Translators to sneak LPFM into Seattle

[engineer Sandi Woodruff is using the FCC's bizarrely inconsistent frequency allocation rules to sneak LPFM signals into Seattle's overcrowded radio spectrum. Her ingenious strategy borrows a page from the evangelical Christian radio playbook: acquire low-wattage translators and use them to relay signals from distant stations. Sandi may be the first to come up with the idea to use translators to expand the reach of LPFM community radio... -jl]

Radio Beat: New stations for FM listeners to try
by Bill Virgin, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Radio listeners throughout the region are about to encounter some new stations on the dial, thanks to the addition of translators.

Translators are simply a way of retransmitting a station's signal, on a different frequency. They're often used by radio stations to cover shadows in their signal coverage caused by terrain, although the Federal Communications Commission also allows translator stations to extend a station's coverage beyond its primary territory.

Last year the FCC opened a filing window for translators and got swamped by 13,000 applications. The commission has since been working through the backlog of applicants and has granted some approvals, including in Seattle.

"It's going to be a very full FM band when they're done," says Sandi Woodruff, an Olympia-based broadcast engineering consultant.

Woodruff has been working on several applications that have made it through the application pipeline. One is for 92.9 in the Seattle area, which will retransmit KGHO-LP (94.3), a low-power FM station with a rock-oldies format
broadcasting in Aberdeen-Hoquiam.

Two others in the Seattle area, at 94.5 and 97.7, were applied for by Sam-Sno Educational Media, which Woodruff says is a group interested in community radio.

The specific formats that those translators will carry haven't been announced. Woodruff, who consults with low-power FM stations, as well as commercial enterprises, says one idea is to tie LPFM stations and Web-based broadcasters into a sort of network that would use translators to cover the entire region. The low-power FM stations and the Webcasters would originate programming, since under FCC rules translators aren't allowed to originate programming themselves....

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