HELENA, Mont.—The TV translator about a mile from the eastern Montana town of Lavina will be removed later this year, its usefulness eroded in the age of cable, satellite service and now digital television.
When members of the board overseeing the Lavina translator looked ahead to the nation’s switch from analog TV to digital, they considered upgrading the translator to continue relaying programs. But late last year the board polled about 75 subscribers of the service, then shut it down. There had been only one vote to keep it.
“It was a sign of the times,” said Ellen Lehfeldt, board member for the Lavina TV District established in 1973. Satellite and cable services are used widely, leaving few if any people in Lavina entirely dependent on the translator to put television in their homes, said Lehfeldt, also the town clerk for the community of 234 residents 45 miles northwest of Billings.
The people who oversee translators scattered around the country have been looking at what to do with them as the federally mandated conversion to digital TV approaches. The Feb. 17 deadline may be congressionally extended to June 12.
Technical upgrades dovetailing with the digital conversion will allow translators to continue relaying programs from full-power stations, the kind typically affiliated with a major network, and there are government grants to cover at least some of the cost. Low-power television, which the Federal Communications Commission established in 1982 as a pathway for locally oriented TV in small communities, must eventually switch to digital broadcasting but there is no deadline. For translators, the low-powered conversion will mean more adaptation down the line.
Some of the country’s 4,700 translators are going dark rather than change.
About half the size of a microwave oven and often attached to towers, translators were authorized by the FCC in 1956. They receive a transmitted signal, convert the frequency, then relay the signal to TV viewers, who often are in remote places.
“Once you install a translator and have it in and running, it costs maybe $5 or $10 per year per home to keep it going,” said Byron St. Clair of the National Translator Association. “That provides an option for low-income people, or people who for whatever reason don’t want the large selection (of programming) provided by cable.”
Places with translators upgraded for this year’s digital conversion include northern Minnesota’s Koochiching County. A federal grant largely covered the bill of about $12,000, county coordinator Teresa Jaksa said, but the cost of a full upgrade would be much higher, the extent of further grant funding is unclear and whether to eventually do the work has not been decided, she said.
“We’ve got satellite and dishes, and stuff coming through computer lines and phone lines,” Jaksa said. “But in parts of our county, those satellite dishes aren’t working. There is a reason for us to keep” the translator.
Translators proliferated in the 1960s with “ad hoc groups gathering around someone’s kitchen table and running bake sales to buy equipment” so that places without adequate TV reception could get it, said St. Clair of the National Translator Association. Many of the country’s translators are in places with mountains and long distances between the cities where broadcasts originate.
“That’s what brought translators into being—communities 50 miles from the primary station and down in the valley, and just not getting the over-the-air signal,” St. Clair said from Denver.
Engineer John Rietz of Yuma, Colo., does translator work on the plains of northeastern Colorado and said upgrades for the digital conversion have been done there for about $1,500 each.
“It’s a lot of open space,” Rietz said. “It would be difficult to wire it with cable, except for the larger towns.”
In Nevada, engineer Adrienne Abbott of the Nevada Broadcasters Association finds a number of translator districts folding. Maintenance costs are a big consideration.
“Things like that (translators) are on a mountaintop someplace,” Abbott said from Carson City, Nev. “You’ve got to hire a snowcat, if one is available, or a helicopter and find an engineer to go up.”
In Montana’s Lavina, the fire department received the $7,000 or so in the translator district’s treasury and put the money into a reserve account, for use if there is difficulty paying down a $45,000 loan on a fire truck. Firefighters will provide the labor to remove the Lavina TV District translator and related apparatus this spring.
———
On the Net:
National Translator Association:
