Changelog

Over the Juneteenth US federal holiday weekend, REC is planning to perform maintenance on behind the scenes functionality as well as internal and public applications.   Maintenance will start on Saturday, June 18 and will run through Monday, June 21. 

No full outages are expected, but users may experience temporary disruptions or error messages on FCCdata and other systems while development is taking place.

LMSbot routine updates and eLMS are not expected to be interrupted during this maintenance window.  

REC Networks announces the full release of Enhanced Licensing Management System (eLMS) version 2.  Version 2 is a complete rewrite of the eLMS software.  eLMS is the internal REC system that reads broadcast applications and saves the information to our database.  Combined with our LMSbot software (which just upgraded to version 4 last week) provides the real-time information that normally updates REC websites such as FCCdata.org and FCC.today within 20 minutes of the application filing.

We are currently working issues with LMSbot v4.  These are some "first day" bumps in the road that we would expect. 

ISSUE

System locked for a long period of time.  Once unlocked, the system is not displaying applications from the previous business day in Classic Mode. 

eLMS-PN v2 release

eLMS-PN makes an hourly query to the FCC Electronic Documents (EDOCS) system to obtain the LMS Broadcast Applications public notice to determine which applications are accepted for filing and then updates various eLMS tables to indicate the status change. 

On May 23, REC plans to do a "partial" cut over of eLMS.  With the partial cut over, only application types that are new to v2 will be handed by v2 in the production environment.  This includes:

FCC.today will be unavailable on Saturday and Sunday, May 21~22, 2022. 

ISSUE:

FCCdata.org:

The "Tower Payload" function on FM engineering function as well as the "What's That Tower?" on the mobile version is not displaying all broadcast facilities on the tower. 

CAUSE:

This is likely due to some changes in tables that we are making for eLMS v2, including the phase-out of a pre-eLMS legacy table.

RESOLUTION:

Resolution is in progress.  Until then, not all broadcast facilities will show as being resident on a tower.    

During this past week, we have been doing extensive development in getting eLMS version 2 ready for production deployment.  Unlike version 1, eLMS version 2 is more script and table driven as opposed to hardcoded.  This allows us to easily add new application types into the system.  New scripting and table support has been added for various types of non-engineering television applications as well as certain radio application situations that were not previously supported in eLMS version 1.  This includes:

This change made some changes to the FCCdata source code to prepare FCCdata for the conversion to eLMS version 2 on Memorial Day Weekend.  

During this change, we also moved the eLMS v2 database structure and data (which has been updated in the test environment) which is backwards compatible with the v1 database structure. 

This change also streamlined some functions that were previously linked in older versions of FCCdata.

The user should experience very little if any change in the user experience.

We have received reports and were able to confirm that on pending FM Modification of License (ML & MLA) applications, the LMS form no longer includes the various height parameters (ground elevation, radiation center above ground, radiation center above mean sea level, etc.).  This is resulting in that data not showing in FCCdata and incorrect or missing contour maps.  We are aware of this issue and will create a solution for the issue in our eLMS v2 code that will launch on Memorial Day weekend. 

REC will be temporarily stopping our eLMS real time updates and our daily refresh of the FCC LMS database on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the month of May.

We are starting the preparations for the following application types that will be moving from CDBS to LMS:

Some REC systems, especially LPFM.us, LPFM.ws, myLPFM and PREMIS are not functioning properly. 

The root cause so far is due to an unannounced change in the format of LMS data tables. 

REC is currently in the process of modifying our code to be compatible with the new format.  

This is also affecting Live services.  Until we get this issue resolved on our end, we are not able to do channel searches. 

We made some fixes on our AM contour back-end applications that drive the contours on FCCdata's maps.  This contour data comes directly from the FCC through KML files.  We have also addressed the issue where some contours look like they have jagged edges.  We are experiencing a similar issue with this in FM through the eLMS data.  Now that we have seen it in action on the AM side, that gives us some ammo to fix it on the FM side. 

On FM records that have been enhanced by the REC Radio History Project, a new Historic Grid View link now appears in the header.  This link will take you a grid view that shows all of the applications filed in a single view.  This functionality has already existed for AM records, but we are now releasing a FM version. 

The REC Radio History Project is an ongoing endeavor to digitize the paper versions of the FCC broadcast records.  

For FM, Radio History Project enhanced records can be found in the following areas: