As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St. We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30. To make reservations call Paul Black at 925-827-9511 and leave a message on his machine.

The ATSC digital TV seminar will be held at KNPB-TV, Reno, on Monday August 20th from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. The speaker will be Gary Scrignoli of Zenith and he'll have a room full of equipment with him. If you'd like the complete flyer, contact me at [email protected], or click here. It's in PDF format.

Paul Marks is still trying to arrange for Zenith to do their ATSC seminar in San Francisco. No date or location as of now.

Something I think would make an interesting meeting is how are all those servers doing? Many broadcasters have them as part of editing systems or for commercial playback. What is the real mortality rate of the drives? How well do systems recover? What are the success/horror stories. Drop me a note. - RT

by Larry Bloomfield.

Essentially, Larry had known the late "Indian" organ player in LA under a Hispanic name.

In the June issue of Los Angeles magazine, R.J. Smith traced him back to Mississippi, born of non Indian parents. Who is right? I'm not about to say.

As a sometime dabbler in genealogy, I know about the SSDI (Social Security Death Index) which permits anyone to obtain a copy of a deceased person's Social Security application. I found Korla in their files and I sent in my $7. More next month.

(A few words on investing for your future by Roy Trumbull. This is not a recommendation by SBE Chapter 40.)

That fly-by-night bucket shop, the US Treasury Department has an interesting deal for you. After having several of the top financial writers rub my nose in it, I finally checked into inflation bonds. The deal is, the bonds pay about 3 to 3.5% but, inflation gets added in to your return. A blue ribbon panel of experts strongly recommended that the Treasury Department drop those bonds like a hot rock. When interests rates are going down, Uncle Samuel does fine and gets cheap money. But when inflation goes up, he's exposed to unlimited interest rate liability. The bonds are available from banks and there are several mutual funds that specialize in them. The Treasury Dept. is on the web.

http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/sav/sbifaq.htm

On July 16 SBE filed comments to ET Docket 01-75, the rulemaking that will update and streamline the Part 74 BAS rules. The SBE comments are available as a pdf file on the SBE web page (www.sbe.org) or from the FCC's electronic comment filing system (ECFS) at http://www.fcc.gov/e-file/ecfs.html. The SBE comments run 28 pages and about 11,000 words, and cover a wide range of BAS issues.

SBE is now working on reply comments to ET 01-75, which are due August 7. Of particular importance will be SBE's reply to Globalstar, which told the FCC that broadcasters using "grandfathered" ENG Channel A10 (2483.5-2500 MHz) should be booted off that channel because they don't use it anyway. Obviously, the SBE reply comments will take vigorous exception to that claim and will provide reasons why grandfathered A10 users should continue to exist.

Any TV station with a TV Pickup license that authorizes A10 would be well advised to file reply comments to the ET Docket 01-75 rulemaking, pointing out that this grandfathered channel is most definitely used and is a critical part of many "home channel" plans.

Dane E. Ericksen, P.E., CSRTE
Chairman, SBE FCC Liaison Committee
Hammett & Edison, Inc.
707/996-5200 voice
707/996-5280 fax
[email protected]

Webmeister Tim Pozar has the current newsletter plus newsletters all the way back to 1996 at: http://www.lns.com/sbe

Tim is also keeping track of email addresses and you can subscribe to the mailing list at:

We require affiliates of the top four commercial broadcast TV networks in the top 25 TV markets to provide 50 hours per calendar quarter of prime time and/or children*s programming with video description.

We also require MVPDs with 50,000 or more subscribers to provide 50 hours per calendar quarter of prime time and/or children*s programming with video description on each of the top five national nonbroadcast networks they carry.

In addition, we require any broadcast station, regardless of its market size, to *pass through* any video description it receives from a programming provider, if the broadcast station has the technical capability necessary to do so, and we require any MVPD, regardless of its number of subscribers, to *pass through* any video description it receives from a programming provider, if the MVPD has the technical capability necessary to do so on the channel on which it distributes the programming of the programming provider.

The first calendar quarter these rules will be effective will be April-June 2002.