Dave Platt wrote:

In article ,
Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Hundreds of kilowatts, up to megawatts of power output. I'm sure it
adds up. And, since it's public spectrum, they're paying a
significant license fee every year to the Feds for the right to use
the frequency exclusively within their broadcast area.

You are ignoring the antenna gain. One station I worked at fed 130
KW to the antenna for a 5 MW EIRP. The backup generator was a 500 KW
Kohler diesel that was able to power the entire transmitter site,
including the cooling system & A/C.

Erp. You're quite right - I failed to notice that the quoted figures
are EIRP rather than transmitter output power (or similar). This
would bring the per-hour operating cost down by quite a lot.

So, if the whole power budget for a station such as yours is in the
range of 400 kW (output power, transmitter losses and necessary
inefficiency, cooling and airco, and lower-power auxiliary stuff) then
it might be in the range of low tens of dollars per hour in
electricity costs? Not too terrible.


It was around $45,000/month, or about $62.50 an hour when you
subtract the few hours they were off the air, after midnight Sundays.


What I suspect that the stations would like to do would be to be able
to sell/auction off the spectrum rights.


They don't own the spectrum they use. If they stop using it, the FCC
voids their license.


VHF and UHF spectrum is
limited and expensive, and there are probably commercial applications
(e.g. cellphone and Internet access) which would pay quite a lot for
access to a 6 MHz slice of spectrum. If the local stations could
shift over to non-broadcast signal distribution without losing more
than a small fraction of their viewership they'd probably find it very
attractive to do so (assuming that they can get regulatory approval).


Those frequencies are rather useless for cell or broadband. VHF has
too much noise and skip. All of the UHF band wouldn't gain much,
compared to microwave bands where smaller antennas would be useful.


If this trend plays out, it would tend to throw "free access to at
least basic TV news and entertainment" into the waste-can of history,
as the signals would not be available via any non-pay distribution
system. In the past I believe that there were public-safety and
social-benefit arguments made in terms of ensuring free access to the
broadcast media; whether this philosophy will hold true in the future
is anyone's guess.


Actually, they could move free TV broadcast to the KU band, and offer
dumbed down sat receivers cheap or for free. US OTA stations are
carried by Dish & Direct TV. A featureless sat receiver could be built
to only allow reception to stations currently available. A complete GPS
receiver & antenna module is now under $20. No need for an account,
just plug & play on existing TVs.