More Air for FM?

To most people, FM--"staticless radio" --is still a mysterious what-is-it. In Washington last week, it was a red-hot issue: should FM be dispossessed and its airways address be changed from its present quarters at 42-to-50 megacycles to another place way up at 84-to-102 megacycles?

No, said RCA, NBC, Zenith, General Electric, Stromberg-Carlson, FM Broadcasters Inc.--the move to a higher band might delay FM's postwar development, might make the present 500,000 FM sets useless, boost the price of new receiving sets, necessitate equipment changes.

Yes, said FCC, Philco, Crosley, CBS, the Blue Network, the Cowles Broadcasting Co.--the move ought to be made to avoid sunspot interference predicted a few years hence.

Major Edwin Howard Armstrong, the bald, monolithic professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University who perfected FM, proposed a compromise--just a short move next door, say, to a 48-to-66 band. Major Armstrong probably knows more than any other man alive about FM, which is about as easy to understand at first glance as a menu written in Sanskrit. Beginners might start with some of the following facts:

FM demands special sending equipment, a special receiver. The benefits to the listener are an absence of static, a unique fidelity of tone. Standard broadcasting keeps the frequency of its radio waves constant, varies the power; FM varies the frequency, keeps the power constant. Static is a series of power variations--and FM receivers "level off" the variations. Each FM station enjoys a channel 20 times as wide as standard broadcasting's ten megacycles, which is one of the reasons for the fidelity of tone. High notes are rapid vibrations, and the most rapid demand wider channels than standard broadcasting uses.

FCC, which presumably does understand FM, listened to the arguments for three days, then called a secret session for next week. There, under the War Department's watchful eye, a Signal Corps expert and the industry's experts will get together to decide on FM's next move.

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