Page "Edwin Howard Armstrong" Paragraph 23

RCA began to lobby for a change in the law or FCC regulations that would prevent FM radios from becoming dominant.

By June 1945, the RCA had pushed the FCC hard on the allocation of electromagnetic frequencies for the fledgling television industry.

Although they denied wrongdoing, David Sarnoff and RCA managed to get the FCC to move the FM radio spectrum from 42-50 MHz, to 88-108 MHz, while getting new low-powered community television stations allocated to a new Channel 1 in the 44-50 MHz range.

In fairness to the FCC, the 42-50 MHz band was plagued by frequent tropospheric and E-layer stratospheric propagation which caused distant high powered stations to interfere with each other.

The problem becomes even more severe on a cyclical basis when sunspot levels reach a maximum every 11 years and lower VHF band signals below 50 MHz can travel across the Atlantic Ocean or from coast to coast within North America on occasion.

Sunspot levels were near their cyclical peak when the FCC reallocated FM in 1945.

The 88-108 MHz range is a technically better location for FM broadcast because it is less susceptible to this kind of frequent interference.

( Channel 1 eventually had to be deleted as well, with all TV broadcasts licensed at frequencies 54 MHz or higher, and the band is no longer widely used for emergency first responders either, those services having moved mostly to UHF.