Friday's (JST) 8.8 earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan's main island Honshu at Miyagi-ken and it's resulting tsunami has caused severe damage throughout Japan's eastern coast. Watching the homes in Sendai city and other coastal areas being washed away was devistating to watch. The structural damage and overall loss of property is enormous. So many people's lives have changed as a result.

Recently, Franny (remember her?) put up a Facebook group for the callers of K-Fone, another voice system that has ran until recently. The interesting thing about K-Fone and many of the REC systems was that it was developed on the same platform. First a quick tutorial on the generations of REC systems:

Generation 1 - Chatsworth 1987-1988 - Called the "REC Conference, Voice Mail and Information Access Service". Featured a live conference bridge, private voice mail and IAS boxes (one way recordings that callers can operate). Operated on an IBM XT.

Perhaps, it's time for this to happen. NPR has got too big.. There was once a time when college radio stations were actually located at the college and were programmed by students and members of the community at large. But these stations out of greed towards the promotion of other university programs got bigger. Transmitter antennas moved off of campuses and on to mountaintops. Powers increased and suddenly public radio was big-time. With that, stations sprouted formats. Gone are the day of local music, local views, local people and most importantly, the students.

The FCC has released a Memorandum Opinion and Order (MO&O) MB Docket 09-52 on Tribal and Rural issues. In this Order, the Commission has made some changes to policies related to the FM Table of Allotments as well as a change to how FM Translator applications are handled.

REC 2x70 Maps in PDF | KML files for Google Earth | REC Auction 83/GTI Page

REC's "2x70" concept for the handling of the pending Auction 83 (Great Translator Invasion) applictions is starting to gain support in the broadcast engineering community. Radio World's Michael LeClair recently described our proposals:

REC’s commonsense proposals go a long way to address the faults of the 2003 translator window and point the way to a more reasonable translator allocation system.

We are very confident that we have the most sophisticated handling method for these applications that would assure that translators are available in areas where they are the most needed (the rural areas) and LPFM stations are available in the areas where they are most needed (the suburban and urban areas). "2x70" imposes a counterbalance in the current structure where there are more urban translators and more rural LPFMs. Rural LPFM must continue to be made available and if anything we feel that rural LPFM deserves a boost, we also see the value of translators in rural areas. "2x70" assures that in the rural areas where there's plenty of room for both LPFM and translators, they can both co-exist. These are opportunities that would have been foreclosed upon with the 10-cap.