Someone left a comment that said,
” Want even more supposition re Art Bell’s most recent retirement? Check out: http://hamfanz.blogspot.com/“
I’m not going to endorse the content at that link, or the links that you may follow from there because I have no way of knowing what is true. I will say that the history given in that link differs significantly from what is given in, “The Art of Talk”, Art Bell’s autobiography.
Art Bell retires from Coast-to-Coast AM again saying he wants to be able to spend more time with his new wife and daughter. Well, I guess doing a 4 hour show two days out of the week would take a lot of time away from family. I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the merger between Clear Channel and Mergerco.
I hope you will forgive my cynicism but I can’t help but feel there are issues, other than those stated publicly, involved in both this retirement and previous retirements. That said I’d like to state a few of my beliefs and suspicions. These are nothing more than my beliefs and opinions. I’ll make that clear from the onset in hopes it will dissuade Art Bell and Clear Channel from suing me.
First, a lot of people were critical of Art Bell remarrying only three months and a few days after Ramona’s death. They have suggested that Art was “vulnerable”, or that Airyn is a “mail order bride”. I have even read one blog in which the poster suggested that he “disposed of Ramona and bought a new wife”.
Art Bell lives in Pahrump, Nevada. Prostitution is legal in Nevada counties with low populations and I believe that includes Nye county. Art Bell has large amounts of money. If all he wanted was a hot Asian girl to bang he wouldn’t have much difficulty obtaining same without the commitment that goes with marriage or the publicity.
Although it might seem disrespectful to many that he remarried so soon, it is a statistical fact that when men in a good marriage lose their spouse to death, they remarry substantially sooner on average than men who were in bad marriages.
Having listened to Art Bell over the years, having read his autobiography, and having seen many photos of him with Ramona, I do believe his love for her was very real and that their marriage was very good.
If he were going to mail order a bride, the Philippines wouldn’t be the best option because divorce isn’t even a legal option there. I don’t know what the effect of a legal annulment in the United States would be in light of the fact that the marriage took place in the Philippines. Suffice it to say that he could have gone with some lower risk options.
He generally speaks glowingly of various network officers but I wonder if things are as rosy there as the picture he paints. If you look at the rest of Clear Channels hosts, Art Bell seems very out of place.
Prior to the Clear Channel takeover, Art Bell didn’t use call screeners and did generally have interesting guests. Now calls are screened and the guests all seem to be selling something, usually pushing a new book. The commercial load seems up considerably. These don’t impress me as things that Art Bell would not accept without some resistance but perhaps I am wrong.
During the last retirement, which was somewhat lengthy, one of the substitute hosts that got a long run was Mike Siegel, who I personally couldn’t stand for a variety of reasons. Those of you who had heard Mike Siegel on KVI would know that prior to taking the position on Coast-to-Coast AM, he was a right wing political talk show host.
Ian Punnett, who will replace Art Bell on the weekends, seems to be largely apolitical, reasonably knowledgeable, and reasonably capable of handling callers in a civil and non-abrasive manner. However, for reasons I can’t nail down, he never has impressed me as being as interesting as Art Bell.
Many years ago I heard rumors that Art Bell was connected with the DIA. Whether there was any truth to these rumors or not, I don’t know. I have for many years had the sense that someone else was calling the shots.
I have found his position on various wars disturbing, justification for our continued presence in Iraq, or the continual push for war with Iran. To be specific about what I mean about Iran, he keeps pushing the line that the president of Iran wanted to “wipe Israel off the map”, but neglected to mention that that quote was actually part of a speech in which he is quoting Khomeini and setting himself apart from Khomeini’s policies, which means, taken in context he is saying exactly the opposite of what is being implied by the out of context quotes.
I have written to him on this topic and neither received any reply nor have I heard any on-air correction or attempt to place the quote in the proper context.
I find his penchant for revenge troubling. It’s hard for me to believe that after all of the years of marriage to Ramona and his long time friendship with Evelyn Paglini, he would not understand karma and the connectedness of all things and why revenge is not such a good thing for the person seeking it.
