So imagine you’re the owner of WABV-AM in Abbeville SC – a small town in rural SC near the Georgia border.\u00a0 Your 1000 watt AM station only can be heard in your small town of about 5000 people – even in the heyday of AM radio, that’s too small to have a viable station.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Since at least 2007,\u00a0 your transmitter has been broken and operating only at partial power, so you aren’t even making it out into the farm pastures around the city.<\/p>\n
What’s an owner to do?\u00a0\u00a0 Well, you could try to sell the station by putting it on your web site: but that’s not very creative.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n How about – let’s move the station to Nevada!<\/p>\n FCC auction letter<\/a><\/p>\n Back in 2004,\u00a0an AM station license\u00a0in Las Vegas became available via an auction.\u00a0\u00a0 Eight applications were made to build a station there – WABV proposed to change their “Community of License” to a suburb of Las Vegas (most of the TV and Radio stations are located on a mountain that overlooks the city).\u00a0\u00a0 They propose building an array of 9 AM towers and move their existing station about 1,800 miles.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n As of September 2009, the FCC couldn’t pick a winner, so decided to hold an auction among the 8.\u00a0\u00a0 It is now July 2011 and the FCC has not yet scheduled\u00a0AM Auction #84.<\/p>\n It’s important to know that in the\u00a0FCC bidding process, $1 is not\u00a0$1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you are a “special” type of person, you get a discount on your bid.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I may bid $900,000 for\u00a0a license and lose to someone else who bids $950,000 – but they only actually pay $300,000 because they are a gay disabled black native american hispanic female Friend of\u00a0Harry Reid who has no experience running a radio station –\u00a0and the Small Business\u00a0Administration will “loan” them the money for the down payment to borrow the\u00a0rest from\u00a0Goldman Sachs.\u00a0<\/p>\n This process is explained in this word document created by the FCC Advisory Committee on Diversity For Communications In The Digital Age<\/a><\/p>\n They can’t come right out and say “Give licenses to people based on their race”, so they obfuscate it with lawyer language like “People who have overcome obstacles like lack of access to credit”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So imagine you’re the owner of WABV-AM in Abbeville SC – a small town in rural SC near the Georgia border.\u00a0 Your 1000 watt AM station only can be heard in your small town of about 5000 people – even … Continue reading
http:\/\/www.wabv1590.info\/<\/a><\/p>\n