skyvalleyradio wrote:CFSI appears to be toast. ... Very sad indeed...
As always, I enjoy updates from the Gulf Islands despite the bad news. All this unmodulated carrier stuff is frustrating. It's mind boggling how the commission enables these losers. Merely because electrons are flowing through an element, does not mean service is being provided yet the commission doesn't seem to care. In fact, I'm hard pressed to find anyone in recent times who's lost their license for that kind of behavior. Obviously, they fear litigation and muzzling more than actually doing what their job descriptions require.
It's going on a few years that CHMZ 90.1 FM Tofino has been abandoned. UPS equipment installed has failed. Every time the power flickers, the station goes off air... often for weeks on end. The building owner where McBride's studio was located was foreclosed upon, hence everyone locked out. They did refinance however, but McBride got the boot for not paying rent for years. Besides that, being located in the cash buyer's office of an old fish camp down on the waterfront, the negligent absentee maintenance of the studio has given rise to a nasty layer of mold over the equipment and a rat infestation contaminated or destroyed equipment with fecal/urine and gnaw damage.
Twice removed previously from CHMZ, Cameron Dennison has made some kind of paperless back room handshake deal to relocate the studio, but ENTIRELY at his own expense. New location, computers, board, rack, furnishings etc. Meanwhile McBride pockets the nationals and election revenues. I like Cameron. He's well liked in the community and means well, but he's on a fool's errand and much of the investment ought to be utilized on his new family and be better served than enabling Matthew McBride's penchant for f++cking everyone over. It's back on air... on auto... and non-compliant. Mono, low BW and parasitic (both ways). The Telus MW link is intermodding at a resonant TX. Waveform monitoring the near-field RF output displays similar to an image even though it's operating at the correct frequency with peaks and valleys, as opposed to a straight line. In fact, an image is clearly heard on the aviation band at band at 111.5 MHz. A double multiple of the 10.7 MHz intermediate frequency at thirty over in FM narrow mode outside of the near-field for greater than two kilometers from the tower. McBride had Geoff Johnson (who's not an engineer or technician) change out the TX a few years ago, out of the box, without dummy load testing or measuring and correcting the SWR disparity with the existing antenna. Yet they wonder why transmitters are failing.
Other than few border blasters, I don't see much of a crackdown on non-compliance issues in the radio world. Apparently reprehensible isn't egregious enough to warrant discipline. Apparently egregious isn't heinous enough to warrant cancellation either.
The mandate requirement isn't worth the spit it takes to utter it or the cost to us for the people who pretend to understand it. Guys like McBride go before the commission, promising the moon and deliver on none of it. Likewise, he can outright lie about CCD payments or and other operational malfeasance yet the licenses continue to stand.
McBride and Dhillon are egotistical, monopolistic c++kblockers and little else, enabled by an outdated system. They don't give a ratSa$$ about community, only self interest. They failed years ago in every aspect of the business, yet the commission upholds them as legitimate, effectively squeezing everyone else out from doing anything meaningful. Meanwhile, more people will be bilked out of their savings and time for the promise of the ethereal 5% of nothing. This nonsence has gone on way too long. It's past ridiculous and beyond the likelihood of every being anything reasonable. It's evolved into an outright scam and the game's still got some empty seats for new marks.
CRTC just doesn't get it, neither does Industry Canada, so long as these clowns are still allowed to operate the way they do.