Art Bell received some items that were allegedly recovered from the Roswell UFO crash. I am of the belief that the crash really occurred and that these parts wouldn’t have been allowed to remain in civilian possession if they were genuine, and because of certain characteristics of the parts, I do believe they were genuine. All of this leads me to believe that Art Bell probably has some military intelligence ties.
So now that he’s off the air again, I wonder what is up? What’s getting ready to go down? The world has been strange lately.
There are some of my random thoughts. I don’t know if I am pleased or disappointed that he retired again, but I am not surprised.
At one time telegraph was the principal method of rapid communications over long distances. A telegraph consisted of a battery keyed into a long wire, and on the other end of the wire a sensitive electromagnetic device would clack as the key at the remote end was pressed.
The reliance on a wire was the weakness of the telegraph. During a war, wires strung across enemy lines would be cut by the enemy. To get around this problem, something known as a ghost line was invented. A ghost line used the Earth as it’s wires. On one side of the enemy lines a set of ground stakes were placed in the ground as far apart as possible with the line connecting them perpendicular to the direction the signal was to be sent. On the other side of the enemy lines somewhere, a similar set of ground stakes parallel to the first set was also utilized.
On the transmitting end, battery was keyed into the ground stakes. On the receiving end, they were connected to a sensitive detector just as with a wired telegraph. This was not a particularly efficient system since only a small portion of the power keyed in at the sending end would reach the receiver, but it was a system that lacked any wires for the enemy to cut.
When I was in junior high and high school, I operated a pirate radio station and so did several of my friends. Near the end of high school, they all got busted by the enemy, the F.C.C., and I only narrowly escaped. After that we all started looking for legal ways to communicate a signal over distance.
One of my friends read about Ghost Lines. I thought it would be interesting to try it with audio. I drove two stakes into the ground at my parents house as far as I could get them apart in an east-west line, about a hundred feet.
I took a portable cassette recorder and connected a couple of portable ground stakes to the microphone input. With the receiving ground stakes not more than 8 feet or so apart and not more than a foot in the ground, I was able to detect a signal two miles away.
The limitation was not signal amplitude so much as power line hum amplitude which was abundant. I was surprised that the higher frequency audio components were not noticeably attenuated. It occurred to me that one could perhaps get around the hum problems by frequency modulating a carrier say around 40 Khz. I tried to build a little circuit to generate an FM modulated carrier in this range using a phase locked loop chip but I kept frying the chips and eventually gave up. This was late 70’s or very early 80’s, chips were primitive.
Back in those days digital signal processors also were not existent and as a result neither were more complex modulation schemes such as CODFM. With modern technology I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to achieve high speed computer communications this way. This could serve all sorts of interesting purposes, data communications, voice, even pirate radio station STL with your FM transmitter up in a tree somewhere.
I am going to go quite a bit into telephone switching here because there are some interesting parallels between the development of telephone and broadcast technology, and I think this provides some insight into the future of broadcasting.
I worked for Pacific Northwest Bell, then US West when the baby bells got sucked into various regional companies after the AT&T divestiture, and then Qwest when some brilliant marketing folks thought that Qwest sounded better than US West. I guess they just wanted to get “US” out of the company and put some “Q” in. I worked for PNB/US West/Qwest from 1978 to 1995 at which point I left to devote full time to Eskimo North.
Early on most everything was analog. In 1978, many of the central offices were computerized (they referred to it as “stored program controlled”) but those that weren’t completely mechanical used computers to control mechanical switches.
In the 1990’s most of these were replaced with “digital” switches which used at their core a time switch multiplexer which basically took a data sample at one time slot and buffered it then sent it out on a different slot. The 5ESS still had a layer of physical switching acting as a concentrator.
When I started working for Pacific Northwest Bell, most trunking, the circuits that carry conversation between central offices, was on twisted wire pairs with individual trunk circuits on each pair. They used very primitive regenerative bidirectional repeaters on these circuits to overcome wire losses on longer circuits. They were a pain to adjust and maintain.
Over time these individual trunk circuits were moved to “T1” carrier systems, a time division multiplexing scheme that multiplexed 24 individual conversations onto two pairs of wire. These worked by taking samples of the analog voltage of each channel 8000 times per second and encoding it using 8-bit u-law encoding creating a data rate of 1.544 Mb/s which, with the aid of repeaters, could be forced down copper lines to a remote central office.
