Businesses seem to be moving in, why not our media?

[Vic_doucette]

It just makes sense to put your broadcast location in the central city of the metro area. Southfield is not the central city. It may be a central city in geographical terms, but it's not thecentral city in geopolitical terms.

If the studio isn't on the same site as the transmitter and antenna, you have to find a way to get the signal from the studio to the transmitter. That's done via microwave relays. Using those requires that you retransmit the signal via an uplink at the studio to a downlink at the transmitter,

If you have to do that, you increase the cost of the physical plant [[you have to buy additional equipment) and you increase the complexity of your engineering [[somebody has to make sure that the equipment is working properly -- if this stuff fails, then you are off the air).

Along with that, it all requires FCC approval. That gets lawyers and consulting engineers involved. They don't come cheap.

The Detroit broadcast spectrum is already pretty crowded. Finding acceptable microwave frequencies to pull this off might not even be possible. I'm not an engineer, but I did spend 25 years in broadcasting, so I'm not quite ignorant about it. The FCC might not approve it, and you couldn't do it without FCC approval.

Further, if it isn't a line-of-sight transmission of a relatively short distance, it requires multiple "hops," each requiring an additional uplink and downlink, both of which make the engineering more complicated, costly and prone to failure.

As a broadcasting executive, you're asking me to add to my costs, make my overworked and underpaid engineers jump through even more hoops, bring the lawyers and consultants in to try to get FCC approval -- and all of this won't guarantee me even an additional dime of profit or a single viewer.

Oh, and let's not forget the additional expense of buying/renting space and equipment to set up a new studio to replace the stuff that I have that already works just fine.

It just isn't going to happen, especially in today's economic climate.