The owner of WHDT, a digital-only station in the West Palm Beach, Fla., market asked the FCC today to force the local Comcast cable system to resume carriage of the station, contending that Comcast had dropped the station last fall without giving the required 30-day notice to subscribers, municipal officials and the station itself.

He says the FCC should require Comcast to restore the channel immediately, while considering the underlying dispute over whether WHDT is entitled to carriage under the must-carry rules.

“Comcast's illegal termination has caused WHDT to lose access to more than 98 percent of its pre-deletion households, with a corresponding decrease in advertising revenue,” owner Guenter Marksteiner says in one of two complementary petitions.

“Without immediate carriage reinstatement, WHDT may not remain a viable station,” he adds.

Comcast dropped WHDT from its lineup on Oct. 11, 2007, even though the station has had must-carry status since 2002, claiming that the station was no longer providing a good, over-the-air signal to its headend as required by the must-carry rules.

The system posted a slide on WHDT's former cable channel saying that the station was “not transmitting at this time.”

But that was not true, Marsteiner says. Except for periodic maintenance, WHDT never stopped transmitting or delivering a good signal to Comcast, he says.

The signal is now available to Comcast via a digital translator, he says.

The problem is Comcast flatly refuses to accept signal delivery via translator, even though the FCC has specifically ruled that such delivery is acceptable, he says.

Marksteiner believes he may have triggers Comcast's action when he requested that the system WHDT to its HD tier. Two days later, Comcast drops the signal, he says. "It could have been a coincidence, right?"

WHDT is an unusual independent station, producing much of programming in HD in its own studio.

In pressing his case for immediate action, Marksteiner cites a 2006 case in which the NFL Network alleged to the FCC that Time Warner Cable had dropped the network without providing 30-day notice.

Just two days later, Marksteiner says, the FCC ordered Time Warner to restore the network while the agency sorted out the outlying dispute.

“The harm to WHDT and its viewers is far greater than the relative harm to the NFL Network from Time Warner's premature termination,” Marksteiner says.

Comcast's refusal to carry WHDT is an “opportunistic and hostile attempt to exploit the digital transition to force a small, local independent broadcaster off the air, and thereby reclaim system capacity for use by national programming in which Comcast has a greater stake,” he claims.