In 2009, REC celebrated its 25th anniversary. On July 20, 1984 from what started as a simple phone line called "California Comments" has developed and changed over the past quarter century.

2009 was a pretty slow year for REC. Other than routine database maintenance, we pretty much took a back seat in the broadcast/LPFM department this year. Our friends at Prometheus Radio Project were very busy in getting legislation through that would increase the opportunities for new community broadcast stations across the country.

Today, the US House of Representatives passes the Local Community Radio Act.

The vote, which was supposed to take place on Tuesday, was delayed until Wednesday due to a lack of a quorum, a significant number of representatives to vote on the measure.

During the debate on the measure, Lee Terry (R-NE) recognizes the MITRE study and the fact that LPFM stations operating on third adjacent channels will not interfere with full power FM stations. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) explain the benefits of LPFM stations to women, minorities and local musicians.

Over the past few years, REC has helped provide data and support to those organizations who were involved in pushing this legislation through.

The FCC has set up a filing window from February 19 through February 26, 2010. This has been rescheduled from this December.

This window is restricted to locations that are on the Table of Allotments that have been reserved as non-commercial educational.

In 2003, the FCC opened a window to permit proponents to petition that a certain vacant non-reserved band allotment should be moved from commercial to non-commercial use.

In order to reserve a channel as non-commercial, the proponent must make a showing that there are no reserved band (88-92) channels could be used without interference to foreign broadcast stations or TV channel 6 stations.

There is also a third test where an allotment would be possible if the allotment would provide the first or second non-commercial educational (NCE) radio service to at least 10% of the population within the 60 dBu service contour of the proposed allotment and that population is at least 2,000 persons.

There are a few things you need to know about this window:

To prepare REC for a move to outside the Phoenix area, REC Networks will be using an outside hosting service for a majority of the website content of the REC properties. One service that can not be moved is the FCC/Canada broadcast database services. These will continue to be handled on an internal server. Going forward, all inquiries should go to cdbs.recnet.com . Requests going to recnet.com/cdbs will be redirected. There will be a period of time where either no or limited FCC/IC database services will be made available. We will announce that before it happens.

With what started as a Radio Shack answering machine on a single phone line that was connected on July 20, 1984, who would have ever thought where it would go.

REC Networks started as a telephone entertainment service called "California Comments". The name was a tribute to a segment from KFI radio several years prior under the same name where listeners would call a phone answering machine and then comments were played on the air later that day.