[BC] Radio engineering not a profession - 50 kW Vs. 2 Watts

[Mike McCarthy]

The FCC still does it by mail...at renewal time.  Each licensee must 
certify his/her station is conformant (or has suitable temporary 
authorizations) at the time of renewal.  If the station is later found to 
have not been compliant at the time of renewal, the FCC will view that 
certification rather dimly under the candidness (lack of) aspect of fitness 
for holding the license.  Just look at all the fines which came about from 
Public File non-compliance admissions at renewal time.  The lawyers got the 
message out to their clients that they're license IS on the line and 
they're better off 'fessing and pay up the piper than to lie.

MM

At 10:36 AM 5/3/2008 -0700, Harold Hallikainen wrote

> > The sad thing is that there are probably hundreds of small town managers
> > like this now with little knowledge or regard for FCC R&R.  At least in
> > the
> > old days when you had someone with hard-earned blue-paper hanging on the
> > wall, you had someone who's first priority was seeing to it  that the
> > station operated in a legal and technicality competent manor. And back
> > then
> > managers had respect for engineers and didn't consider them just appliance
> > repairmen you call in when your radio station is broke.
> >
> >  - Nat Kayle
>
>
>About 20 years ago, the FCC experimented with a "mail order inspection." I
>always thought this was a good idea. You could get a pretty good idea
>whether the station had any idea what was going on. However, NAB did not
>think it was a good idea, and the FCC dropped it. Instead, they came up
>with the self inspection form that a station can use to evaluate how
>compliant it is, assuming it looks at the form. In addition, the FCC came
>up with the alternate inspection program which, I think, is a good idea.
>It's a way to reduce FCC enforcement costs and increase compliance. The
>FCC can then, instead, concentrate random inspections on stations that
>have not done the AIP.
>
>Finally, though not updated recently, and I still have more work to do
>with the 2001 data, I have FCC enforcement info at
>http://sujan.hallikainen.org/FCC/FccRules/violations/ . It can be
>interesting reading how stations respond to violation notices. In
>addition, the FCC now posts field office notices at
>http://www.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/ . These can be interesting reading.
>
>Harold