Half of public stations miss DTV sign-on deadline

Originally published in Current, May 12, 2003
By Dan Odenwald

More than half of the country’s 357 public TV stations missed the May 1 [2003] deadline to begin digital broadcasting, according to APTS. As of late last week, only 163—just 46 percent of public TV stations—had launched their DTV signals.

Not that it matters much. The 194 public stations that failed to flip the switch are eligible to petition the FCC for two six-month extensions. When commercial stations faced their deadline a year ago, two-thirds missed it and the FCC freely issued waivers.

About 73 percent of TV households now have access to at least one digital public TV signal, APTS says. But coverage may be limited in certain markets as many stations went on the air with low-power signals.

APTS had predicted that two-thirds of public stations would meet the deadline, but the association now says “some stations underestimated the difficulty of getting across the finish line.” Many faced technical problems, including severe winter weather that hindered tower construction. Stations also reported a shortage of tower installation crews and backlogs in delivery of transmission equipment, APTS says.

Four out of 10 stations cited legal hurdles, including challenges to tower locations, zoning issues and problems with clearances from the Canadian government.

About 40 stations that were to receive CPB aid for digital conversion missed the deadline. By the time Congress released federal funding in January, it was too late for many stations to complete the digital startup, says Doug Weiss, CPB’s v.p. of system and station development. In many cases, stations hadn’t decided which equipment to buy with CPB dollars or, if they had, it couldn’t be delivered before May 1.

“This is what we feared,” he says. Public TV started lobbying Congress for digital money in 1997, to avoid the last-minute crush.

While most stations have told APTS they expect to be on the air a year from now, at least nine indicate they’ll miss that date, too. Stations that fail to convert by May 2004 must petition the FCC individually for additional time.

A handful of stations that missed the deadline have neither filed for extensions nor notified APTS of their transition status.

APTS hopes that the failure of so many stations to make the deadline will persuade Congress of the need for more funding. The lobbying organization says stations need more federal dollars to pursue matching funds and hold capital campaigns.

The FCC last month eased another deadline, giving public TV stations an extra six months to simulcast half of their analog programming on their digital channels. The original deadline was May 1.

APTS had argued for an indefinite delay to give stations more time to purchase equipment and work out the kinks with their new digital signals. The FCC is reviewing the simulcast requirement as part of its periodic review of DTV regulations.

The commission also granted a special waiver to Milwaukee Public Television permitting the station to simulcast both of its analog channels on one DTV signal, freeing the other for an all-high-definition service.

Early approvals by PTFP

To push DTV along, the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) rushed $25 million in digital TV grants to 103 stations on April 30. The expedited grants come five months before PTFP usually announces its awards. Grantees will match those federal dollars with $40 million raised locally, according to PTFP.

“The sooner we get the dollars to them, the more it helps,” says Clyde Ensslin, a PTFP spokesman.

The $25 million represents 58 percent of PTFP’s fiscal year 2003 appropriation of $43 million. An additional $16 million in radio and TV equipment replacement grants will be announced this fall.

In addition to these projects, the program awarded $2.6 million to WNET and WNYC-FM to rebuild their transmission facilities destroyed at the World Trade Center.

The equipment grant program is operated by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the Department of Commerce.

With these grants, PTFP has invested a total of $122 million in DTV aid over the past six years. In the latest round of awards, it gave 56 grants to stations in 31 states.

The largest award of $1.8 million went to South Carolina ETV. Iowa PTV received $1.2 million, the round’s second-highest award. Michigan’s WDCQ/WDCP, Ohio’s WOUC and the Mississippi network received $1.1 million each.

The three New Mexico stations will share an award of $933,700, and the 11 Texas stations will divide a $886,100 grant.

PTFP also awarded PBS $631,400 to purchase satellite DTV receivers and decoders for distribution to 45 public TV stations nationwide.

Earlier article
Public TV's digital transition: hunkered down but moving ahead

Originally published in Current, March 24, 2003
By Steve Behrens

With a little of its persistence and ingenuity, Ed Caleca was thinking, public TV might turn on digital transmitters at 150 of its 357 sites in time for the FCC’s May 1 on-air deadline.

Still, public TV engineers have moved ahead haltingly to put 103 digital transmitters on the air, as of last week, reaching 62 percent of viewing households, according to APTS. For others, activation is within reach: Pubcasters have applied for six-month extensions for 192 additional stations.

