If you go from Salt Lake City and head northeast, you’ll reach a rural pocket of Wyoming with just a handful of radio stations available to listeners.
Thanks to a petition from one broadcast company, the FCC has just OK’d the expansion of licensed FM stations serving this area by adjusting its FM table of allotments.
With a population of 142, Cora, Wyoming, sits some eight miles from the town of Pinedale — and 240 miles from the northern tip of the Salt Lake City-Ogden-Provo metropolitan area.
The closest AM radio station is 52 miles away.
The stations one can pick up on the FM dial are a local noncomm non-profit station, an NPR Member Station affiliated with the University of Wyoming, two commercial Country stations, and an affiliate of Christian Talk and Teaching noncomm Pilgrim Radio.
Locals will soon be able to add another commercial FM station to the mix, as the Commission adopted on Thursday an expansion of the FM table of allotments in a petition for rulemaking filed by Wind River Broadcasting.
With no counterproposals or other comments in response to a NPRM seeking comment on the company’s petition, the FCC granted it.
As a result, Cora is getting its first radio station—a Class C2 FM at 102.7 MHz.
For Wind River, it’s an entry into the Pinedale area that was first sought in August 2017.
Blake Coble is President of Wind River, and has experience in automotive dealership operations — a likely key for local radio ad sales success.
With the new radio station that’s been approved for Cora and Pinedale, Wind River will compete against Robert Rule’s Rule Communications and Wagonwheel Communications.
