After long wait, one Las Vegas station — shazam! — becomes two
Years after discovering it could squeeze another FM channel into the Las Vegas airwaves, Nevada Public Radio will finally be able to do it this fall.
Classical music fans will get a new station of their own, KCNV, and KNPR will switch to all-news/talk.
It’s happening because the FCC let Nevada Public Radio juggle frequencies, scooching KNPR from 89.5 to 88.9 MHz and making room for a sister station at 89.7.
Officials say they’ll start using the new channels sometime between October and December, when they’re ready with transmitters and, they hope, new local news/talk programming. [After publication of this article, the stations took their positions on the FM band on Oct. 31.]
The station has commitments for $1.7 million of the expected $3.3 million cost, says Lamar Marchese, g.m. It’s also seeking CPB aid to launch a new daily hour of local public affairs programming when the new KNPR signs on. If fundraising flags, the station can borrow against a $1 million line of credit at a local bank, which it arranged as a backup.
To avoid interference with other stations and win FCC approval, both stations
will broadcast from Mt. Potosi, southwest of Las Vegas. Because the new site
is twice as high as KNPR’s present site, it gives the news station 20,000
more potential listeners in the direction of the California border, Marchese
estimates. The classical station will have a much weaker transmitter than
KNPR but will cover the Las Vegas area well because the antenna site is so
high.
“We’ve been working on this, it seems like forever,” says
Marchese.
The FM radio band in Las Vegas was much emptier when KNPR went on the air in 1980, he recalls. No one knew how the noncommercial frequencies at the low end of the band would fill out, or was much concerned about packing in channels in the most efficient way.
By the early 1990s, KNPR’s listeners were clamoring both for more
news and more classical music. Consulting engineers spotted the opportunity
to shift frequencies and shoehorn another station into the band. But when
the station proposed the changes to the FCC in 1996, a religious broadcaster
called Southern Nevada Educational Broadcasters filed a competing application—sentencing
the project to a six-year delay. The case fell into a backlog of hundreds
of similar channel competitions because the FCC hadn’t figured out how
to decide disputes involving noncommercial applicants.
KNPR escaped the logjam in 2001 by negotiating with the other applicant, who
was able to move to another channel. KNPR paid its engineering and legal fees
for the change of plans, according to Marchese. The FCC okayed construction
permits last year.
Juggling frequencies to create a new channel was far cheaper than buying an AM channel, as Colorado Public Radio did in Denver. “If you can do it, it’s definitely the way to go,” says Marchese.
It won’t work everywhere, however. Pubradio’s study of the FM band in Seattle several years ago found no great opportunities, says Doug Vernier, a retired pubradio manager who heads the engineering firm V-Soft Communications in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Moving two stations in Las Vegas is far easier than juggling 30 in Seattle’s crowded band, Vernier observes. In some cases, the frequency position of a low-power school station could block improvements for two or more other stations. Vernier also worked on the Las Vegas case years ago.
Frequency changes that admit new channels are rare in public radio but more common in commercial radio, where financial incentives are large, Vernier notes.
The creation of two specialized channels at Nevada Public Radio is a major step in narrowing its formats. It already dropped jazz in the mid-1990s and left that format to neighboring KUNV, said Program Director Flo Rogers. KNPR will add NPR’s Talk of the Nation and the new Day to Day to its schedule. It will air the BBC World Service overnight.
Posted Nov. 5, 2003
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