Licensed to non-actual locations

[Cooper Fox]

is WHOM actually license to Mt Washington?  I guess I
never noticed.

I know that WPKQ is licensed to North Conway.


--- Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com> wrote:

> 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
> 



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