Radio News: FCC confirms, LPFM stations do not interfere with full-power stations

May 23, 2016 10:02 pm
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Once upon a time, the few opponents in Congress to the low-power FM bill then pending in Washington D.C., made up a fake compact disc and distributed it to legislators, claiming it contained the sounds of interference that low-power stations would cause over the signals of much more powerful full-power stations. Of course, giant full-power FM stations would interfere with small low-power FM stations, if radio engineering was incorrect, not the other way around. Now that Congress has allowed two different low-power FM bills to pass, and thousands of stations to go on the air, Radio World reported May 12 that the Federal Communications Commission made their first ruling on this issue. A Birmingham, Ala. FM station, WDJC, raised repeated concerns about interference from three planned LPFMs stations, all with religious-based programming. Kimtron Inc., part of Crawford Broadcasting claimed their high-definition digital signals were endangered by the low-power stations, but the FCC did not buy that argument, and still, no one has proved that low-power FM stations interfere with full-power stations.