TechnoBabble

For all of the issues that we may have here in the Triad over the Digital Transition (and they are very few so far, thank goodness), many of the good people along the Front Range in Colorado have just started receiving over the air digital signals for the first time within the last week. "But how can that be?" you ask. Digital TV has been around for a while now.

It all started in 1998 when several of the Denver TV stations decided to build one tower to house their digital antennas on Lookout Mountain, where their separate analog antennas are located. A group of homeowners at the foot of the mountain decided that it wasn't safe or healthy to build this new tower. No matter that the top of Lookout Mountain has been home to radio and TV transmitters for better than 60 years while the homeowners are newcomers in the last 20 years or so. One of the homeowners, a lawyer, starts a NIMBY group called CARE (Canyon Area Residents for the Environment) and begins an 8 year battle against the TV stations and in effect, depriving residents of the surrounding area, free over the air digital TV because the stations can't build the new tower. 

The list of things that happened in those 8 years is just amazing. Everything from blackmailing the county commissioners with the threat of being voted out, and then when they couldn't find any legal justification to deny the tower going on a nasty campaign that got supporters on the county commissioners to "reexamine the case" and with false information to pull the approval, to getting court judges to side with them and not look at the law, to hiring "experts" on RF radiation and then coming up with some amazing "studies" that would scare the pants off of anyone who didn't know better and getting the town of Golden to attempt a non corporate limit annexation to condemn the property as "public lands" to keep the tower from being built. The whole time, the rest of the country was getting digital over the air free television, while the Denver area people waited, the only market in the nation to do so.

Over time, the usual environmental wackos that seem to populate Colorado and even the print media (no friends of the electronic media I can tell you) turned against the group, now publically dubbed  "sCARE" by most people in the area for all the "alarming health hazard data" the group had "dug up" for their arguments. Truth is, had ANY of that stuff been true, we ALL would be dead just because of cell phone RF radiation at our heads, never mind a broadcast tower on a mountain top that was thousands of feet above everyone's head. So in the end, what did it take to resolve the issue? The proverbial "Act of Congress." Literally.

On the last day that Congress was in session before the Christmas break of 2006, the Senators and Representatives of Colorado got both houses of Congress to pass a bill that stated anyone who had a valid permit from the FCC to build a TV transmitter facility on Lookout Mountain, could and local authorities could not stop it because of the "public good" clause in the law. I.E, federal trumps local and no judge was willing to try to overturn it. Of course CARE and their puppet governments of Jefferson County Commissioners and the town of Golden screamed bloody murder. This was a local matter and Congress had no legal authority to step into this. Of course, that wasn't correct. The digital transition is a federal mandate and the stations were doing what they were told to do and with time running out, the stations had to start construction if they wanted to make the February 17, 2009 date and not deprive Colorado citizens of free over the air television after the analog shutdown. Even Congress knew which side of their bread was buttered on with this issue. In an attempt to save face, CARE put on a dog and pony show to Washington saying how they were going to take the government back for the people by confronting the lawmakers, showing them how unfair they had been but they only got a cold shoulder from Washington. No one back home even cared.

Fastforward to April 11th of this year. The new tower comes alive when KCNC, KTVD, KUSA and KMGH all began full power digital broadcasting. Their respective old analog towers will be removed from the mountain when analog broadcasts cease February 17, 2009 removing 4 towers from the mountain with a net loss of 3 towers, making the mountain top less of an eye soar and reducing the RF radiation from the mountain.

As for CARE? The lawyer who started the group continues to fight on. CARE has now moved on to other mountain tops in the area to try and stop towers from being built on them to little avail or fanfare. Very sad actually. Concerned citizenry run amuck.

So it would seem no matter how bad things are in your own backyard, someone else has it a lot worse. We can be thankful. I guess?

If you are interested in this, check out http://www.hdtvcolorado.com the tower web page. It has pictures and links to past newspaper articles on the fight for the tower.