Denver, CO - OTA - Page 9

I thought that they were going ahead with the LCG2 plans?

Have they made significant changes to that proposal? Has anyone read it or have any specifics regarding changes?

FWIW, when I was growing up in MN they were trying to construct a huge high tension power line. The locals fought it every step of the way (identical playbook to sCARE) including sneaking out at night and unbolting the finished towers from their bases. They made a movie out of it, no kidding. They never succeeded in toppling any of the towers that I am aware of though.

note to sCARE: Do not attempt to unbolt any towers! The falling tower would kill millions as it rocketed down the mountain, rolled across the plains and eventually took out all of Manhattan. Plus the resulting fires would envelop the earth in smoke, plunging us into nuclear winter. Oh the horror!

Hurry before its too late! Ending an 8 year record setting smash hit run!!!

"Groundhog Day"

With the recent President's blessing, they don't have to follow the LCGII plan. That's why Commish McCasky brought-up the vote for JeffCo to at least offer a bone to LCG to accept the old (approved 3x now) LCGII application and then drop all future protests.

If I was LCG, I'd say no "fill-in-the-blank" way. Remember, that application had a lot of expensive, good neighbor items in it. Like, paying for independent RF monitoring, having to still be regulated by zoning for any future changes, donating the old land to JeffCo etc. By accepting that, they would be stuck with it. Now, they aren't required to do any of that.

I agree Ernie.

My initial impression was that they were planning to adhere to the LCGII proposal. I'm assuming that the latest proposal no longer includes said "good neighbor" items. Perhaps this would explain the commisioners fury. Of course they know who to blame, just check any nearby reflective surface.

Yes, putting the new building, fuel tank, etc ON the mountain instead of INSIDE the mountain would be a huge expense and time saver. Also retaining the land for future tower construction would make good business sense. Perhaps I should revise my on-air date to much sooner?

BTW, I think you need a more coniving, unethical, conspiracy theorist-type to play Mayor Baroch. Perhaps someone (anyone?) from D.C.? Just kidding!

Boy I never realized Golden was such great "whine" country. Glad to see Deb, Al, and Comish Congrove have been able to maintain the 'high' road. Must be good stuff they are smoking.

I think the Commissioners simply refected the LCG proposal to fulfill their campaign promises that they will vote against any tower approvals, important if you might want to save face in the community. I think the language from Congrove is a reflection of his understanding that it really doesn't matter what they do at this point, they are powerless to stop any of the construction. It is funny that the LCG proposed leaving all the old towers in place until all lawsuits were settled. I guess the other good news is that after JJ takes away the injunction on Monday, construction can actually begin. Obviously Jeffco was stalling by asking for delays to see if their lawyers could find a loophole. It sounds like their answer was, "no, we can't find one". The only thing that could have made this solution any better for all of us is if it would have happened 5 years ago. This is fun to watch now!

This is very important. If JeffCo would have accepted the 'agreement' with the clause of leaving the old towers up until all litigation stops (that includes Golden and sCARE lawsuits) it would in effect get JeffCo to pressure Golden and sCARE to give up in defeat as the only way to get the old towers removed.

First they were selfish, and self delusional.

They they were stupid, using arguments that wouldn't pass the smell test.

Now they are just childish, stomping their feet at authority.

What's next? Rude hand gestures?


They lost, and they better take the best deal they can get, and quickly.

So what about those old towers. Even tho the Cry-Baby-Commissioners (CBC's) didn't sign anything that doesn't mean LCG has to remove any towers. I don't recall anything in S.4092 that forces LCG to remove towers. I say let 'em sit until the suits are done. That's expensive and they ought to leverage doing that against having to spend more money fending off assine lawsuits.

I like the 3 stooges for the current CBC's but you need to find the biggest Hollywood bitch to play the part of SCARE Attorney.

Indeed S.4092 gives them an incentive to leave at least one of them up, since it states that any new tower has to be lower than the tallest EXISTING analog tower. No time limit on that provision that I saw.

You can find a pretty complete (not perfect) list of HD radio stations at www.hdradio.com/index.php. There are quite a few more than have been mentioned on the AM side but I don't know how many transmit from Lookout.

For the movie:
Deb - Meryl Streep
Mayor - Scooter Libby

That's why it is so funny. The LCG is throwing the threat of leaving the towers up right back at them, and given the existing new law, I doubt they could be forced to remove them. They could claim they are 'backup' antennas and let the (S)CARE folks stew in their own juice. In reality, they would never tear them down anyway at least until the new tower is up and all the stations are in operation from the new tower and the analog deadline has passed, so this is only a threat to leave them up after that. They would be turned off, so they would become a visual blight but a necessary one (from the LCG standpoint) in case Jeffco or someone else sued to stop the use of the new tower. I think Geof is correct, there is nothing that I read in the new law that would require them to take the old antenna towers down. I suppose that also would mean the end of that 'open space' proposed for the old sites. Obviously the LCG is no longer required to donate their old properties to Jeffco for that use. I find that position by the LCG somewhat hysterical actually. I would say good for them if I didn't have so much contempt for some of their previous actions. As it stands, I will simply stand aside and have a good laugh at the whole situation.
ROFLMAO

I'm thinking that instead of open space turn it into "Towerland", a fun new amusement park for the entire family! You could put up dozens more from around the globe for the "It's an Antenna World After All" ride. Maybe even a live "Pirates of the Canyon Area" show.

And don't forget... "Space Cadet" mountain, "The sCAREy Haunted House" and possibly an "Eminent Domain-dome" stadium for concerts!

And you could sell aluminum foil hats for all the kiddies!

Can somebody quickly summarize the differences between the original LGC proposal and LGCII? Why was LGCII created in the first place?

