The just released Broadcast Station Totals as of June 30, 2013 report from the FCC showed little change in full power TV licenses from the previous quarter totals released in April. The number of UHF commercial TV licenses increased by one to 1,028 while non-commercial VHF and UHF and commercial VHF TV licenses remained unchanged at 107, 289 and 358 respectively.
Surprisingly, the number of VHF LPTV licenses dropped by 3 to 400 while the number of UHF LPTV increased by 5. This trend also carried over to TV translators. Over the last three months the number of UHF translator licenses increased by 6 to 2,930 and the number VHF translator licenses dropped by seven, to 1,146. The number of Class A TV licenses continued to drop, from 454 to 433 (almost 5 percent in three months!) while the number of low power TV licenses, which have secondary status, increased by two, from 1,967 to 1,969.
On the radio side, the total number commercial AM and FM licenses increased to 15,297. The number of AM licenses dropped by two while the number of FM commercial licenses increased by three, to 6606 and the number of FM educational licenses increased by 40 to 3,957. The number of low power FM licenses dropped by five to 797. The number of FM translators also dropped, by nine to 6,044.
For those people that had been using my TV Engineering Database spreadsheets to look up technical data on stations and extract statistics during the DTV Transition, I got a request to update the spreadsheet. A new spreadsheet, generated using the June 28, 2013 files from CDBS, is available at www.xmtr.com/fcc as tv20130628.xls (Excel/Office 2000 - 3MB), or compressed in a smaller zip file as tv20130628.zip.
