Central Minnesota Station Owners Building New FM on North Shore

A group of broadcasters from central Minnesota is in the process of building a new FM station on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Wireless LLC won the allotment for 96.9 in Grand Marais in recent FCC auction. A long-form application shows that Wireless LLC is 50% owned by Lucas Carpenter’s Crystal Media Group and 50% by Dennis Carpenter and Ellen Ward’s Starcom.

Crystal Media Group owns two stations in Albany, while Starcom owns a low-power TV station in St. Cloud and has a 25% interest in radio stations in Elk River and Princeton.

The planned station on 96.9 will transmit from Grand Marais with 25.5kW/209m (class C2), which is an upgrade from the class C3 allotment. The allotment had previously been for class C from Grand Portage; a previous permittee moved it to Grand Marais but did not sign it on.

It will be the second commercial FM station in Grand Marais, where Shire & Shore Communications relaunched WFNX/95.3 as “The Otter” with a broad Adult Alternative format earlier this year. The community is also home to WTIP/90.7, which has a large amount of local news and community programming, as well as two Minnesota Public Radio transmitters.

Cook County has a population of about 5,600.