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The DTV Utah group has come up with a plan that would allow all eight stations to use the same tower for their digital stations.
Sometimes local RF TV broadcasters do a better job of co-locating stations than the FCC with its sophisticated computer programs and engineer experts. That's what the Commission has conceded by taking a look at a plan by eight broadcasters in the Salt Lake City area to rearrange their digital TV spectrum.
Other broadcasters around the country have until July 12 to file comments on the proposal by the Utah eight, who for this purpose are going under the name "DTV Utah." Reply comments are due July 27.
The group has come up with a plan that would allow all eight stations to use the same tower for their digital stations, but it would require an assignment of different channel assignments for some of the stations, swaps for others, and site or facility changes for others.
In their request to the FCC to allow the changes, the group asserts that their plan would reduce transactional, construction, and operating costs for all of the stations and that their plan is necessary to resolve potential interference and engineering problems they would have encountered under the FCC allotments.
More important, from the agency's point of view, they claim that their plan would not result in new interference to the DTV operations of other full-power stations in the Utah market. It already has been working with the owners of translators to avoid interference in that area as well, the group said, and has worked out changes with the low-power community to accommodate their needs.
The proposal "warrants consideration," the FCC said and put the plan out as a notice of proposed rulemaking (MM Docket 99197). "We find that these channel changes are acceptable under the two percent criterion for de minimis impact that is applied to evaluating requests for modification of initial DTV allotments," it said.
The DTV Utah plan includes a swap by KULC-TV that would see it trade its DTV Channel 34 for KUTV's Channel...