Reading services hunt secure spectrum for services to the blind
Originally published in Current, July 21, 1997
By Mary Snellgrove
The National Association of Radio Reading Services has asked Vice President Gore to help find new spectrum--perhaps in the television band of channels--to deliver reading services to the blind.
Robert Brummond, first v.p. of NARRS and manager of a reading service in Asheville, N.C., said the most common and cost-effective means of distribution for radio reading services--hitchhiking on a public radio station's FM subcarrier--is now being eyed by high-tech companies planning new data transmission networks. "Companies want to lease subcarrier spaces to transmit high-speed data," Brummond said.
Seiko Communications, for example, may offer a public radio station $10,000 a month to lease a subcarrier, said Steve Terry, g.m. of WYPL in Memphis, while radio reading services rarely pay more than incidental costs for such a lease.
Dianna Schmid, director of marketing and corporate communications for Seiko Communications, said Seiko uses subcarriers to transmit messages to Seiko MessageWatch pagers. The company now uses subcarriers along the West Coast and is looking to expand, said Mark Parr, v.p. for network services. "We have already developed quite favorable relationships, technically and financially, with several public radio stations."
Reduced federal and university subsidies make it especially tempting for public radio stations to negotiate better-paying leases, said Brummond.
Pacifica rents to Seiko
That recently happened in San Francisco. A local radio reading service, the Rose Resnick Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, is being replaced by the Seiko paging service on the subcarrier of KPFA, Pacifica Radio's Berkeley station. KPFA, which had leased its subcarrier to the Lighthouse service since 1981, notified the service in November that it wanted to revisit the agreement.
The Lighthouse service is now operating on a SAP channel of a commercial TV station, KTVU. The station donated transmission for 18 months and may renew, said Damian Pickering, coordinator of telecommunications at Lighthouse.
"I think the TV-SAP channel is better, though, because a TV station has more power, which allows us to cover a larger area, and the sound is much better, too."
"KPFA [said it] suddenly had extraordinary costs imposed on it, and it wanted to move us to one of its other subcarriers," said Pickering. "We eventually settled a financial severance. It boiled down to the public radio station had its business to do, and we had ours."
Burt Glass, KPFA spokesman, said the agreement between the two parties was mutual. "They (Rose Resnick Lighthouse) were looking into a different way of serving their constituency; it was an equitable agreement." In no way was the reading service kicked off KPFA, he said. "If it had not been happy with the agreement, we would not have gone forward." Pacifica has had a "longstanding relationship with Seiko at our other stations," Glass said.
Pickering has no hard feelings toward KPFA. "Public radio is having to find ways to keep itself afloat, and the FM subcarrier 'real estate' is very developed."
FCC rules offer some protection to radio reading services. Commercial use of a public radio station's subcarrier cannot be "detrimental to an existing or potential radio reading service," warns regulation 73.593.
But Terry believes the rule provides no real security. "Radio reading services think they are protected from being dropped from a subcarrier, but nothing has ever been tested in court."
"I've been the one telling radio reading services to get off the subcarrier space, because it is not going to be there much longer," said Terry, who operates one of the few such services that has its own FM license. He stopped leasing another station's subcarrier when he got a main channel in 1991. (Operating on an open channel--unlike subcarriers, which require special receivers--had the added advantage of expanding service to the illiterate, who were not entitled to state-financed receivers that are available to the blind.)
"I predict within the next three years commercial companies will occupy space in the top 50 markets," said Terry.
Short- and long-term options
Brummond's NAARS Future Signal Viability Committee is seeking alternatives to subcarrier leases. He suggested various options in letters to legislators, to the FCC and to Gore, the main Administration spokesman for public-interest uses of spectrum.
"NARRS doesn't want to advocate conflict [with public radio] because we want to be on the side of digital technology, and we don't want it to be hard for public radio to survive."
As a short-term solution, the committee is seeking spectrum usable with inexpensive receivers: three channels, 15 khz wide, preferably between 50 mhz and 250 mhz.
Over the long term, the committee sought a 1 mhz channel from the surplus TV spectrum that otherwise will be auctioned when TV completes the digital transition after 2000. It also asked for four reserved data streams in the signals of digital TV stations.
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