Later, these T1 circuits were multiplexed into a 45 Mb/s stream and sent down coaxial cable. Over time these streams were multiplexed into still higher bit-rate schemes and sent over optical fiber.
There was never sufficient capacity demand between two central office to justify the entire bandwidth an optical fiber could carry. It became desirable to use a form of multiplexing that could add/drop a portion of that bandwidth at multiple locations. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) that run over SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) links provided this functionality.
What should be noted about this entire architecture is that each conversation creates an entire 64Kb/s data stream continuously for the entire conversation and each trunk circuit represents 64Kb/s of data being transferred continuously whether or not someone is actually speaking on it. ATM adds considerable overhead because it operates with only 53 byte cells with 48 bytes of data payload and 5 bytes of header information.
As you can see, this means almost 10% of the transmission mediums capacity is eaten by cell headers. The reason they used such small cells has to do with latency. At the speeds common at the time, the concern was that larger cells would introduce too much delay and interfere with natural conversation. Small cells were chosen to minimize latency at the expense of efficiency.
I made the conjecture way back before VOIP (Voice over IP) was commercially available that eventually IP transmission would come to dominate voice transmission. The reason is efficiency. With VOIP you don’t have static paths or connections. You route data as the need arises. Most VOIP software has silence detection and doesn’t send data or much data, during silent intervals. Additionally modern encoding techniques are more efficient and less data is required for a voice conversation than the 64 Kb/s used by the telephone companies.
The main thing that prevented the implementation of VOIP back then was that routers were not sufficiently robust to handle large amounts of voice traffic. High end routers had 25 Mhz CPU’s and limited memory back at that time.
Still, back when I was working for the telephone company and they were educating me with respect to ATM, I believed that eventually the fixed data rate encoding of voice circuits would eventually be replaced with voice over IP and at best ATM would carry IP traffic between routers. The economics of doing so make sense.
Now there are many VOIP long distance and local telephone carriers competing with traditional carriers and British Telecom has committed to converting their entire network to VOIP. But I don’t think VOIP as it exists today is the end point.
As it exists today; you get a box you plug your phone into and it connects to a broadband internet connection. It creates a connection between you and a telephone company switch (which might be a software switch consisting of nothing more than a PC loaded with the proper software). Then that switch takes information and creates a connection to somewhere else, might be over a conventional trunk circuit to a conventional telephone company central office, might be to another VOIP switch, or might be to a customer. Eventually I see all of that going away and connections going directly from one end user to another over a broadband connection. There are programs to do this now but with most people still using conventional telephones you still need access to the circuit switched telephone network.
So how does this impact the broadcast industry? Broadcasting today is extremely inefficient in terms of the way it uses spectrum and energy. In addition, it offers the end user a very limited choice of programming, particularly with the recent change in station ownership rules allowing a few corporate entities to own and control the programming of the bulk of radio and television stations and prevent the entry of independent competitors.
Broadcast today involves a high power transmitter at some central location broadcasting an electromagnetic signal to a limited area surrounding the transmitter. 100 kilowatts of effective radiated power might provide a roughly circular coverage area with a commercially useful radius of perhaps 30 miles (give or take, there are many variables such as antenna height, local terrain, etc). A high quality receiver and antenna might be able to receive a signal up to about ten times that distance but not your average person.
Since the FCC has eliminated clear channels, even at night the geographical coverage area of any given station is very limited. If you are driving and listening to a program, you can not drive very long before that station is no longer receivable.
Net Radio by contrast has the advantage of having a global coverage area and not wasting hundreds of kilowatts of power for each originating source of programming. Potentially millions of stations are available which provides much greater program diversity. The barriers to new entries are much lower than with conventional broadcasting where it costs several tens of millions of dollars to buy or build a broadcast station. With Net Radio, someone with a PC and a broadband connection has everything they need to get started.
Net radio is limited presently to mostly fixed reception. This is so because presently a good infrastructure for continuous IP connectivity on the move doesn’t widely exist. However, the recent introduction of WiMAX protocol will go a long way to changing this as well the introduction of even newer ultra-wide-band wireless data transmission standards.
