Entries Tagged as 'Television'
September 24th, 2022 · No Comments
MEGO in journalism stands for My Eyes (or Ears) Glaze Over. According to William Safire , a MEGO os “a subject of great importance which resists reader interest.”
Infrastructure is a one-word MEGO.
So I haven’t written much about infrastructure, including here: on a blog created by Christain Sandvig when we were both fellows at the Berkman Klein Center. It was meant as a place where learned folk who care about infrastructure could hold forth. A variety of those was recruited to participate, and approximately none did, including me. I’ve kept it alive in recent years by posting here occasionally, mostly with stuff that I think fits better here than anywhere else I tend to write.
In the meantime, I have kept an active site on the topic going: a Flickr account with the name Infrastructure. My chief interest there is in showing the plasticity of infrastructure over time: how it changes or gets replaced. I am especially interested in forms of infrastructure that are out of sight, mind, or booth, but on which we depend completely. These include water, gas, electricity, waste treatment… all the usual.
Plus broadcasting. Because that’s the form of infrastructure I know best, care about most, and see disappearing. Nobody else seems to be on this beat, so I’m stepping up.
“Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain,” John McPhee explains in a New Yorker essay that visits his compulsion to collect stray golf balls. I am likewise compelled to take pictures of transmitter sites. I came by my interest in transmitters when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, observing the Manhattan Skyline from across swamps populated by dozens of transmitting towers for New York’s AM radio stations. I loved radio and was so curious about the sources of signals that I would ride my bike down Route 17 (dangerous and dumb, but I survived) to WABC in Lodi, WINS in Lyndhurst, and WADO, WBNX, and WHN on Patterson Plank Road in Rutherford and Carlstadt. There I would gawk at the towers and sometimes knock on doors of the buildings feeding signals to the towers, so I could talk shop with the engineers who answered. The compulsion stayed with me. So, after I could drive, I visited countless other facilities, including mountaintop FM and TV stations.
But I didn’t begin shooting lots of photos of broadcast transmitters until digital photography became easy, along with publishing details about them. (One of the most active groups on Facebook is titled, no kidding, “I take pictures of transmitter sites.” It has over fifteen thousand members, most of which, I gather, are active or retired engineers like the ones I would visit as a kid.)
In the last few years, I’ve also come to realize that I’m documenting a medium in decline. Radio is being eaten on the music side by streaming (Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora) and on the talk side by podcasting. Broadcast TV moved almost entirely from antennas to cable decades ago, and now cable itself is being replaced by subscription (aka “prestige”) video services. TV stations maintain transmitters mostly to satisfy “must carry” rules for cable. (Your station can’t be on cable if it’s not on the air.) So now my transmitter site photography has a documentary purpose: keeping up with what’s going down.
The example at the top of this post tells the story of one tower transmitting three of Santa Barbara’s AM stations: what broadcast engineers call a triplex on a monopole. Here’s what the tower looked like for most of its life, when it was 198 feet tall and proclaiming itself a landmark with bright red and white paint. And here’s what it looks like since December of last year, at just 128 feet tall, painted dark green to camouflage it among surrounding palm and eucalyptus trees. The tower now makes up for its lack of height with a flat 24-foot-wide X mounted on top like the candy on a lollypop. The tower was shortened because it was slightly bent. Twenty years ago, the tower would have been replaced or straightened.
Since the tower is now less efficient, the stations have adjusted their powers, mostly upward. Listeners, I am sure, can tell no difference. Nor did they notice when WBBM/780, Chicago’s alpha news station, dropped from its legacy status, running 50,000 watts full time, to 35,000 watts in the daytime and 44,000 watts at night. they did that so the station’s owner could sell off the land under the station’s transmitter sits. WBBM is now diplexed onto the tower of sister station WSCR/670.
The Santa Barbara stations are lucky that their tower stands a city equipment yard, consuming only a few square feet of space on the ground that’s not for sale. Countless other AM stations across the country have been going dark or operating with cheaper facilities. They do this because AM listening is declining while the value of land under many transmitter sites exceeds the worth of the signals. In the Santa Barbara case, the tower stands in the city equipment yard, taking up almost no room on the ground, and the shorter tower works almost as well as it did at full height. And, because it’s an example of AM’s growing unimportance, I keep shooting pictures of stations like these.
