The FCC has sent a warning to the purported operators of a pirate radio station to cease operations. Where this buccaneer is may surprise some.
While South Florida, Boston and the City of New York have long been hubs of unlicensed FM radio station operations, a Notice of Illegal Pirate Radio Broadcasting has been issued to Silver Randall and Cynthia DiCarlo, successor co-trustees of the owners of a property located at 681 W. Jackson Street in Painesville, Ohio.
That’s a residential home on a leafy street in a town to the far northeast of Cleveland.
From here, FCC Enforcement Bureau field agents based in Columbia, Md., found the point of origin for unlicensed broadcasts at 99.1 MHz on both June 22, 2023 and July 14, 2023.
The agents traveled from Howard County, Md., to Northeast Ohio after getting a complaint. Now, nearly 1 1/2 years later, the property owner is getting a warning to cut the illegal broadcasts within 10 days of the December 23 letter or risk a fine.
The 99.1 MHz frequency is reserved in the Cleveland market for W256BT, a 250-watt FM translator that is home to a “Throwback” Classic Hip-Hop format operated by the nation’s No. 1 owner of broadcast stations — iHeartMedia.
