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| Friday, October 5, 2001 |
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Eat your spinnage 
| | I'll write more about it later, I hope. Right now I gotta get a haircut. |
Infrequency check
| | One year ago today there was a conversation at rec.radio.broadcasting about New York City FM and TV transmitters: which ones were on which buildings, where the backups were, etc. (Forgive me, I'm a radio freak. I'm into this kinda shit.) |
| | Both threads take on fresh relevance since September 11, when the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center brought down a heap of TV and FM stations along with everything else (tragically including a number of engineers working at the transmitters). |
| | As replacement transmitters and antennas find their way back to new (and old) locations, it's interesting to look back at the history of TV and FM transmission in New York. |
| | In the earliest days, every station tried to find its way onto the tops of high buildings. At first they were all over town — WQXR-FM on the Chanin Building, WBAI on the Pierre Hotel, WPAT on the Crysler Building — but by the late 1960s nearly every TV and FM station had migrated up to the top of the Empire State Building. |
| | The FM stations nearly all shared one antenna system designed by Andrew Alford, consisting of 26 T-shaped protrusions, in two circles of thirteen each, sandwiching the observation deck like a bristly hamburger bun. You could reach out and touch them if the windows opened. Meanshile the TV stations each had their own separate antennas, since the frequencies (and therefore the wavelengths) were too far apart to share a common antenna. These antennas were arranged in roughly decreasing size going up the tower that sat on top of the building. (Which looked like this without the antennas, and like this with them). |
| | [By the way, the entire FM band sits right above TV channel 6 (which you can hear if your FM radio tunes down below 88 on the dial), and far below TV channels 7-13. TV channels 14 and up are UHF and on a much higher band with much shorter wavelengths. From bottom to top, analog TV takes up a huge percentage of the entire radio frequency spectrum — one reason why many engineers and companies eager for spectrum want to hasten digital broadcasting.] |
| | Unlike the old flagship AM stations (WABC, WNBC, WCBS, WOR), New York's FM and TV stations never had big signals. In fact, they are required to broadcast with progressively lower power as the antenna increases elevation above around 1000 feet (and around 500 feet for FM). But, since height has advantages over power at TV and FM frequencies, all the big TV stations and several FMs made plans to move to the World Trade Center as it approached completion in the late 60s and early 70s. |
| | Since they were rectangular with a metal exterior, and higher than the Empire State Building, the new World Trade Canter towers were expected to create shadows behind the signals (toward South Jersey) and ghosts from reflections off the North faces of the towers looking back in the direction of The Bronx. As soon as they could, the major stations put up translators on UHF channels radiating toward the ghost-prone area from what later became the observation deck at the top of the South Tower. Those antennas were still there when I visited the deck several years ago. You can see the translator tower (unused but still there) in this picture here. |
| | Eventually all the major TV stations other than WCBS/2 not only moved their antennas over to the World Trade Center mast, and abandoned the old site on the Empire State Building. WCBS kept theirs as an "aux" or auxilliary site, which came in handy when the WTC tower was bombed in 1993, and again on September 11. All but four of the FM stations, however, ended up staying on the Empire State Building, broadcasting from new shared main and auxilliary antennas in spaces higher up the mast that the TV stations opened up when they left. (The old bristly affair surrounding the observation deck is still there, by the way, and used as an auxilliary system. You can see them in this view from below.) |
| | Now, if you read this thread here, you'll find out why some New York TV stations aren't looking so good at the moment. Unable to move back to the Empire State Building, some are broadcasting temporarily from a tower in Alpine, New Jersey that was built by Major Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM, in 1937. Others are making do in various ways. Some are off the air completely, broadcasting only on cable. I'd be interested to see what the long-term solution would be. If it involves a fraction of the politics involved in the WTC move thirty years ago, it should take awhile. |
