A Dayton OH station looking to clear out of the upper reaches of the current television spectrum band had its proposal challenged by another station in Fort Wayne IN.
The Dayton station is owned is WKEF-TV, owned by Sinclair. The challenging station is Granite’s WISE-TV. The sale of WISE-TV to Quincy Newspapers, along with other properties, is pending.
WKEF is located on Channel 51 – adjacent to the lower 700 MHz which is already in the hands of wireless services. The FCC has been allowing stations to vacate such channels in advance of the incentive auction to enable wireless companies to build out that spectrum.
The target for WKEF is Channel 18, where WISE-TV is resident.
Sinclair’s technical testimony predicted that the channel would interfere with 0.4871% of WISE’s population, safely under the FCC’s limit of 0.5%.
Granite used an alternate method to calculate interference and came up 0.6818% of its covered population.
Granite’s methodology utilized a terrain profile, which Sinclair successfully argued is not mentioned in the rules. It therefore prevailed on that count. Further, the FCC is very much in favor of clearing out high-channel television stations as soon as possible.
So the channel change is granted, and the move, which required publication in the Federal Register before taking effect, while be executed as expeditiously as possible.