And just think, you could hold hot dogs on sticks just in front of the towers to cook your lunch. Market a little kraut, relish, onions and mustard on the side an "Towerland" becomes fun for Mom & Dad too!

One difference was that Channel 6 dropped out , although I think they were originally included when LCG2 was submitted. The other one that was major, was that the land for the other towers would be given over to Jeffco for Open Space. I don't think that was in the original. LCG 1 was rejected (rightfully so) based largely on the grounds that the LCG did NOT provide all of the required documentation (including as I recall a alternative site assessment) in a timely fashion along with the submittal. I don't think the LCG really thought out LCG1 to be frank. I think they just rushed together a concept and assumed it would pass. It wasn't until it was turned down that they really got serious and did their design homework. Wabisabi can probably shed more light on this if he is reading.

To add to John's comments, LCG 1 did not meet all the requirements of the Jefferson County Telecommunications Land Use bill and as John mentioned they were horribly late with the alternate site submittal. After those JeffCo hearings and the subsequent NO vote on LCG 1 the LCG asked the FCC to preempt JeffCo and also filed an appeal to a JeffCo Judge. They were late with submittals to the JeffCo Judge and somehow managed to kill two years (or thereabouts) before submitting LCG2 plans. After the LCG1 fiasco it became painfully clear that they were in no real hurry to get anything approved. And they took their sweet time with LCG2 although this time around they did their homework and came up with a vastly superior proposal (as compared to LCG1).

I recall hearing once that soldiers in the Korean War liked to hang out near microwave communications relays to keep warm. Seems more likely to cook your goose than your lunch though.

Just to be clear, those stories were mostly about microwave dishes, and pretty much anyone can tell you NOT to stand directly in front of one. I worked with a friend for many years at GE Space Division back in Valley Forge, PA. who was a veteran of the Navy. He got his start in RF working as a tech on shipboard repairing early Navy shipboard microwave dishes for radar and Communications. He used to tell us stories of how in the old days they would have them climb up the tower and work on the dish feeds (cleaning off debris, repairs etc.) while the dishes were hot. He said he always wondered if it was safe. He died about 1990 from a brain tumor. No direct connection was proven since it had been about 30 or more years, but at the end, Tom told us about those days and we ran some calculations to see the PFD levels he might have been exposed to. Now days, he would not be allowed anywhere near such a dish while it was hot. FWIW the power levels do drop off pretty rapidly once you get away from the dish (1/R^2), but not if you stick your head in front of one. Those stories were likely true.

No back to your regular programming.

Mythbusters did a segment on Radar units. They hung a turkey on a ships huge Radar unit. They ran the thing for like an hour and the birds temp never heated up. In fact, it went down on one of the tests!
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Ok, I have a question, anybody watch Fox tonight? I was watching Idol and some of the commercials were pillarboxed. But, at the very top, you could see about 10 scan lines of a wide-screen version of the spot. It was like they were showing a WS spot and 'cropping' the center with black bars. I've not noticed this until tonight. What's up with that? It was the network doing it and not local spots. That's weird!

In the early days of radar, the receivers were not as sensitive as they are today. Wide pulse widths nearing CW were often radiated. As a result of improved receiver technology, the modern radars are able to use much narrower pulse widths (resulting in far less "average" power radiation). The average power is the culprit. I would not be surprised to see a test run now that did not produce much heat in the turkey. RF engineers are a LOT smarter these days than they were in the early days of WWII. There weren't many studies done on the effects of RF during that time. Communications radar (similar to TV microwave or phone traffic links) are much different animals as the CW signals are used and the average power used is often quite high. The effect is also a function of the frequency, somewhat related to water absorption curves, the more power absorbed in the water (i.e. body matter, blood etc.) at a particular frequency, the more heat is generated. As everyone knows, some frequencies are much more dangerous than others. We tested many geosynchronous satellite transmitters/antennas at GE back in the day, and I can assure in the sweet spot they would easily cook a turkey. Obviously television broadcast satellites use CW high power transmitters. The other issue in the early days was that since no 'harm' was envisioned, men often spent a lot of time directly in front of the dishes over periods of months if not years as a part of the ground crew.

See this article .

Why is it that everybody thinks they're a lawyer? What's worse, even the real lawyers think they're always right. We need to adopt some of the european ways, where you have to go before a Judge before you can even bring a case. To see if has any merit. Saves so much BS and court time.

I have no doubt you will see more of these suits as the analog shut off date gets closer. There are many marginal TV watchers (obviously no one here in the AVS forum) who are plenty upset about having to replace their TV's or at least buy a new tuner. I think this would have been less of a problem had more DTV stations been on the air sooner so that the transition would have been smoother. Thanks to places like, say, oh, just for fun lets pick a city, how about "Denver", the lack of DTV leading up to the transition will make the analog shut off seem far more intrusive than it was intended. I just don't think there was any 'clean' way to do this transition without aggravating a large group of viewers. On the other side, I really don't think any of these suits will have any success other than to perhaps delay the analog shut off date again for a year or two.

Or they could have pushed ATSC tuners into smaller-sized sets much earlier than they did.

While there are plenty of marginal TV watchers around, I don't get the sense that there is any wide scale outrage about the transition as yet.
Public Citizen, the group who filed this lawsuit, are always trying to gin up a controversy to justify their existence but I don't think much of the public knows or cares about the transition as of yet.

In the end, I think those marginal users will be more upset about the COMPLEXITY of using a new tuner box than the (subsidized) COST. My mother in law is still befuddled by using a VCR with the TV.

Very true. But, they did escalate the requirement. In 22 days, pretty much all devices with a tuner, must have an ATSC tuner.

So, things are getting better.
....jc

wah wah wah, I have a constitutional right to my free OTA analog TV. Gimme a break.