| | By the way, in mountaintop locations where TV and FM stations don't need to share one building or tower, stations tend to each build their own towers. Here's a terrific story about the improvements being made right now to the biggest FM station in the country, Pacifica's 110,000-watt KPFK/90.7 in Los Angeles. Check out the "wall of steel" photo of the Mt. Wilson complex, from which nearly all the TV and FM stations in the LA area radiate. Bear in mind that this photo doesn't begin to show all the stations on the mountain (more are around and behind the photographer). Also note that Mt. Wilson is a long ridge which, at nearly 6000 feet, is more than 3 times the height of the World Trade Center and Empire State Buildings. Also note that the "wall of steel" photo is shot from high on KPFK's own tower, and it's still not far above the surrounding terrian. So, since KPFK's is not the highest tower on the mountain (actually it's one of the shortest and least advantageously placed, consistent with its status as a nonprofit), the station's huge signal actually gets blocked by terrian looking downward toward populated areas to the East and Southeast. Other stations with lower power and higher antennas cover larger areas. (Some nice additional info here.) By the way, KPFK has a 10-watt translator signal covering Santa Barbara very nicely. The antenna for that signal is the top picture on this page here. |
| | [Later... I just found this site, which was dedicated to the transmitting facility on the North Tower of the World Trade Center. You've seen the videos by now: the big antenna mast was the last piece of the tower to fall into the ground. It's remains highly involved, and now serves as a remarkable news source.] |
Gonzolalia
Dyslinkage
| | Yesterday I had an error in the way my "rules" were set up, resulting in bad URLs for anybody linking specifically to any of the little blue arrows by the subheads. It's fixed now, but if you did link to one of those you might wanna go back and make sure the month directory in the URL is 10 (October) instead of 09 (September). Sorry about that. My bad. |
| | I'm going to bed now before I screw anything else up. |
Mouse droppings, cont'd
| | The Lemur has a kind link this morning, regarding yesterday's SSSCA rant. Isn't it strange and sad that crap like the SSSCA, UCITA, DMCA and RAND are all as bad as CDA, yet get only a fraction of the attention we gave the CDA threat back in '96? |
| | Is it just that when the CDA came along, the Net was populated mostly by early adopters who gave a shit, and is now overrun by mass market "consumers" who don't? Is it that we've given up? Or is it that we're just overmatched by an entertainment industry with near-absolute political power that's fighting for its life? |
| | I dunno, but I do highly recommend reading Steve Russell's letter, which I also pointed to yesterday. It's like a nice hot cup of coffee, right in the eyes. |
False Choice Theater
| | Demands for even more surveillance miss the point. The problem is not obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. Everyone already leaves a wide audit trail as we go through life, and law enforcement can already access those records with search warrants. The FBI quickly pieced together the terrorists' identities and the last few months of their lives, once they knew where to look. If they had thrown up their hands and said that they couldn't figure out who did it or how, they might have a case for needing more surveillance data. But they didn't, and they don't. |
| | More data can even be counterproductive. The NSA and the CIA have been criticized for relying too much on signals intelligence, and not enough on human intelligence. The East German police collected data on four million East Germans, roughly a quarter of their population. Yet they did not foresee the peaceful overthrow of the Communist government because they invested heavily in data collection instead of data interpretation. We need more intelligence agents squatting on the ground in the Middle East arguing the Koran, not sitting in Washington arguing about wiretapping laws. |
| | People are willing to give up liberties for vague promises of security because they think they have no choice. What they're not being told is that they can have both. It would require people to say no to the FBI's power grab. It would require us to discard the easy answers in favor of thoughtful answers. It would require structuring incentives to improve overall security rather than simply decreasing its costs. Designing security into systems from the beginning, instead of tacking it on at the end, would give us the security we need, while preserving the civil liberties we hold dear. |
| | Some broad surveillance, in limited circumstances, might be warranted as a temporary measure. But we need to be careful that it remain temporary, and that we do not design surveillance into our electronic infrastructure. Thomas Jefferson once said: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Historically, liberties have always been a casualty of war, but a temporary casualty. This war -- a war without a clear enemy or end condition -- has the potential to turn into a permanent state of society. We need to design our security accordingly. |
| | Thanks for the link goes to Tom von Alten, who also has a very interesting blog about the human qualities working on both sides of the phone solicitation game. |
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