FCC Takes a Bite Out of Clear Channel and Its Ilk

It looks like the FCC is finally moving on low power local radio, and in so doing, they are going to be kneecapping crappy mass market radio, which includes a lot of the right wing talkers:

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision issued Monday (PDF) will clear the runway for hundreds of new community radio stations that broadcast on low-power FM signals, bringing progressive, community voices to urban areas that have for decades only known what’s being broadcast by major corporations and America’s political right.

In other words, the dismantling of Rush Limbaugh was just the beginning, and the whole FM dial is next.

The FCC’s decision on Monday wipes away a massive backlog of applications for FM repeater stations, which are transmitters that repeat signals broadcast by corporate and religious radio operators — many of which rake in big listening audiences for right-wing syndicated talk shows.

“So, what a lot of right-wing, conservative radio stations have been able to do is expand their reach out in communities by just having these translators out in the wild, which is why Rush Limbaugh gets the type of audience that he has — because the networks take one signal and repeat it over and over and over across the dial all over the country,” Steven Renderos, national organizer with the Center for Media Justice, told Raw Story on Tuesday. “They’re constantly looking for opportunities to expand that, so there were a slew of these applications pending at the FCC.”

…………

Instead of slowly grinding down thousands of repeater station applications that leave no room for community radio, the FCC essentially threw most of those applications away by limiting who can apply, how many filings a single entity can make, and which markets can consider new repeaters — all of which frees up the regulatory body to examine applications for new community stations. The regulatory agency still gave some deference to corporate broadcasters, however, by allowing them one shot at revising their applications to fit the new guidelines.

…………

The FCC’s move Monday was the first step on a path laid out by the Local Community Radio Act, signed by President Barack Obama at the start of 2011, which represented the first real victory in activists’ long fight against the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) the radio industry’s biggest lobbying group. The bill freed up portions of the radio spectrum that had otherwise been kept empty by the larger broadcasters, who had long insisted upon four clicks of blank space on the FM dial to prevent interference. It also stipulated that new space on the dial must be reserved for community stations in urban areas where there might otherwise be none.

The radio stations that they are clearing the deck are limited to non profits, and each one has to be independently owned.

So, we'll see more diversity on radio, and we'll have better radio.

Some Good News (And a Hearty F%$# You to NPR)

The Congress has finally passed a bill allowing for low power community radio, the Local Community Radio Act, which will allow for expended low power, sub 100 watt, radio stations.

Until the late 1970s, legally licensed low power non commercial radio was a fairly common thing, but then NPR successfully lobbied the FCC to terminate those licenses to eliminate the competition and to open up airwaves for their expansion.

Hopefully, this will allow for a far greater diversity in radio.

Victory for Low Power Community Radio

Harold Feld has the scoop, but the short version is that the courts upheld the FCC's ruling to make it easier to form low power, less than 100 watt, non commercial radio.

As an aside, I don't give to public radio, because NPR, et. al, have been vociferous opponents of this, not for technical reasons, which have always been crap, but because they don't want competitors for their niche.

NPR Gets ½ a Clue

Well, it took them long enough to realize that by lending her to the partisan political operation known as Fox News, she is creating a credibility problem for the network:

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

Liasson refused, because she has a contract, and because, "she appears on two of the network’s news programs, not on commentary programs with conservative hosts," except, of course that the agendas of these programs is set by those, "commentary programs with conservative hosts."

See my earlier post, with a spot on Jon Stewart critique of Faux News here.

As to Liasson, she's not quite as hacktacular as Barbara Bradley Hagerdy, who is literally in the pay of right wing Christo Fascists, but to hear the venom drip when she says the world "liberals," is enough.

Another reason, in addition to their balls to the wall opposition to low power radio, for me not to give to them at pledge time.

Things That Make Me Want to Smash My Clock Radio With a Sledge Hammer

It goes off, and they have Bill "Felafel Man" Oreilly on pimping his book:

Last October, after NPR fired Juan Williams, O'Reilly went on Fox News and said NPR "is not a news organization" and "is basically a left-wing outfit" that "throw[s] out propaganda in violation of the First Amendment." He called for "the immediate suspension of every taxpayer dollar going into the National Public Radio outfit" and likened the network to terrorists: "Terrorists want to create terror. Well what does NPR want to create? They're intimidating, too." To cap it all off, he called NPR "boring," "dishonest," and a "snake pit."

………

So O'Reilly thinks NPR is a totalitarian snake-pit of pseudo-terrorism that shouldn't get taxpayer money to promote its dishonest left-wing ideological agenda. Using taxpayer money to help sell his books, though, is perfectly fine.