“There were bumps and grinds, for sure,” says Caleca. Engineers in northern states have been stalled by snow, he says, and others by delays in funding, equipment delivery and all the many approvals required to put an entire transmission system on the air.

Still, because big-city stations have been signing on their digital transmitters since 1997, public TV already has digital signals covering 62 percent of the viewing public.

An unknown number of additional stations are ready to sign on, but simply waiting until the last minute to save money on their power bills, Caleca speculates.

The other day in East Lansing, Mich., tower crews were hauling up a 5,200-pound antenna that will radiate both the analog and digital signals for WKAR. Gary Blievernicht, chief engineer, expects to meet the May deadline. He summarizes the situation: “We’re all just trying to muddle through.”

Even some of the smallest pubTV stations are nearly on schedule. Northern Minnesota Public Television, which operates KAWE in Bemidji and KAWB in Brainerd, is ready to go with its Brainerd transmitter and will put up its Bemidji antenna by July, says Bill Sanford, g.m. and director of engineering. Now he’s waiting for Minnesota Public Radio to vacate leased space on the TV tower in Bemidji.

The licensee pulled together $3.2 million for its conversion from the state, PTFP and its own reserves.

A video server and new automation software will let KAWE assemble two multicasting channels locally—a Lakelands Classics channel of primetime repeats and how-to shows, and a public affairs channel featuring its nightly local newscast and the state legislature feed, according to Sanford.
“Everybody’s just hunkered down and working, trying to get this done,” says Sanford.

There are few signs of utter impoverishment. When Dow, Lohnes & Albertson filed extension requests for 69 stations earlier this year, “not a single one of them relied on, ‘Gee, we have not been able to find the money,’” says attorney Todd Gray.

It helps that Congress has given $52 million to CPB in the last three years, adding another funding source. Of that sum $51.4 million has been obligated to more than 100 stations, according to CPB.

Digital stations No. 102 and 103 were the Biloxi and Oxford transmitters of Mississippi ETV. APTS put out a press release when the total reached 100, as Pennsylvania State University’s WPSX went digital March 3.

“We’ve done it, hurray!” says Kate Domico, director of technology at WPSX.

The pieces of funding came together, with the state, feds and a capital campaign contributing. Penn State will toss in a new building next year. But Domico says WPSX needed more than a year to negotiate the site for a 990-foot tower—twice the height of its present tower, in case some cable systems don’t carry the signal. Later, a shortage of tower crews delayed the start of construction for nine months.

Innovating in the midst of change

Instead of buying a few pieces of equipment each year, engineers during the digital transition have to build entire broadcast systems while components are still under development.

Located in hilly central Pennsylvania, WPSX is working with an engineering consultant, Merrill Weiss Group, that’s developing a digital repeater than can extend the station’s signal by repeating it on the same broadcast channel instead of requiring a separate translator channel—a commodity in short supply today.

The on-channel repeater to be tested at Penn State will bring WPSX’s signal into the valley where the university is located, which the main transmitter covers poorly, according to Domico. If all goes well, WPSX may add on-channel DTV repeaters in Altoona and Johnstown.

Others have applied ingenuity to extend the life of equipment. In Kentucky, the state public TV network worked with Hitachi to develop a way to make a digital microwave system out of the old analog system that connects its 15 transmitter sites. Now the digital system gives Kentucky ETV’s analog signals the clean signal of a digital hookup, says Bob Ball, director of transmission systems engineering.

Though high-definition TV is DTV’s big selling point for commercial broadcasters, some pubcasters give it low priority for equipment spending. Maine Public Broadcasting is waiting until later to upgrade its recorders, switchers and other equipment to HD, says Gil Maxwell, Maine’s senior v.p. of operations and technology and chairman of the PBS Engineering Committee. “We can broadcast HD but we don’t need an HD house,” he says. “We just splice into the HD feed from PBS.”

Producing a talking-head program in HD makes no sense to Maxwell. He’d rather put Maine’s resources into creating standard-definition multicasting streams.

“What I find exciting now is that we’re in the process of defining our own environment here,” he says.

At the Maine network, which put its fifth and last DTV signal on the air last month, engineers are working to improve digital multicasting. Maxwell says many DTV receivers react poorly when stations turn off their multicast channels when they switch to HD, or vice versa. In defining the component channels in the DTV signal, he says, it’s safer to maintain all of them in existence even when some are carrying no pictures or sound. Technicians in Maine and elsewhere are experimenting with “trickle-streaming” of notices telling viewers when to expect programs to resume on a channel that’s now idle.