The FCC has denied a petition for reconsideration of its dismissal of an application for a low-power FM station at UW-Milwaukee.
The proposed 49-Watt station on 90.1 would have been licensed to the university and would have carried “Prowl Radio” student programming. However, a typo in the application’s tech box caused the latitude of the planned transmitter site to be off by one degree, accidentally placing the site in Chicago.
The FCC dismissed the application earlier this year, stating that the proposed Chicago transmitter site failed to protect WMBI-FM/90.1 (Chicago).
The university’s student radio group then filed a petition for reconsideration arguing that, though the tech box contained the wrong coordinates, the correct coordinates were included in an attachment. It also cited previous instances when the FCC allowed LPFM applicants to correct typographical errors.
In an April 26 letter announcing its denial of the application, the FCC reiterated that its public notice announcing the LPFM filing window warned that applications that fail to protect existing stations would “be dismissed with no opportunity to correct the deficiency.” The letter says FCC staff only reviews the facilities specified in the tech box and does not review attachments to see if there is any discrepancy.
The letter also states that the practice of allowing applicants to correct coordinates predates a 2014 report and order in which the FCC said that, going forward, it would rely solely on tech box data and would not allow applicants to file an amendment to fix location errors.