5 years ago this week, the FCC opened the "Auction 83" filing window which was designed to expand the number of FM translators. As a surprise to many, over 14,000 applications were filed in the window with a significant number of them filed by the co-owned Radio Assist Ministries and Edgewater Broadcasting.
What eventually surfaced was a long battle by REC, Prometheus and the grassroots movement that eventually lead to the FCC starting to look at their policies regarding speculative filing. As a result, the FCC has placed limits on the number of pending applications from that filing window and to address potential issues of speculative filing in the full power services, the FCC imposed a similar limit on last year's Non-Commercial Educational (NCE) FM filing window.
In a statement by Michelle A. Eyre, founder of REC Networks:
"Speculative filings by the large filers in the translator window to sell non-commercial permits that would not be subject to filing fees or auctions was the largest fleecing of FCC resources in this recent decade. The large filers claim they did not need those permits anymore. If that was the case, they should have turned the permits in and not sold them. It is clear what their intentions were. Now local organizations are left in a 'radio dust bowl' with a large amount of unusable spectrum. I call on the FCC to pass rulemaking that cultivates this currently unusable spectrum and give priority to those with local intentions."
