Following technical failures and reports of unprecedented filing demand, the Federal Communications Commission has extended the deadline for the ongoing noncommercial educational FM translator window to Nov. 23.
(Read the commission’s public notice.)
Acknowledging Thursday’s technical issues with its Licensing and Management System, the Media Bureau announced that the filing deadline is now Monday, Nov. 23 at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. The window was originally scheduled to close on Nov. 17.
LMS was offline for approximately seven hours on Thursday, preventing the public and broadcast licensees from viewing or filing applications across all radio and television services.
As Radio World reported, the outage followed a data leak when the window opened on Wednesday morning that exposed confidential translator filings in LMS, contrary to commission policy. Michelle Bradley of REC Networks subsequently discovered two additional workarounds that allowed users to view pending applications before the system was taken down.
Bradley wrote a post-mortem analysis of the data leak we encourage you to check out.
Earlier in the week, eight noncommercial broadcast and technical assistance organizations sent a joint request asking the commission to extend the deadline by at least a week, citing severe consulting backlogs and technical strain.
The commission noted that the filing freeze on reserved-band and non-reserved-band minor modification applications for low-power FM, FM translator and FM booster stations will remain in effect through the close of the extended window on Nov. 23.
“Applications submitted after the deadline will be dismissed without further consideration,” the Media Bureau stated in its public notice.
The bureau also confirmed that the snapshot date for establishing point totals and comparing mutually exclusive applications will shift to match the revised Nov. 23 closing deadline. All other application procedures and instructions established for the filing window remain unchanged.
Originally, the window was to be held in August. However, the commission postponed it to November after receiving concerns from groups such as College Broadcasters Inc. that the late summer timeframe would be not conducive to the schedules of many places of higher education.
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