIL
NO LONGER NEEDED". There are a lot of old records in the online FCC
database, but no record of the stations I engineered at, at Ft. Greely
in the early '70s.

What a letdown. By your presentation, I suspected dark undercurrents.


Most people have never even heard of a Courtesy license, let alone
have any idea what they were. A lot of broadcast engineers have never
heard of them, or seen one.


The FCC replaced the DOC as the ruling agency, and their first job
was to clean up the mess of radio stations that interfered with each
other. Once again this was an engineering problem, not political.
Stations had been allowed on the air with little or no control.

Early TV has similar problems, requiring the realignment of channel
and power assignments. This was an engineering problem, not politics.

Well, neither of us were at the FCC during this period, but having
worked there I have a lot of difficulty believing that they were ever
free of politics.

Joe Gwinn


Joe, the FCC was created because the DOC was purely political, and
screwed up everything. They were to created to fix the technical
problems. Once that was taken care of, the FCC turned into a typical,
lawyer driven government agency. After all, someone had to fine the
stations that didn't comply to their new rules.

Do you know about the first TV channel realignment? When the '150
mile rule' went into effect, a lot of TV stations had to move to a
different channel.


--
Greed is the root of all eBay.