Already there are companies installing national high-speed networks based on this protocol. I believe it’s only a matter of time until portable internet radios and automotive internet radios become widely available. Presently, there are some portable internet radios that rely on WiFi hotspots, it’s just a matter of time until versions for WiMax evolve and smart cell hand-off that allows you to retain the same IP as you move from cell site to cell site becomes available.
When this happens I believe it will completely displace conventional broadcasting and many other mobile radio services. Instead of having a gazillion different radio services, technologies, and modulation schemes, you’ll have one ultra-wideband data transmission scheme and all of these various services carried over that wireless extension of the Internet.
When this happens, satellite broadcasting and conventional terrestrial broadcasting will become largely obsolete. Satellite may still enjoy some audience in areas were population density is too low to justify data cell sites, WiMAX or whatever future protocol they might be. They will become obsolete because IP broadcasting is so much more cost effective and at the same time will offer much more consumer choice.
That’s my prediction for where broadcasting is ultimately headed; from a situation in which fixed terrestrial stations use tremendous amounts of energy to offer programming to a limited geographical coverage area and the people in that area have limited choices, to a situation where “Net Broadcasting” is broadcasting and wireless internet fills the gap for portable and mobile applications.
One artificial roadblock that was thrown at Net broadcasters was the recent increase in royalty rates, which if left unchecked, will pretty much kill Net broadcasters in the United States. Save Net Radio is an organization that is fighting this and recently a bill has been introduced called the Radio Equality Act which would set royalty fees internet broadcasters pay to the same as those that satellite radio broadcasters pay putting them on an equal footing. I suggest writing to your Senators and asking them to support S 1353 (the Senate version of the bill) and writing your Representatives and asking them to support H.R. 2060 (the House version). Also visit Save Net Radios website and consider contributing to their effort.
The potential for a great broadcasting future exists if power can be wrestled from the megacorporate interests that now control the industry.
There is a radio station at the high school I attended, Nathan Hale, KNHC on 89.5 FM.
Doing an unrelated Google search I stumbled across “Bush Radio 89.5 FM“. When I stumbled across this I thought, “Oh crap! Bush has even taken over my high school station!”, but not yet… Bush radio is actually a station in Africa.
I’ve linked the blog for it here so you can go take a look (under the Radio Stations section).
Please take a look at the Register article entitled, “Congress may loosen the noose on Internet Radio“.
It is extremely unfair that Internet broadcasters should have to pay a fee 300-1200% higher than satellite broadcasters, but that is presently the situation.
If passed, the Internet Radio Equality Act, would set the royalty fee for Internet broadcasting to 7.5% of revenues, exactly the same as Satellite Radio. This new bill was co-sponsored by Washington State Democratic representative Jay Inslee, and Illinois Republican representative Don Manzullo.
Please write to your congressmen and express your support for The Internet Radio Equality Act. It is only fair that Internet broadcasters be allowed to complete on an equal basis with satellite broadcasters.
I’ve re-organized the sidebar links to sort them into categories. Because my own interests in the Radio, Broadcasting, and Wireless field is so broad, the collection of links was likewise broad. I’ve created the following categories:
Amateur Radio and DX primarily deals with Amateur (HAM) radio and the hobby of listening to distant stations.
Broadcast Blogs, News, and Trends, primarily deals with information sources pertaining to current events in the broadcast field, anything from personal blogs to industry news to scathing editorials. Sites that are more geared towards the technology and theory behind it are in a separate Broadcast Technology section.
Broadcast Equipment is for sites primarily selling broadcast equipment.
Broadcast History is for sites primarily concerned with the history of radio and television broadcasting.
Radio and TV station consists of web sites for operating radio and television stations. Note that unlicensed stations will be placed in the Unlicensed Broadcasting category.
References is sites which primarily consist of reference data, radio station databases, etc.
Unlicensed Broadcasting consists of sites which primarily relate to unlicensed broadcast operations. These may be part 15 stations, bootleg or pirate radio stations, or any other form of broadcast without a license.
Vintage Radio consists of sites which have information on or sell vintage radio equipment. There is some overlap with the Broadcast History category as many of these sites selling vintage equipment also have some history on them, and some history sites will have minor sales functions. If the primary activity of the site seems to be geared towards sale of vintage equipment or if the emphasis is on the equipment and not the broader history, it will be listed here.
