It serves Monmouth and Middlesex Counties in Northern New Jersey, but in many ways has become the lone source of Country music for listeners on the left bank of the Hudson River who have no local radio station to tune to for tunes from such artists as Ella Langley, Morgan Wallen, Kip Moore and Megan Moroney.
That’s why the FCC’s approval of an FM translator in the City of New York on the frequency this Press Communications FM uses worried the company so much that it asked the Commission to reconsider that decision. It did — and Family Stations’ modification of the tiny FM has been unapproved.
The matter involves W292FV, at 106.3 MHz. On October 25, 2024, the Commission granted a modification application to the FM translator allowing it to shift its power output from 2 watts to 5 watts. The transmitter, however, was upped to 348 feet from 190 feet, and from a site in The Bronx.
This saw a relocation from New Rochelle, to the northeast. While this may have seem minor to most observers, Press filed an opposition, on the grounds that predicted co-channel interference as a result of the move to its full-power Class A WKMK-FM in Eatontown, N.J.
How would this be possible, if W292FV’s signal only scraped the Garden State and, at that, towns such as Fort Lee and Englewood, as the WKMK signal contour doesn’t extend to Fort Lee?
Maps alone don’t tell the story, especially given the topography of the New York Tri-State Area. WKMK can easily be heard across Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, while it reaches well into Somerset and Union Counties, where it is rated in Nielsen Audio’s monthly reports for the Middlesex market. In its Modification Objection, Press included a map showing a potential “zone of interference” within WKMK’s 45 dBu signal strength contour that covers an estimated 3.9 million people across the greater New York metropolitan area. Press also included the names, addresses, and locations of 15 WKMK listeners within this interference zone and stated that it was in the process of obtaining signed declarations from these listeners.
Family Stations, which used the facility on the frequency used by now-defunct WVIP-FM in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., to rebroadcast its WFME-AM 1560 (the onetime WQEW and WQXR-AM), agreed to take the power down from 5 watts to a mere 0.5 watts.
That still didn’t please Press, which argued that this was problematic: 1 watt is the lowest Effective Radiated Power (ERP) authorized for a FM translator, and that would still interfere with WKMK’s 45 dBu contour.
Meanwhile, timing played a factor that Press argued was unfair to the licensee, stating that Family had “put the FCC in the position of having to quickly act on the application to prevent the W292FV license from expiring while leaving Press with only 2 days to document interference claims under Section 74.1204(f).”
That led to more back and forth with the FCC from Family Stations and Press, as all of the facts presented were weighed.
“Upon engineering review of the Petition, we find Press has satisfied the requirements of sections 74.1204(f) and 74.1201(k) and established that interference was predicted to occur to WKMK at the time the Petition was filed (and presumably has been actually occurring since the grant of the License Application),” Audio Division Chief Al Shuldiner determined.
This rescinded the grant of the modification and license applications, returned the modification application to pending status, and dismissed a license application as moot.
