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Admin
They don't TMK. In fact I'd be pushed to name any national radio station over there. @boomzilla?
Admin
We don't have any national radio stations. (Imagine the size of transmitter needed!)
We have NPR, but that's a network, not a station. We also have a bunch of monopolies that run virtually-identical-except-callsign stations in a bunch of different cities, but that's still closer to a network than a national station. Because each city's station still has a few local staff who go to like State fairs and mall openings and such.
Also nobody listens to radio.
Admin
What good is ignorance if you can't be proud of it‽
BTW: Channel 4 is NBC here, as far as TV is concerned. We don't have numbered channels like that for radio. We just use the frequency of the broadcast. Did you guys invent some new metric radio thingy?
Admin
Don't know about the bed wetting. I only have that problem for two scenarios a) Nightmares -can't remember my last one and b) the other sort of dreams that involve a certain amount of.....dampness.
as for the 1,2,3 stuff. Well, I like to think that because we just need to know it is 1 2 or 3 etc, (wherever it is on the dial) we are a bit more "grown up" about it. Besides we have a thing called RDS which tells us what radio station we are listening to and do not need the security of knowing the frequency.
Admin
Damn I was hoping the UK made like North Korean radios where there's only 2 buttons and they only can be used to listen to the 2 commie broadcasts and if you modify one you go into a gulag and your pets are executed.
Admin
There are stations that are affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox. Possibly other networks, but they are also mostly independent.
We also have the Armed Forces Radio Network, which, of course, is all over the world, since y'all need our presence. I think that local broadcasters have their own localness, too.
We'll just too big for a single radio broadcast to make any sense.
Admin
The "Radio {1,2,3,4}" thing is the brand name. Like BBC {1,2,3.. }
Admin
Channel 4 is reserved for Super Nintendo.
Admin
But you still have the gulags and pet executions, right?
Admin
It used to be like that when we had push button radios, now we use a technology called PLL or something to lock on to the frequency and with additional "magic" follow it.
Admin
Only in the furtive imaginations of some of our more extreme politicians...
Admin
We have something called HD Radio here but the RIAA has basically crippled it enough to make it utterly useless. You can't sell a USB widget with a HD Radio decoder in it, since that could potentially allow (gasp!) recording off a radio. You're not allowed to stream an HD Radio station over the webs. You basically can only find it in cars.
Which is a shame, because there's a really good local one, 107.7-2 The Sound, that I'd love to listen to at work, were it possible.
Admin
Typical American response "bigger is better".
We may be a small country, but we still get affected by the curvature of the earth. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of r e b r o a d c a s t i n g where the output is transferred by "land line" to a l o c a l t r a n s m i t t e r. Quite often that transmitter has to rebroadcast on another frequency (because of other wavelength commitments). Even so, I can travel from one end of the UK to the other on a m o t o r w a y and not have to re-tune my receiver or miss a beat.
Admin
INB4 hopefully most HD Radio providers provide their own stream (It's how most get it to the radio tower after all).
Admin
TV's are for watching, radios are for listening
Admin
Back to those....damp... dreams again
Admin
No.
No. The systemic problem is that the office is too cold. If people are spending their own money on forbidden devices just so they can do their job properly then the company management has a serious issue. If the people in question form an identifiable group then it sounds a lot like discrimination. @FrostCat makes a good point about this not being his circus and there's no reason it should be, but we need to be aware that this is not an appropriate state of affairs.Admin
We watch the shows, we watch the stars On videos for hours and hours We hardly need to use our ears How music changes through the years.
Let's hope you never leave old friend Like all good things on you we depend So stick around 'cause we might miss you When we grow tired of all this visual
You had your time, you had the power You've yet to have your finest hour Radio, Radio.
Admin
So you turn up the heat and now a different group of people are sweating and miserable and bringing in fans.
:wambulance:
Admin
Never underestimate the power of the placebo effect. :trolleybus:
Maybe they're on vacation (now that you mention it, I haven't seen @buddy post in a while)? Also, I think it's the middle of the night where flabdablet is located.
Actually, wait, I think I see something...
@pjh, maybe this will have to do for now?
Admin
I would pay more credence to that if the default building inside temperature wasn't 76.
Admin
If you were really dedicated to the proposition, you could get a car battery and a car stereo.
Admin
No, silly, it takes a lot of watts to get a radio signal 3000 miles.