I added a link for abdx.org. They are a group of radio enthusiasts interested in American broadcast DXing. This is a hobby I used to be fairly heavily involved in, particularly TV DXing. Unfortunately, most of the activity seems to be on a Yahoo mail list rather than on the website. However, there are some cool tower pictures including one of a tower downed after a storm.
An article in ElectronicsWeekly.com entitled, “AM Radio Broadcasts Could End In Two Years“, I find very troubling.
I understand the governments desire to end analog TV service. All the digital channels have been moved to UHF and ceasing VHF broadcasts will free up that spectrum so they can auction it off to the highest bidder. What ever happened to governing the airwaves to serve the public interest?
I don’t understand the rush to shutdown analog AM/FM transmission since the digital counterpart occupies the same frequencies. I also hate to see all those old AM furniture radios no longer functional.
I don’t like the Ibiquity HD radio system for AM at all. FM, so-so, it’s probably an improvement over analog subcarriers. The AM Ibiquity HD radio system is a gross waste of bandwidth. Better quality audio could be fit into an existing spectral footprint.
They are trying to stick us with a system that is incompatible with the rest of the world to limit our exposure to news and opinion from the rest of the world while at the same time edging out smaller broadcasters so that only a handful of mega-corporations remain. We’ve already had a sample of “Fair and Balanced”, and that’s what we’re going to get more of if we allow this to happen.
There is no reason to force a change over. If the economics favor it, stations will switch on their own. I do think that stations on AM should either broadcast analog or digital, not waste bandwidth with hybrid systems, but I do not think the entire band should be mandated to change. A system, such as I proposed, which would fit in the same spectral foot print would allow stations to switch as they felt it was economically beneficial to do so without impacting adjacent stations.
A few analog stations would remain to service those old radios. The biggest thing I don’t like about Ibiquitys’ system is that it uses three channels for audio with “fake” highs when it could fit audio with “real” highs into one channel if it got away from proprietary and non-compatible standards and used open and compatible standards.
I’d urge people write your congress critters and tell them the FCC needs to be returned to governing the airwaves in the publics interest, not in the NAB’s, not in Ibiquitys’ interests. You can write the FCC too but given that they are owned by corporate interest there doesn’t seem to be much chance at persuading them directly.
There is a lot of paranoia surrounding cell towers s and possibly human health risks. What is important to understand is that radio frequency field intensity is related to the inverse of the distance squared. The exposure that you get from being in the vicinity of a cell tower is hundreds of times lower than the exposure you get using a cell phone.
The only exception to this might be in a situation were cell phone antennas are operated on top of a roof and people are allowed access to that roof top so you can get right up close to the antennas.
Some early studies of cell phone usage showed some adverse health effects, a slightly increased risk of brain tumors and cataracts among them. However, the largest and most recent study did not show any increased risk.
This isn’t to discredit earlier studies however. The earliest cellular handsets operated at power levels up to four watts. Without any external input your brain normally produces about 12-25 watts of heat. An additional 4 watts is a significant heat load and it’s not heat that is distributed evenly but rather concentrated near the antenna. So it is extremely likely that there were significant health risks with these phones.
The next generation cut that power to 1 watt maximum. Still enough for mild thermal effects and possibly some marginally increased risks.
The next generation after that which still operated at 900 Mhz had a maximum transmit level of about 250 milliwatts, a quarter of a watt. This is really approaching a power level where thermal effects are becoming insignificant. These phones only operate at maximum power if they are in a poor signal area.
The very latest generation operating at 1.8 GHz uses a maximum power of 100 milliwatts and will step down to as little as 1 milliwatt if the signal level is good. This is not enough to cause significant thermal heating and is safe.
The field strength you are subject to from cell towers is a small percentage of the field strength you are subject to using even one of these modern phones. They represent no threat.
For cell phone users, more towers reduces your exposure because your modern cell phone steps down it’s power when the signal is strong. If you’re a few hundred yards from a cell tower, that cell tower doesn’t require that your phone transmit at a high power level for it to receive it. If you are several miles, then your phone must transmit at a higher, but still safe, power level.