[BC] BDR Article--"Does the FCC Know Where Your Station Is?"

[Tom Taggart]

Interesting article in the BDR...

Many older installations may be off a by few seconds, simply
because it was not that crucial at the time the station was
built.  Not sure even if it is today, where the error may
only be 1 or 2 hundred feet (except in the case of an AM
directional array); but we've developed the accuracy of
measurement beyond the ability to comprehend what the
measurements mean. 

Can be an interesting problem where an antenna is mounted on
a tower used for other services...tower registration or
those other licenses might not correspond exactly to where
the broadcast antenna is licensed.

Interesting side light on this--couple of years ago friend
bought an old AT&T microwave tower, which he then sought to
have registered (short tower, didn't need to be
registered--but he was looking for cellular rentals & they
would only look at registered towers).  FAA 7460 sent
in--using AT&T's coordinates for the tower.  FAA office
called back--coordinates were wrong--they were using
TopoZone to check! Just a minor error, but the coordinates
put the tower in the center of the county highway. (TopoZone
still available--at Trails.com).

Another interesting aspect to this is many folks do not know
how to read the coordinates shown on a GPS. Back when we
owned the local AM, a nearby church was a client. Later,
when the low-power window opened, they asked me to do their
application, pointing to a site about a mile & quarter from
that AM (which we had since sold). A site due south of the
AM. No problem, we figured out the coordinates from a topo,
filed that application, and a c.p. was issued. 

Minister comes in--complains the CP was all wrong--that the
coordinates listed in the CP were on that AM tower...and his
GPS proved it. As you've guessed, the longitude was right,
but he had misread the decimal display of the GPS for the
latitude.

One important record that may be somewhere at the FCC--but I
can't find on-line, is the studio address of the station. 
Our mail goes to a P.O. box, when we built our station in
1983, the rural mail delivery was unreliable.  Besides, the
rural route address would have been "route X, Box Y;" there
were no street numbers on our road at that time.  Now we
have a "911" address, which we had to get because a lot of
UPS shipping locations have software that demands a street
number be entered. Never bothered the local UPS drivers,
they just parked in front of the building with the big tower
next to it.  Of course, since we have a combined site, it
would be easy for the FCC to find--just type in the tower
coordinates.

However, when we bought a third station, we had to move the
studios in 2 months.
The station had been in a JSA with the local Clear Channel
Cluster, CC did not renew the JSA so the absentee owners
sold to us. CC wanted their closet studio vacated. So we
bought a house, threw up a 60' STL tower & built a studio,
all in the two months from the October 15th signing to the
late December closing. One of the things we did is send a
letter to the Commission alerting them to the address change
for the studio. (We're still trying to get all the agencies
to correct their databases--just this week we've been
tracking down a missing check that probably got sent to a CC
lock box).

Interestingly, the field inspector went through town 6
months later, stopping at the two local clusters but not at
this station. Would have had to drive right by the studio
going from one cluster to the other. Maybe we just weren't
on the list.

However, I can't find anywhere on FCC.Gov which lists studio
addresses. Mailing address--yes. Not the actual studio
address.  Again, could be inferred from the STL license
coordinates--but if the station uses a wired data link or
unlicensed 5.7 ghz link there's no licensed site to track
down.