“Saving” AM radio status

Last Friday was the Day 1 for AM station license holders to apply to add an FM Translator (“FX” in FCC jargon) to rebroadcast AM stations on the FM band at up to 250 watts – that will reach perhaps 15 miles depending on terrain and the height of the antenna,

Because of the low power and expectations, FX doesn’t require a big tower and FAA approval or “land use” nazi approval. A new FM translator costs less than $5000 and the antenna can be mounted on a pole on the roof. Especially for AM stations that have to turn off the transmitter at sunset or turn the power down to 4 watts, having their signal on FM at night is a lifesaver, especially during winter when sunset occurs before the evening rush hour in parts of the country.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (R) was the main advocate for Friday’s change and declared it a success, with “almost” 1 in 10 AM stations applying for an FX license.

Now for a little context about the success story. FX for AM stations is not new. It was authorized about three years ago by the prior FCC Chairman. There is a glut of unused FX licenses released last year after the FCC ended their 10 year old block on processing FX applications.

As of today, there are 4,679 licensed AM stations in the United States. Of those, 1,089 already have a functioning FX translator in operation – that’s a little under one in 4. About 700 AM stations are either officially silent or “Vewy quiet” (my designation that I doubt they are functioning) or have no presence on the Internet.

So as of last Thursday, there were about 2,800 functioning AM stations without an FM translator. The biggest obstacle is the AM station needs to be in a city that has a “free” FM frequency above 92 MHz – few major cities have any. Because FX has a smaller footprint, a few may be squeezed in between existing FM stations with paying for engineering work to make sure it won’t interfere with existing FM stations. Most however will be in rural flyover country.

What changed on Friday was permission to move an existing FX license (probably currently unused) up to 250 miles as long as there is an open frequency, the AM station commits to operating it for 4 years and it meets the other technical requirements.

How many FX licenses are there to buy?

+----------+-----------+
| count(*) | licstatus |
+----------+-----------+
|       20 | -         |
|      874 | APP       |
|     1978 | CP        |
|     6311 | LIC       |
|        1 | PRO       |
|       32 | SOP       |
+----------+-----------+

APP = Application received – the FCC awarded a license but has not yet approved the proposed transmitter location
CP = Construction Permit – FCC has authorized the FX to be built. The owner has three years to get on the air. Since installing an FX is inexpensive and takes only a few days, it is safe to assume most of those will never be built as proposed – they are held by speculators
LIC = Licensed and operating – the 5,300 that are not already in use on AM are being used for their original purpose (filling in coverage gaps in hilly areas or non commercial operations like Public Radio or religious broadcasters) or rebroadcasting FM HD 2/3 channels, a recent and rapidly growing option for major radio operators to create new FM stations beyond their existing ownership limits.

The fairly obvious question with a fairly obvious answer – if the objective is to save AM radio, why didn’t the FCC just offer new FX licenses for free to qualifying AM stations, rather than creating a windfall for speculators who never had an intent to actually run a radio station?