WASHINGTON (ABP) — Churches: Don't throw out your wireless microphones — yet.
With the shift of the nation's broadcast communications from analog to digital, early indications were that wireless microphones might become outdated or even illegal.
A Federal Communications Commission official said Feb. 17 that rules were still being written to address those issues, even though Feb. 17 was the original day the switch was to be made.
The national deadline for switching to digital broadcast is now June 12. Television stations in some smaller markets made the switch by the original deadline and there will be a "rolling" switchover, said the official who spoke only on condition that he not be identified.
He said rules governing the digital channels that microphones would use will be finalized "soon," which he defined as "in the coming days and weeks."
The background: Signals broadcast through the air occupy a specific band or channel. Digital signals can be compressed much more efficiently and they occupy less air space, or fewer channels. Consequently, a national switch to digital opens space, into which will slide new commercial and public digital services, including "interoperable" radios that will put fire, police, rescue and emergency response services on equipment through which they can talk with each other.
Recent large-scale disasters have exposed major difficulties in communication and coordination for response teams in ways that have proven catastrophic.
While television stations occupied the spectrum in channels 2-69, the digital compression is packing them into channels 2-51. Now new services and the interoperable systems will locate in channels 52-69, the empty space in which many church wireless-microphone systems operated. The government auctioned that air space for $20 billion.
Church wireless-microphone systems will need to find a home in channels 51 and below. That availability varies city by city, depending on what other services are there.
It actually is not the microphones that will be out of date, but the transmitters that send the signal to the amplifier. Some can be reconfigured. Others will be no good. Churches will generally have more flexibility if their sound-system equipment is new or high-end.
The equipment manufacturer should be able to help local-church audio crews, as well as help them with what channels are vacant in their areas, the FCC official said.
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Norman Jameson is editor of the Biblical Recorder, the newspaper of North Carolina Baptists.