A noncommercial licensee saw its opportunity to build an educational FM station dashed after it failed to build its facility on time with the antenna it originally specified, so said the Federal Communications Commission.
More than seven years ago, the FCC Audio Division granted an application for a construction permit for a new NCE FM station in San Simeon, Calif., to Centro Cristiana Vida Abundante (eventually to be KSIY). The licensee was given a permit expiration of March 2013 to finalize construction; in February of that year, CCVA filed an application to modify its construction permit so that it could position its directional antenna higher while reducing its effective radiated power.
In its March modification application, CCVA said it had installed a nondirectional antenna in lieu of the original authorized directional antenna, which CCVA believed was allowed under the FCC rules, the FCC said in a letter to the organization on Nov. 22.
But events took a turn when public radio station KCBX(FM) in San Luis Obispo objected. KCBX told the FCC that the KSIY facility was not constructed in a timely manner and had failed to commence operations before its CP expired.
After investigating the matter, the Audio Division found that even though an antenna can be replaced from the one specified in an original application, as CCVA had proposed to do in this case, a licensee cannot replace the original directional antenna authorized in its original permit with an omnidirectional antenna.
As a result, CCVA failed to complete construction by the March 2013 permit expiration date with the original, approved antenna type. Under FCC Rules, a construction permit is automatically forfeited if the station is not ready for operation within the specified time period. And so as a result, the commission outright dismissed the license application for KSIY and deleted the call letters.
It was not immediately clear what contributed to the gap in publicly released information on this matter. The last public request from the FCC for more information from CCVA was issued in January 2014; the dismissal of the application was announced in November 2017.
