A Mississippi non-profit has been unable to convince the FCC to accept its application from the 2023 LPFM window.
This is one in a series of recent dismissals that followed a similar pattern.
Renew Taylorsville desired to broadcast on 93.5 FM in Taylorsville, Miss. The organization said it wanted to air educational, religious and moral instruction to the area.
The antenna listed on its application would be located some 27 miles west of Taylorsville, putting it much closer to the Jackson market. This appears to be a glaring misplacement on the non-profit’s part.
The commission rejected Renew’s application for violating same-channel spacing requirements to WHJT(FM) Kearney Park, Miss. Its proposed antenna site was about 42 miles from WHJT. The same-channel spacing requirement is around 48 miles.
The application also violated second-adjacent spacing requirements to 93.9 WJAI(FM) Pearl, Miss. The second-adjacent requirement is at least 25 miles while its proposed antenna was just under 20 miles away from WJAI. Both WHJT and WJAI serve Jackson.
In late January, Renew asked the commission to reconsider. It said a simple data entry on the part of its engineer had resulted in the application’s short-spacings. It provided new coordinates for what it claimed would be a “minor amendment” that would make its application a singleton. The updated coordinates would place its antenna within the town limits of Taylorsville.
But as in other cases, the commission didn’t accept the data entry argument as grounds to change the outcome. It said “any application submitted during an LPFM filing window that fails to meet its spacing requirements will be dismissed without opportunity to amend.”
It also reiterated that “typographical error claims” cannot be used to justify filing an amendment that would otherwise not be merited.
Renew Taylorsville attempted to file another amendment to its application at the end of February, seeking to make changes that made its application “fully compliant.” But that amendment came after the expiration of the 30-day window following the FCC’s dismissal.
Several LPFM applications in the 2023 window now have succumbed to short-spacing violations that appear to have been avoidable, a reminder for applicants to take care to plot the locations of the transmitter coordinates on their applications before submitting them.
