Word: fcc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three years ago Maine's salty Republican Senator Wallace Humphrey White Jr., grandfather of FCC, took a squint at the nation's ethereal affairs, promptly clamored loudly for a Senate investigation of radio networks and of his grandchild. But before Senate guns could be trained on the agency, Franklin Roosevelt whisked lively little Trouble Shooter Frank Ramsay McNinch of the Federal Power Commission to the chairmanship of FCC. Chairman McNinch cut out a lot of FCC deadwood, then began an investigation of the whole radio industry...
...Soon FCC findings on super power set 50 Kw. as the maximum strength for commercial transmission. Not so rapid was the progress of FCC's monopoly-investigating committee, first presided over by Chairman McNinch, later by fat-jowled, cautious Thaddeus Harold Brown, Republican wheel horse of the Commission. Starting in November 1938, with NBC's David Sarnoff as its first witness, the committee rambled on until the following May. Then it began to brood. Not until last week did it make known the results of its inquiry. They were enough to send a network tycoon gibbering...
...some 5,000 regularly worked foreign stations. For the most part their conversations with alien hams consisted of trivia about the weather, eclectic gossip of tubes and frequencies. When war came, most amateurs subscribed to a self-imposed neutrality code, foreswore all contacts with hams in Europe. Last week FCC further restricted their activities, forbade them to signal any foreign hams at all. Prohibited also was the use of any portable transmitter capable of sending messages "farther than the line of sight." Violators face immediate loss of license and up to $500 fine...
...FCC will enforce this new regulation through its 27 offices and seven monitor stations throughout the country. With no alien operator among the hams, and 7,500 of them in the Naval Communication Reserve and the Army Amateur Radio System, it is unlikely that FCC suspects any strong fifth-column virus in their ranks. Largely precautionary, FCC's new ruling is designed to make quisling hams stand out boldly if they attempt any aerial shenanigans with Governments abroad...
Still to be solved by FCC is the problem of preventing foreign hams from getting information through local amateurs. A seemingly innocent conversation from the mainland to Hawaii might conceivably contain a wealth of information for a listener in Tokyo...