Among the reduced or deceased signals:
- WMEX/1510’s 50,000-watt facility
- WFNI’s 50,000-watt six-tower site in Indianapolis. (That link is to a 2019 Google Streetview of the site. Note the For Sale sign. It’s sold now, the station is off the air, and the land covered with buildings. It was, for most of its life, and at the time of its demise, the biggest AM station in Indiana. When I lived in North Carolina, it was one of the biggest signals one could get at night.)
- KABC/790’s and KHJ/930”s legacy transmitting sites in Los Angeles
- KOKC/1520’s original full-size towers (lost in a tornado and replaced with cheaper ones half as high and much less efficient)
- WDNC/620 in Durham and WKIX/850 in Raleigh, North Carolina, with land sold from under their old towers
Those are harbingers toward a time when AM is gone completely, as it already is in much of Europe. FM and TV are not far behind. But streams will remain, as the most popular radio already is the smartphone.
And I want to document as much of the change as I can.
By the way, I am also firing up this blog because it is also starting to show up in some RSS feeds. Greetings, feedsters!
Important: RSS is a hugely important source of Internet infrastructure. Dig:
Nothing with that many results can’t matter.
Tags: Future · History · Industry · Media · Radio · Television
To answer the question Where are SiriusXM radio stations broadcasted from?, I replied,
If you’re wondering where they transmit from, it’s a mix.
SiriusXM transmits primarily from a number of satellites placed in geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres or 22,236 miles above the equator. From Earth they appear to be stationary. Two of the XM satellites, for example, are at 82° and 115° West. That’s roughly aligned with Cincinnati and Las Vegas, though the satellites are actually directly above points along the equator in the Pacific Ocean. To appear stationary in the sky, they must travel in orbit around the Earth at speeds that look like this:
- 3.07 kilometres or 1.91 miles per second
- 110,52 kilometres or 6,876 miles per hour
- 265,248 kilometres or 165,025 miles per day
Earlier Sirius satellites flew long elliptical geosynchronous orbits on the “tundra“ model, taking turns diving low across North America and out into space again.
Satellites are also supplemented by ground repeaters. If you are in or near a site with repeaters, your Sirius or XM radio may be tuned to either or both a transmitter in space or one on the ground nearby. See DogstarRadio.com’s Satellite and Repeater Map to see if there is one near you.
In addition, SiriusXM also streams over the Internet. You can subscribe to radio, streaming or both.
As for studios, those are in central corporate locations; but these days, thanks to COVID-19, many shows are produced at hosts’ homes. Such is the case, for example, with SiriusXM’s popular Howard Stern show.
So, to sum up, you might say SiriusXM’s channels and shows are broadcast from everywhere.
I should add that I’ve been a SiriusXM subscriber almost from the start (with Sirius), and have owned two Sirius radios. The last one I used only once, in August of 2017, when my son and I drove a rental minivan from Santa Barbara to Love Ranch in central Wyoming to watch the solar eclipse. After that it went into a box. I still listen a lot to SiriusXM, almost entirely on the phone app. The rest of my listening is over the Web, logged in through a browser.
Item: a few days ago I discovered that a large bill from SiriusXM was due to a subscription for both the radio and the Internet stream. So I called in and canceled the radio. The subscription got a lot cheaper.
I bring this up because I think SiriusXM is an interesting one-company example of a transition going on within the infrastructure of what we used to call radio and would instead call streaming if we started from scratch today.
In The Intention Economy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), I saw this future for what we wouldn’t call television if we were starting from scratch today (or even when this was published, eight years ago):
Today we’d put Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV and Apple TV in the upper left (along with legacy premium cable staples, such as HBO and Showtime). We’d put PBS stations there too, since those became subscription services after the digital transition in 2008 and subsequent spectrum sales, which reduced over-the-air TV to a way for stations to maintain their must-carry status on cable systems. (Multiple “repacks” of TV stations on new non-auctioned spectra have required frequent “re-scans” of signals on TVs of people who have antennas and still want to watch TV the old-fashioned way.)
Over-the-air radio is slower to die, but the sad fact is that it has been terminal for years. Here’s the diagnosis I published in 2016. I’ve also been keeping a photographic chronicle of radio in hospice, over on my Flickr account for Infrastructure. A touching example of one station’s demise is Abandoned America’s post on the forgotten but (then) still extant studios of WFBR (1924-1990) in Baltimore.
