It’s license renewal time – the FCC only reviews licenses now every 8 years (all at the same time). The FCC sending out renewal letters may be the spark that causes an AM station owner to decide not to renew the license.<\/p>\n
I’ve firmly believed that there are a significant number (in the 100s) of AM stations that ceased operations a long time ago, and just never got around to telling the FCC. The FCC is reactive – they respond to complaints, they don’t seem to go looking for problems. <\/p>\n
WPAY-AM just filed a “Stay Silent” request. It’s an 800 watt day\/night station on 1400 kHz, one of the handy-dandy small town frequencies from the era of Clear Channel AM stations (pre 1986). Its justification for going silent is the station is not economically viable, and is for sale. I believe it may have been a full service country music station.<\/p>\n
WPAY-AM is located in Portsmouth Ohio, and has no web site that I could find. Portsmouth is a town of about 20,000 people along the Ohio River. It used to be part of an AM\/FM pair – WPAY-FM was recently sold to a public Radio service in Cincinnati. Portsmouth has 1 other AM station, 2 music FM stations, a classical music station, and a religious FM station – and close enough to Cincinnati to hear WLW-AM – maybe even KDKA from Pittsburgh. That’s a lot of stations for 20,000 people in good times, even in the heyday of radio which no longer exists.<\/p>\n
So if you always wanted to own a radio station, keep your eyes open \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s license renewal time – the FCC only reviews licenses now every 8 years (all at the same time). The FCC sending out renewal letters may be the spark that causes an AM station owner to decide not to renew … Continue reading