Point-to-Point

San Francisco longshoremen got a break last week. While waiting for jobs, they could loll around their homes, get their assignments from the radio. Hitherto they had had to keep telephoning hiring halls to find out what was up--their vital war work suffered from a lot of telephonic confusion.

The pleasant change was inaugurated by FCC, which relaxed one of its most cherished regulations, authorized San Francisco station KYA to use point-to-point transmission to dispatch the longshoremen. Point-to-point is a signal beamed directly at persons or places. FCC has hitherto forbidden broadcasters to use it because it invades the territory of telegraph, telephone and other communication companies.

The advisability of point-to-point appeared when the San Francisco telephone exchange, short of telephones and help, wanted to get rid of the longshoremen's telephone load (some 225 work gangs average 16 men apiece). Twice a day, for five minutes only, KYA now transmits such information as: "Gangs 15 and 75 report to pier 42 at 7 p.m."

Now that the air is broken, it seemed that FCC might extend the privilege to any section of the country that really needed it.

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