And the interview itself was nauseatingly sycophantic.

Seriously, If I didn't not donate to public radio because of their vociferous opposition to low power community radio, I would never give to them now.

And In An Emergency, Your Lobbyist Can Be Used as a Flotation Device*

I've written about efforts to allow free wireless connectivity access to what is called "White Spaces", bits of spectrum allocated to over the air TV, but not used.

It has been proposed that these spaces be used for unlicensed devices, much in the same way that WiFi works now.

The difference is that the ranges and penetration of the signals are much greater.

Well, there are two groups lobbying very hard against this, the broadcasters, who have their channels allocated from this spectrum, and the wireless microphone industry, who use the white spaces illegally, and have done so for years.

Since the FCC tests showed that there was no problem with interference with TV stations, the prototypes did the necessary, "sense and avoid," of occupied space, there isn't a problem there, so my take is that their opposition is because they think that they "own" this space, and they think that there may be a way to monetize the space, so they have enlisted wireless microphone users: (quoting Harold Feld on
For a good background on all this, check out Harold Feld at Wetmachine.com):

I gotta admire the broadcasters (as represented by their trade orgs, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV)). Even with the facts completely against them, they never give up trying. Sadly, they all too often succeed through a combination of heavy duty lobbying power (what politician doesn't suck up to his or her local broadcaster?) and the fact that most decision makers don't know squat about engineering and regard the whole thing as black magic. Heck, it worked to hamstring low-power FM (LPFM) radio, despite a subsequent independent government report showing the broadcaster interference claims were unsubstantiated bologna.

But embracing radio pirates by proposing to expand the availability of wireless microphones in the broadcast white spaces for their political allies and tacitly agreeing to amnesty for illegal wireless microphone users? Even I never thought they would go that far.

He also notes that the US military uses the technology in question for protection of their troops in life threatening situations.

In any case, it looks like the broadcasters have brought in the big guns,^† a Megachurch Preacher Rick Warren and Dolly Parton to claim that, white space devices will "will create an unnecessary interference in the worship services of hundreds of thousands of churches across the country," according to the preacher man, and may have a, "direct negative impact" on Dollywood, the Grand Ole Opry, and "9 to 5: The Musical."

You are illegally squatting on a public resource already, Ms. Parton.

^*Pun most certainly intended.
^†Yeah, this pun is intended too.

Yeah, I Work There

Normally I don't just publish a press release, but Antenna Research Associates is my workplace, so I am posting this without comment:

OceanSound Partners Acquires Antenna Research Associates, a Leading Provider of Integrated Radio Frequency

OceanSound Partners (“OceanSound”), a growth-oriented private equity firm that invests in technology and technology-enabled services businesses serving government and highly-regulated enterprise end-markets, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Antenna Research Associates, Inc. (“ARA” or the “Company”), a leading provider of integrated radio frequency (“RF”) and advanced communications products to the aerospace and defense (“A&D”) end-markets. ARA’s management team, led by CEO Logen Thiran, will continue in their operational roles and as investors in the Company. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 1963, ARA enables the U.S. Department of Defense and other national security-focused customers to modernize legacy platforms and deploy next-generation systems that enhance situational awareness, threat detection, and advanced communication capabilities. The Company leverages its over 60-year heritage in electromagnetic spectrum expertise, combined with scaled innovation, engineering, manufacturing, and testing infrastructure to design, develop, and deploy advanced antennas and other mission-critical RF solutions across several use cases, including Communications, Tactical RF, and Radar-Critical Subsystems. ARA’s core differentiation lies in its ability to leverage active electronically scanned array (“AESA”) technology applied in size-, weight-, power-, and cost-constrained applications.

“ARA’s comprehensive RF solutions portfolio is well positioned to address critical U.S. Department of Defense priorities such as the modernization of legacy technology systems and development of lower-cost and high performance unmanned aerial systems (“UAS”) and counter UAS solutions to better manage threats from U.S. adversaries,” said Joe Benavides, Managing Partner of OceanSound. “Since its founding in 1963, ARA has developed a portfolio of over 50 patents used in the delivery of differentiated RF systems and, more recently, innovative products leveraging small form-factor AESA technology to become a leading provider of RF solutions to the A&D market. ARA’s ability to miniaturize their products enables the development of small, low cost, higher-volume platforms such as drones, low earth orbit satellites, man portable communications and other mobile A&D platforms.”