<and i know about rebroadcasters
Admin
....which won't trip the circuit breakers, and thus are not banned.
Admin
Protip: neither do sweaters.
Admin
Again, neither my circus, nor my monkeys.
Admin
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to plug them in.
Admin
pcbe
Admin
Because doing HVAC properly is clearly Not A Thing?
Admin
I was under the impression Americans used random letter combinations for radio stations.
Admin
http://www.radiomuseum.org/forumdata/users/922/Verbotsanhaenger.jpg
Admin
For commercial stations, we use 4-letter combinations beginning with K, western, or W, eastern. (The dividing line is now more or less the Mississippi River, but there are plenty of exceptions both ways.)
But they're not randomly assigned: the station developers apply for combinations they are interested in. So there are often meanings or implications; subtle or blatant. Some I'm familiar with:
KWYO - (Sheridan, Wyoming) K-Wyoming KROE - (Sheridan, WY) Pronounced "crow" as in the Crow Indians, a local tribe. KTWO - (Casper, WY) Channel two. KOTA - (Rapid City, SD) ... da-KOTA. KLIN - (Lincoln, NE) LINcoln WOWW - Need I say more? KLMS - (Lincoln, NE) LMS = Lincoln's Music Station
Etc., get it?
Admin
The prefix, W- or K- in the case of the US, is assigned by the International Telecommunications Union. (The US is also assigned prefixes N- and AA-AL-; these are not used by broadcast stations, although they are used by other services such as Amateur Radio.) Canada uses CB* for stations affiliated with the CBC, despite CB- being assigned to Chile.
Older stations may have 3-letter call signs, such as KGO, San Francisco. Also, suffixes such as -FM, -TV or -HD1 are part of the station's call sign, where applicable, and must be used in the station's legal identification. Therefore, station call signs may have from 3 to 7 letters, although 4 is most common.
Networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS commonly use the appropriate W- or K- prefix followed by the network abbreviation for their flagship stations in large cities such as New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. One notable exception to the use of the Mississippi River as the dividing line between W- and K- prefixes is WACO, Waco, TX.
TIL that the requirement to identify using the stations' formal, licensed call sign is only an FCC requirement, not an ITU requirement, and most other countries do not require it.
Admin
KMKY is Radio Disney
Admin
I'd never really heard of it before. In NL, stations commonly identify by their broadcasting frequency.
Admin
In the US, radio stations pretty much always include this as part of their identification messages (TV stations use their channel number), but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the legally required identification. The required identification must consist of exactly the station's licensed call sign, as individual letters (e.g., K-I-S-S, not kiss) followed immediately by the city in which it is licensed; a station which is licensed in a suburb must state the suburb, optionally followed by the big city or cities it serves. In the Bay Area, for example, it's not unusual to hear an identification such as Kxxx Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose. Note also that the station's licensed location does not necessarily indicate its physical location; e.g., a number of stations licensed in Newark, NJ are physically located in New York City.
Admin
One thing about it that's long puzzled me is that W is used for east and K for west … Right … um … what logical reason am I missing here?
Ah, that must be it. But then why does this system only seem to apply in the USA? Or is it used elsewhere too, but people just don’t care enough about it to flaunt it to the outside world? Yes, I always tune my radio to the frequencies Radio 1, 3FM, Sky Radio, SLAM! or 538 as well … (To be fair, that last one took its name from the AM frequency one of its predecessors used to broadcast at in Þe Olden Days™.)Admin
All countries1 have ITU-assigned prefixes, and I think the ITU specifies the format of the call sign for a class of radio service (I may be wrong about this, but e.g., Amateur Radio call signs have a similar format in all countries), but specific identification requirements are up to individual countries' licensing agencies, and apparently most are not nearly as stringent as the US FCC.
1"Country" does not necessarily mean what you think it does. Remote overseas territories, and even uninhabited islands, are generally considered countries, separate from whatever country claims them, for ITU purposes.
Admin
As long as those who are receiving the transmission know who is doing it, it doesn't matter whether the UN-level formal requirements are met; the ITU doesn't have the power to enforce anything except by delegation to national agencies and governments.
Admin
The license is issued for the location of the transmitter. You're correct that it doesn't matter where the station studios are located, but a station can only transmit from the location they designated in the license.
The college I attended, Union College, Lincoln, NE, sold its radio station. But the new owners had to continue to transmit from Union College for a quite a while, because when the company arranged to buy the license and move the studios, they neglected to apply to the FCC to change the licensed location. Licenses can be sold basically at will, but the transmitter location can't be changed without FCC approval of the new location.
