PROCESS RANT
IT'S ALL ABOUT YOUR PEA
For most of you who are not bidding in the auction, and may not know the lingo, what is being sold by the FCC in the incentive auction, the "product", well that is a PEA; a partial economic area.
There are 416 of them around the country (and off shore), and they do not relate much to the 210 TV DMA's. But you will have to watch your PEA very carefully, since when it is clear, well you will soon have to move to your new displacement channel which you hopefully got 6 months after the auction.
THE KEY POINT - When your PEA is cleared of auction eligible broadcasters, the winning wireless bidder is ready for testing, and a government mandated regional repacking will be forced on LPTV and TV translators, all without compensation. Regional repacking of PEA's will force move LPTV and TV translator licensees as soon as one year after the auction. But the worse part is that we are not included in the regional repack, ie, have access to the tower crews for our own installations on the same damn towers the repacked primaries, nce, and class a's are on.
Unless of course, all willing and able LPTV and TV translator licensees and permittees are also built-out at the same time. Otherwise over 2000 new build CP's and the remaining 1500 A-D, analog to digital conversions, will not be able to be built for years.
COALITION COMMENTARY -
As we leave the familiar world of TV DMA's, and prepare for the post-auction world of PEA's, LPTV and TV translator station licensees and permittees need to know which PEA's their current contours are reaching. And we need to know it now, for all licensees and permittees. The FCC has never provided our industry with this analysis, and it should have. Is not the clearing of a PEA an essential element of the repacking so that the provisioning of the spectrum for productive flexible use can be accomplished as soon as possible? The FCC should have studied this impact, that is part of their overall responsibilities to licensees and permittees they have empowered to use the spectrum.
CLEVELAND OH TO WASH DC LPTV AND TV TRANSLATORS - BUILT AND NEW CP
PEA MAP OF SAME CLEVELAND OF TO WASH DC CORRIDOR
TV DMA MAP OF SAME CLEVELAND OF TO WASH DC CORRIDOR
In a related NAB ex parte filing with the FCC, NAB goes into quite a bit of detail about the "trade" it has made with CTIA and CCA members about getting the repack done as soon as possible (and as we have reported on before, this is the trade for NAB members getting additional repacking costs), and was part of our complaint last year about the lack of ex parte disclosure. What CCA wants is no change to the 39 months for repacking, sanctions on broadcasters who do not make the move in time, blah blah blah.
You see folks, when NAB, CCA, and CTIA (and PBS was in the room), they never considered the Class A's, of which we now know that at least 69 were not given opening bids. And of course, 8000 LPTV and translator licenses and permits were not considered also.
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