“We are at an important inflection point in ARA’s development and are thrilled to partner with OceanSound, whose expertise in the A&D technology market will be invaluable, to accelerate ARA’s growth and strategic transformation primarily focused on making complimentary investments in and acquisitions of technology solutions,” said Thiran. “As the defense industry continues to demand advanced, low-cost technologies, our team is focused on building sustainable partnerships with customers to develop and deploy cost competitive, high-performance technologies to address the rapidly evolving requirements of the Department of Defense. OceanSound’s partnership approach will enable us to continue fielding innovative solutions leveraging the RF spectrum to better serve the needs of the market.”

“We are excited to partner with Logen and the current management team who have deliberately transformed ARA through targeted acquisitions of technology capabilities and then cross-selling the resulting differentiated solutions portfolio to higher value A&D programs,” said Jeff Kelly, Partner at OceanSound. “ARA’s long history of innovation and its reputation as a trusted technology partner to A&D customers positions the company well to meet the increasing demand to modernize our country’s defense posture. We will work closely with ARA’s management team to enhance the Company’s RF capabilities and customer relationships, that, together with additional strategic acquisitions, will enable ARA to deliver a more complete portfolio of advanced technologies to the A&D market.”

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP served as legal advisor to OceanSound. Raymond James & Associates, Inc. and Akerman LLP served as financial and legal advisors, respectively, to ARA.

About Antenna Research Associates
Established in 1963, ARA is a leading provider of integrated RF and advanced communications products, including components, assemblies and subsystems, to the aerospace and defense end-markets. ARA maintains deep specialization and differentiation in active electronically scanned array antenna capabilities utilized in size-, weight-, power-, and cost-constrained environments. ARA was founded in 1963 and is based in Laurel, Maryland. For more information, please visit https://ara-inc.com/.

About OceanSound Partners
OceanSound Partners is a New York-based private equity firm that pursues control investments in technology and technology-enabled services companies serving government and highly regulated enterprise end markets. OceanSound employs a partnership approach, working closely with founders, entrepreneurs, and executives of middle market businesses to drive transformational growth. For more information, please visit www.oceansoundpartners.com.

That is all.

Think About this at Pledge Time

NPR's Morning Edition chooses think tank experts of a seriously right wing bent.

I am not surprised.

It is the rule, rather than the exception, that they choose a right wing flack to discuss the issues of the day with a studiously impartial journalist.

That, and their jihad against low power radio stations, are both good reasons not to give at pledge time.

Why I Don't Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity

The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden's NSA Leaks:

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?

Yet Another Reason Not to Give at Pledge Time

A good Ecch (Twitter) discussion of the issue in the context of a relationship.
H/t naked capitalism.Not just because because of their decades long Jihad against low power non commercial radio, (I have mentioned this a few times) but because it appears that they have a penchant for hiring oh so pleasant narcissistic psychopaths in senior positions.

If you read this article and are not completely appalled, you lack either a brain or a soul.

The author, Malaka Gharib, is oh so embarrassed at the fact that her immune compromised and chronically ill husband continues to insist on taking Covid precautions.

It's so inconvenient to have to wear a mask in a movie theater, or make sure that the air is clean, don't you know:

In 2022, while I was 7 months pregnant, my husband and I got COVID. While it was a mild case for me, he had scary, lingering symptoms. He said it felt like there was "an engine humming in his chest." He experienced frightening fits of insomnia. And his personality changed — my normally upbeat husband became uncharacteristically depressed.

Yeah, Covid f%$s with your health, and it affects the brain, so it is no surprise that he was depressed and unable to sleep.

Do you know what else Covid does?  It f%$#s with the development of unborn children.

But your case was mild, so there's nothing to worry about, right?

After a few months, his symptoms went away, but his fears of getting COVID didn't. He is immunocompromised and his doctors warned him that if he got sick again, it may complicate his autoimmune disease. Plus, he didn't want to repeat his traumatic ordeal, especially with a baby on the way.

So, he went through months of hell, is in a high risk category, and does not want to repeat the experience?  How bourgeois!

………

So while the rest of the world seems to have moved on from the pandemic, in our house, it is still 2020. We wear masks when we go into public indoor spaces. We don't eat inside restaurants. We don't go to movies. We have people take COVID tests before they enter our house. All this leaves me feeling torn between two emotions. I want to keep my husband safe and healthy. But I also want our old life back.

Yeah, what is Covid going to do?  Cripple or kill your husband?  

Actually, yes.

It feels selfish and trivial to say that amid my husband's plight. He is terrified that if he gets COVID again, it will be as harrowing as the first time. And it could trigger a flare up of his chronic illness.

