Syracuse Community Radio

Syracuse Community Radio is involved in a complicated endeavor that frequently prompts a lot of good questions about the process. As often as we can, we'll try to incorporate this information into the regular portion of this website, leaving this page to the questions that don't easily fit categorization. If you have a question about our project that you don't see clearly addressed on this website, feel free to email us and if it strikes us as a question that also belongs here, we'll happily add it. We also encourage you to ask any questions you have, regardless if you think them awkward or not, because this a community enabling project that needs to include even the biggest skeptics.

There are many reasons for the delay. One problem is high interest. The FCC received approximately 30,000 inquiries in 2007 alone from groups seeking to start new radio broadcast stations. This enormously strains the limited resources of the same agency that also regulates television and cellular telephone service. And this is also why every time the FCC creates an opportunity for new applications, they get deluged. For example, in March 2003 the FCC opened up a one week filing window for FM translators (which rebroadcast existing FM stations on another frequency over small areas) on the commercial FM radio band and received 13,345 applications, which they are still struggling to process. In October 2007, they opened up another one week filing window for non-commercial educational (NCE) stations and received 3,493 applications (101 in New York State alone), which is expected to take quite some time to process. SCR applied in both of these windows and will apply for every other upcoming opportunity where it is eligible.

As the FCC has become buried deep in all these applications for new radio facilities, they have also been involved in a lot of serious litigation over the methods they've used for processing applications and that has slowed things down as well. To give you some idea, WEOS in Geneva NY applied back in April 1997 to use 90.1 FM in the Ithaca area and was finally approved in May 2007 -- a wait of 10+ years. And unfortunately, this was not an unusual situation. Between the lawsuits and the serious backlogs, the FCC has been accepting new applications on a very limited basis. The filing window for new NCE stations in October 2007 was the first opportunity to file for these since February 2000 -- a wait of 7+ years.

Fortunately, the FCC is continually finding new ways to speed up the process that seem to be working. Like all applications must now be electronically filed, which helps a lot on both ends, though probably a lot more on the FCC side. All the litigation over the new points system for non-commercial educational applications seems to be finally concluded. As one example of the new FCC approach, they are now retroactively forcing applicants from the March 2003 translator window (dubbed by many the "Great Translator Invasion") to choose 10 applications only and have the rest dismissed, which will cut the applicant pool of 13,345 by over half. And they are promising after that major reduction to aggressively process the remaining applications in 2008, which will expedite our two translator applications. The FCC is also very actively processing the 3,493 NCE applications from October 2007, though the SCR application appears to be stuck near the end of the line on that, so they might not get to ours until 2009.

Couple of problems with that. First and foremost, there are no LPFM frequences available for Syracuse and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Even with the proposed liberalization of the LPFM spacing rules, it appears at best to open up opportunities only on the fringes of Onondaga County, far from the City of Syracuse, which is our primary focus. And since LPFM stations are limited to 100 watts, unless an LPFM was located in the center of Syracuse like WJPZ ("Z89"), it would not put a listenable signal over the City of Syracuse. And there are NO current proposals for LPFM that would allow that to happen. Plus, current rules prohibit full power FM stations from applying for LPFM stations, so we'd be forced to give up our other efforts. Lastly, we are friends with LPFM stations all around the country and we've watched with extreme alarm as many of them have been battling severe encroachment by full power stations that have threatened to put many of them off the air. While the FCC is working diligently to address this problem, we find the prospect of trading our other efforts for a precarious existence on LPFM to be scary at best.

We have certainly looked into AM radio, but the process is no simpler than for FM and the end result is clearly inferior, especially for music programming. In fact, there are getting to be so many unprofitable AM stations that many owners are either abandoning or donating them to get away from the expense of operating them. While being the recipient of such a gift sounds desirable, it generally has been more of a curse than a blessing, as the older AM facilities that are typically involved in these transactions are energy hogs that rack up very high utility bills. Plus, there have been no local efforts yet to donate an AM station, though we would obviously very seriously consider any such future offer, were it to occur.