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February 26, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR JOAN LUSK IN
RI
I've put my brother the radio/TV/satellite dish/electronics
nut on
this one, but even he doesn't know. I've searched on "FM
history
frequency allocation" and similar words without getting
a straight
answer. I did find that early in the history of radio stations
did
end in even-tenths frequencies (many stations have posted
their own
histories on the web.) When commercial TV was starting out,
the
government assigned a band of frequencies to TV, and at the
same time
moved FM radio out of that band to higher frequencies. At
that point
the stations seem to have been assigned odd-tenths frequencies.
I
found some regulations in Texas and the UK stating that stations
shouldn't be closer than 200 kHz (0.2 MHz)in frequency, so
if one was
odd-tenths they'd all be odd, to fill up the available band.
But I
didn't find out who made that decision. It's clearly an arbitrary
choice.
Moving the FM band made every existing FM receiver instantly
obsolete. At least now the advent of digital TV is coming
more
gradually!
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