Hey, I admit it. I have no idea whether unlicensed wireless gizmos can share TV broadcast spectrum without screwing up digital TV reception.

This, of course, is the central question in the great white spaces debate now before the FCC.

The broadcasters tell me it will. Allow millions of PDAs, wireless home networking routers and video game consoles to use the spectrum and TV pictures will start to pixilate and freeze up.

Imagine spending a couple grand on a new HD plasma, they say, only to find that it locks up every time the kid next door fires up a video game.

Microsoft, Google and other high-tech firms desperate for more spectrum so that computer gear can interconnect over the ether maintain that broadcasters are alarmists and spectrum hogs. All the devices will have built-in sensing circuitry that will guard against interference.

Both sides back up their claims with impressive-looking results of lab and field tests.

My problem is I’m not an electrical engineer. I can’t read those test results and make sense of them. And, even if I could, the reporter in me tells me to distrust them since they came from the proponents—not from disinterested, independent parties.

The only such testing so far was done by the FCC itself. It tested some prototype devices submitted the white spaces proponents and concluded that they didn't do the job and that they would cause interference.

But the white spaces proponents say that if you look a little deeper into the FCC data it shows that their devices really do work.

So, as I said, I don’t know what impact these devices would have on TV reception. If I were an FCC commissioner and had to vote today, I guess I would go with the conclusion of the FCC engineers and vote no, but with no certainty that I wasn’t, as the white spaces proponents claim, squandering many megahertz of valuable spectrum.

What kills me is the certainty with which groups like the Media Access Project, Freepress.net and the New America Foundation are backing the white spaces proponents, blindly accepting the high-tech industry data and treating the proceeding like a political campaign.

Freepress.net, an Orwellian group that favors government regulation of TV stations—that is, an unfree press—is encouraging its unthinking followers to send form e-mails to the FCC. The FCC docket is now filling up with them.

The New America Foundation, a “post-partisan” think tank of sorts, has been particularly vocal in support of the white spaces proponents. No surprise really. At least two of its board members stand to benefit financially from broadcast spectrum sharing—Eric Benhamou, chairman of 3com and Palm Inc., and Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google.

What about the Media Access Project? President Andy Schwartzman should know better. He’s been harping on broadcasters to do better for 30 years and knows communications law as well as any member of the communications bar.

But he understands the impact of unlicensed white spaces devices on TV no better than I.

I can only figure that Schwartzman has been opposing broadcasters for so long that it’s the natural (kneejerk?) thing to do. If the big bad broadcasters are for it, then MAP must be against it.

All three of these groups profess to be representing the interests of the low-income and minorities households. Oh, really? Is the principal communications need of a struggling immigrant family better access to the Internet for their $1,000 laptops or a TV set that works?

Broadcasters hold that high ground in this debate. They are the ones that serve the poor.

The NTIA estimates that there are 20 million homes—perhaps, 50 million people—that still rely solely on over-the-air broadcasting for TV. And many of them cannot afford cable or satellite.

Those old 26-inch analog TV sets that the rich folks are throwing away to make room for HDTV models will last another 10 years with a cheap D-to-A converter box. And they will deliver better sound and pictures than they ever did before.

NAF, Freepress.net and MAP ought to go to bed each night thinking about how they can preserve FREE over-the-air TV, instead of crawling into bed with a bunch of computer geeks who want to sell more toys to the rich.

They ought to make damn sure that they have a high-tech substitute for the ubiquitous broadcasting service before they go around advocating technology that could hobble it.

Even with a government $40 coupon, it is still going to cost consumers $20 or $30 to buy a converter box so their TV sets continue to work after the February 2009 cut-off date for analog broadcasting.

If Google is really concerned about the “digital divide,” it ought to start a program to bridge the gap between the government coupons and the purchase price of the converter boxes. Give poor families another $20 coupon.That would be a nice gesture.

The good news is that this is one of those issues that will yield to sound, independent testing. Perhaps the white spaces proponents and their allies are right. Perhaps you can share the broadcast spectrum and create all kind of new services without harm to broadcasting. We need to find out.

So here’s my advice for FCC’s Kevin Martin: Put the proceeding on hold and ask the NTIA to test the white spaces prototypes and the feasibility of broadcast spectrum sharing at its well-respected Institute for Telecommunications Sciences in Boulder, Colo.

In a recent interview, I asked NTIA Administrator John Kneuer if the NTIA labs is up to the challenge.

“Absolutely,” he said.

POSTSCRIPT: Rob Stoddard, the chief spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, took offense at my suggestion last week that the NCTA was grossly inflating the value of the donated time of its PSA campaign for its ongoing parental control and the upcoming DTV campaign.

Rob says that NCTA has taken its accounting of PSA time seriously, polling networks and MSO each month to find out how many times they ran spots and what value the time had.

Here are the latest totals on the parental control PSAs. Since May 2005, he says, 117 networks and 20 MSOs have contributed time for 12.7 million spots with a value of $360 million. “It’s not smoke and mirrors,” he says. “This is real value.”

Harry A. Jessell is the editor of TVNEWSDAY. If you have a comment on this column, please send him an e-mail at hajessell@tvnewsday.com.