Like so much else, over-the-air radio is being subsumed into Internet streams and podcasts (in the two Free quadrants above).
Want to have some fun? Go to RadioGarden and look around the globe at streams from everywhere. My own current fave is little CJUC in Whitehorse, Yukon. (I list many others from earlier explorations here.) All of those are what we call “on” the Internet. But where is that?
We can pinpoint sources, as RadioGarden does, on a globe, but the Internet defies prepositions, because there is no “there” there. There is only here, where we are now, in this non-place, a functionally vast but geographically absent non-place: a giant zero with no distance and no gravity because its nature is to defy both. I’m in Santa Barbara right now, but could be anywhere. So could you.
On the Internet, over-the-air TV and radio are anachronisms, though charming ones. Like right now, as I’m listening to Capricorn FM from Polokwane, South Africa. (“Crazy up-tempo hip-hop” is the fare.) But I’m not listening on a radio, which would need to tune in 89.9fm, within range of the transmitter there. I’m here, on (or in, or through, or pick-your-preposition) the Internet.
Or consider the case of KSKO/89.5 in McGrath, Alaska, population 319. Here’s how it looks on Radio.Garden:
Geographically, McGrath elongates the meaning of “isolated.” No roads lead there from elsewhere. Visitors come and go to other parts of the world by plane, dogsled, or boat during months when the Kuskokwim River isn’t frozen. (The name is derived from the Yup’ik words for “big slow moving thing.”) In Coming Into the Country, the best book ever written about Alaska, John McPhee says “If anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be the place to hid it.” Power-wise, KSKO is just 90 watts, with an antenna on a pole beside the station. Since the population of McGrath is just 319, and nearly all are within shouting distance of each other, it doesn’t need to be bigger.
What matters, however, is that I’m listening to KSKO right now in Santa Barbara. (Before that I was digging the equally community-involved KIYU in Galena, 130 miles away, where the station a few minutes ago reported a temperature of -30°f. With “freezing icy fog” coming, a high of -15°f and a low tonight of -40°f. Fun.)
A few years ago my teenage son asked me what the point of “range” and “coverage” was for radio stations. Why, he wondered, was it a feature rather than a bug that radio stations’ signals faded away as you drove out of town? His frame of reference, of course, was the Internet. Not the terrestrial world where distance and the inverse square law apply.
Of course, we’ll always live in the terrestrial world. The Internet may go away, or get fractured into regions so telecom companies can bill for crossing borders and not just for use, or so governments can limit what can happen in their regions (as we already have in some countries, most notably China). But the Internet is also an infrastructural genie that is not going back in the bottle. And it is granting many wishes, all in a new here.
Tags: Geography · History · Media · Radio · Television
A few months back, partly in anticipation of this blog, I created a Flickr account for the Berkman Center‘s Infrastructure group. To my surprise, no account with the name “Infrastructure” was taken, so I grabbed it, and the site is now here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/infrastructure/
All the photo sets so far are mine, but I trust many more will come from other folks in our group. Here’s a rundown on what’s there now:
- Shots exploring Domodossolla, Italy, during a day trip from our family’s ski vacation this past winter in Zermatt, Switzerland. The trip was recommended by Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Center.
- The rapidly-changing spire atop the Empire State Building, on a day pilots call “severe clear.” It is interesting to see how much electronic stuff has encrusted the blunt winged art deco made familiar by King Kong, and how much of that same stuff has been replaced many times over the years. Much of what’s still there is obsolete analog VHF TV transmitting antennae, that I expect will come down. What I’d like to see, personally, is the old building restored to something close to its original shape. Since most transmissions are now on much shorter wavelengths, using smaller antennas, this should be do-able.
- Fiberfete, a “celebration of our connected future,” in Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette is the first city in the country, I believe, to have a municipal fiber optic network that passes every home in town (more than 100,000 people live there), and can deliver 100Mbps service within the town. That’s interesting infrastructure right there. What should be done with it? That was a focus of the gathering.
- Tracking flights. For most of the history of aviation, following airplanes in and out of airports electronically — watching weather alongo the way — was a privilege only of a few professionals. Now it’s something anybody can do, with the help of services such as FlightAware. Here I tracked my 13-year-old son on his first solo passenger flights coast-to coast, all in one weekend.
Infrastructure sets with other Flickr accounts include:
As a bonus link, here’s the Infrastructure Photo Pool at Flickr.
Tags: Photography · Television