But my feelings as his spouse are valid too, says James C. Jackson, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University and author of Clearing the Fog: From Surviving to Thriving with Long COVID, A Practical Guide.

Yes, your feelings matter, not his health.

I'm even in my 7th decade, pretty healthy.

Neither my wife nor my eldest are, so I wear a mask in the store, and at work, etc., because while I might find the masking inconvenient, it won't kill me.  The lack of masking could kill them.

If you find that inconvenient, I would suggest that perhaps you need to your life and your relationship, perhaps with some professional help.

Interesting Development in Ion Drives

Iodine looks promising as a replacement for Xenon for the propellant in ion drives: (paid subscription required)

A high-efficiency radio-frequency (RF) ion microthruster in development could give engineers another approach to solar-electric propulsion (SEP) technology for deep-space exploration, particularly for the tiny CubeSat-based probes just coming into their own.

While large-scale SEP is considered necessary to preposition supplies on Mars for human explorers, work is underway at NASA and in universities on CubeSat-class missions to the Moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations as well. Of particular interest is SEP technology that uses iodine as a propellant instead of xenon.

Iodine is easier to integrate into spacecraft and costs much less than the xenon typically used today. Although they sit next to each other in the periodic table, iodine is a solid that sublimates into a useful gas at relatively low temperature, while xenon in its ambient state is a gas that must be contained in a pressure vessel.

Busek Co., a privately held 50-person space-propulsion business in Natick, Massachusetts, has just demonstrated an RF gridded-ion thruster that uses iodine as a propellant and measures only 3 cm across. With iodine, the “BIT-3” thruster demonstrated a specific impulse of 3,500 sec. and a thrust measured at more than 1.4 mN. Designed to propel advanced CubeSats from geostationary to lunar orbits, using 60 watts of power it can generate a Delta-v (velocity change) of 2.5 km/sec. (1.5 mi./sec) with 1.5 kg (3.3 lb.) of fuel in a 13-kg spacecraft, the company says.

“Iodine is a substance that is stored as a solid on a spacecraft, because it has very high density,” says Vlad Hruby, founder and president of Busek. “It also stores in small volume, in a zero-pressure tank. That means the tank can be conformal. You can stick it anywhere in the spacecraft, wherever you have space, and then you heat it up a little bit and it generates enough available pressure to feed [the propulsion system].”

Busek also has used iodine as a fuel in Hall-effect thrusters, and holds NASA small-business contracts for advanced technology development work aimed at deep-space smallsat SEP. The BIT-3 approach uses an RF coil to ionize the sublimated iodine gas, and electrically charged grids to accelerate the ions to the high velocity needed.

While the Hall thrusters are good for “Earth-centric” missions, the efficiency of the gridded-ion thruster makes it more attractive for deep-space applications.

“They have different niches, really,” says Michael Tsay, chief scientist on the BIT-3 project at Busek. “The Hall thruster has very high thrust to power, so you can get higher thrust, but with slightly lower Isp [specific impulse]. The RF ion can give you very high Isp, but you get lower thrust. So it’s mission-dependent.”

For either application, iodine has another advantage over xenon that makes it more attractive as a secondary payload. Since it doesn’t require a high-pressure tank, iodine is safer and less likely to damage a high-priced primary payload if something goes wrong.

………

“It eliminates the need for a high-pressure tank, and it stores more compactly, so it takes up less volume,” says Andrew Petro, NASA program executive for the Small Spacecraft Technology Program within the STMD. “Those two features are especially important because of the small size of the small satellites we are trying to develop.”

………

Iodine has advantages for small satellites, including much lower cost as industry finds new uses for xenon in fields as disparate as photography flashes and surgical anesthesia. But it may not be as scalable as xenon for the large-scale, multi-kilowatt applications NASA’s human-spaceflight engineers are pushing as a way to move habitats, cargo carriers and other large payloads toward Mars (AW&ST June 23, p. 44).

“The challenge with iodine is feeding the propellant,” says Petro. “With the xenon gas it is very simple; it’s a pressurized gas, It will come out through a valve if you open it. The iodine has to sublime into a gas and be fed, and the larger amount of it you have, the more challenging it might be to engineer a tank that will feed that propellant in a consistent and reliable way. It certainly is possible, but it will probably take some more engineering to work that out. I haven’t really seen much. I think the real attraction of the iodine is in the smaller spacecraft, because they already have the problem of limited volume. It is not as much of an issue for the bigger spacecraft.”

Iodine sublimates at 113.7° C, and being a halogen, it is rather corrosive, but I don't see these as particularly daunting engineering issues in implementing an iodine based system.