ITU allocated K and W to the United States; how the US uses those prefixes is up to it; or, properly, FCC bureaucracy. W/east and K/west was a decision made by FCC for all the good reasons any bureaucracy makes rules, I'm sure.
This gives you
deepno insight into that process: Why Do Some Radio Stations Begin With 'K' and Others With 'W'? The short story is it started with ship transmitters being assigned 3-letter signs, K in the Atlantic basin, and W in the Pacific, which they note is, obscurely, completely backwards of the K/W usage now.But the rules changed from time-to-time, so we have KWY, Philadelpha (three letters, used to be done, yes) and WLAY (now defunct) in Fairbanks, AK.
Like I said: for all the good reasons any bureaucracy makes rules.
ADDED: It occurred to me after writing this that maybe the K/west and W/east was done because of the ships. All the K ships were in the east, which means W land stations would be less likely to be confused and vice-versa. The linked article doesn't say that, but that would make a kind of fractured sense.
Admin
Not true. They need FCC authorization for the transmitter location, and it must deliver at least a minimum quality of signal to its (nominally) target community, but it is common for a small-town station's transmitter to be located well outside its licensed community and as close as possible to a large city. It is the studio (or a studio capable of, but not necessarily used for, generating local programming) that must be located in the city of license. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_license#Licensing_and_on-air_identity (see previous section for discussion of studio location):
A less extreme example, and one not intended to violate the spirit of the rules, is KING-FM, licensed in Seattle; the transmitter is actually located on Tiger Mountain, near Issaquah, about 20 miles east-southeast of downtown Seattle, and about 13 miles from the nearest point within the city limits.
Admin
Dallas itself has WFAA-TV and WBAP-AM.
Admin
And you still have 3-letter stations in a few places: WRR, Dallas, and WBZ Boston.
Admin
There are quite a few such exceptions. I mentioned WACO because I happened to know it off the top of my head, and because it is notable as the only US station for which the call sign exactly spells the community it serves.
Admin
It should have tripped the GFI (or more likely the 15-20A breaker that outlet was on, as GFIs aren’t usually installed on normal office circuits) well before tripping the building’s main breaker. Who knows, maybe they were still using fuses and someone replaced one with a solid piece of metal after it kept blowing.
Admin
I don't disagree, but I think you misunderstood what I meant. Within wide limits, you can broadcast from wherever you wish to locate your transmitter. But when you obtain the license for the transmitter, the application must specify the exact physical location from which you intend to transmit and, once approved, the license does not permit you to broadcast from any different physical location.
You can't just decide one day to pick up and move your tower from here to there: you have to enter a new application for the new physical location and go through the entire review process for that new physical location. That takes many months because you have to do diagrams and signal strength estimates; a terrain map; consider airport flight paths; hold community meetings to hear objections; address any likely interference problems; on and on. I watched that process once; my roommate did it.
GFI would trip only if there's a short to ground. If the short was between hot and neutral, that's the circuit breaker's job, not the GFI.
Admin
You must obtain FCC approval for your transmitter's actual location, but the actual location might not be your station's nominal location. Yes, I think we are in violent agreement about this. :)
There doesn't need to be a full-blown short. They're designed to trip if there is current above some rather low level, such as might happen if there is a current path through your body. Other than that, you are correct.Admin
Well, yeah, now we're in violent agreement about this. But they were talking about a short, so I just didn't extend the discussion to leakage. I also didn't extend it to GFCI, which might trip if the heater was arcing internally. Neither condition, leakage to ground or internal arcing, should have caught the attention of the building main.
I think the whole thread is kind of moot anyway, because I see nothing in the article to indicate there was anything wrong with the heater except that it was a big whopping current sucker (big load).
And that's just wrong, because if the building mains are pressed to the point that another 15 amps trips them (or even an inrush of, probably, 100 or so for 2-3 seconds) then that building is on the edge of disaster anyway. In that case, the load estimates and power input design must have been done by Daffy Duck.
Admin
We had a trip last week from someone just touching the neutral while standing on a wood floor and not in contact with anything else. They shouldn't have been playing with a socket in the first place but when I gave it a prod with a meter the neutral is sitting about 50V above ground, don't think that's quite right...
Admin
Well, there's the rub, isn't it? Different people have different comfort levels, which was my point.