Licensed to non-actual locations

[Dave Doherty]

Hi Scott-

I have an interesting case in the works that rests partially on the CDP 
issue. I can't comment on it now because it is "ongoing."  The attorney for 
our side says CDPs are accepted prima facie, and i've seen a number of cases 
to support that position.  It never hurts to include the local governance 
and economy stuff in support of the case, though.

I think you are right about Mt. Washington and Mt. Mitchell being licensed 
to Boston and Charlotte way back when.  Of course in those days if you had 
today's receivers and 1950's FM station counts, there would be hardly any 
interference and you could probably pick up both stations in Maryland!

I remember sitting in the ham shack at RPI late at night in the early '70s 
and listening to the NYC FMs 150 miles down the road.  Today, you'd be lucky 
to hear any of them.

I don't know what the principal community signal requirements were in the 
1950s. I think the 70dbu requirement was laid down in the mid 1960s.  But 
until the era of dereg, the studios had to be in the principal community. 
For WMTW there was no real community, so I have no idea how they handled it.

This brings to mind the case of the Upstate NY network of Class B stations 
licensed to Cherry Valley, Weathersfiled Township, and other places. My 
understanding is that there was only one studio for the five or six stations 
in that network.  When I was a teenager in Delmar, I was able to pick up the 
Cherry Valley station. It was a kind of background music format, as I 
recall. The owner or his estate eventually transferred the stations to CBN, 
who ran Christian programming, and eventually sold them when they made their 
commitment to TV and the CBN University project. They are now individual 
stations, and not all retained the religious affiliation that came with CBN.

Tuck is a kind of Catch-22. Cambridge already has a station, so it qualifies 
as a community. But it would be really hard to justify a move from 
Provincetown to Cambridge under 307(b) because Cambridge already has a 
station. The most convincing 307(b) showing includes the fact that the 
community does not have a local station, thus justifying the removal of the 
service from the current community.

Brooklyn is intriguing, but WKRB probably works against the case.

-d


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Fybush" <scott@fybush.com>
To: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>
Cc: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org>; <paul@derrynh.net>; 
<boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: Licensed to non-actual locations


> Dave Doherty wrote:
>
>> CDPs were meant to add substance to concentrations of population that 
>> were not incorporated in the traditional sense. They are accepted by the 
>> FCC as licensable communities without any further documentation. If the 
>> community is not a CDP and is not incorporated, then there are 
>> qualifications hoops to jump through - local governance, local school 
>> district, local police force, band existence of local businesses all help 
>> to establish a place as a licensable community.
>
> I'm not sure I agree that the FCC accepts a CDP as prima facie evidence 
> that a community exists for allocations purposes. My understanding (and I 
> am not a communications lawyer, or any type of lawyer at all!) is that 
> further documentation is still required, but that the presumption is 
> heavily in favor of licenseability if a community is a CDP.
>>
>> The peak of Mt. Washington is in Sargents, but the slopes include 
>> Crawfords (where the base station is located), Beans, Chandler, Thomson 
>> and Meserves, Cutts, and arguably several others. I doubt anybody 
>> actually lives in any of these "towns," and not one is included in the 
>> census places table. I am totally guessing here, but I suspect that these 
>> "towns" represent the original landholdings granted by the King or the 
>> territorial Governor way back when.
>>
>> So, could you license WHOM today to "Mount Washington?" Probably not. 
>> Gorham would a piece of cake, though.
>
> The standards were much, much looser in the very early days of FM. I'm 
> pretty sure that the Yankee FM on Mount Washington was actually licensed 
> as a "Boston" station at one point. I think the Mount Mitchell FM in North 
> Carolina may have been licensed as "Charlotte" around the same time.
>
> What's interesting to me is that the "Mount Washington" COL was allowed to 
> be reused when the current FM signal up there was licensed in 1958. A few 
> years later, and it would have to have been licensed somewhere else - 
> probably to Poland Spring, Maine, where its sister TV was licensed. As 
> WMTW-FM, it must have had a main-studio waiver to put its studios first in 
> Poland Spring and later in Portland, right?
>
>> Tuck showings are intended primarily to establish that a community is not 
>> a made-up entity within a larger community. It works mostly to prevent 
>> wholesale moves of stations from small communities to large metros. When 
>> you move a station to a new community, you can't propose to serve more 
>> than a particular percentage of any recognized urbanized area. As an 
>> example, you could not propose to move a station from, say, Provincetown 
>> to Norwood, if the station would serve more than half the Boston 
>> urbanized area.
>
> That's not quite my understanding. The "more than half the urbanized area" 
> test is what triggers the Tuck analysis. If you're proposing to move a 
> station from outside an urbanized area to an urbanized area (by way of a 
> COL change), the Tuck analysis is required when that 50% threshold is 
> reached. It's a multi-prong test that looks at factors like whether the 
> proposed COL has its own media (I've seen even local websites cited to 
> meet that prong of the test), whether people who live in the community 
> also work there (as little as 10% can fulfill that criterion), whether 
> there are businesses that identify themselves by the community's name, 
> whether the community has its own phone book, post office, local 
> fire/police/schools, and so on.
>
> One could argue, with quite a bit of validity, that the Tuck tests don't 
> really accomplish what they were meant to do (as Dave so ably lays it out 
> above) - I'd have no problem writing a convincing Tuck analysis that would 
> demonstrate that Cambridge, for instance, is a community separate from 
> Boston for allotment purposes. (Actually, that one's almost a gimme, since 
> the FCC has a presumption that any community that already has stations 
> licensed to it is therefore a licenseable community.)
>
> The one I've always wanted to try is Brooklyn - except for the fact that 
> it's governmentally part of New York City, it meets all the Tuck criteria 
> and then some. (And I could probably spin the existence of the Kings 
> County government and the Brooklyn borough government, not to mention 
> noncomm WKRB-FM Brooklyn, to get over that hump!)
>
> s
>
>