Approximate coverage area of radio station we applied for (click to expand). The red line is strong coverage, but the signal would extend possibly to the yellow line.

From Your Friendly Publisher & Executive Editor:

Well, it’s been quite a week. Actually, it’s been quite a year. At the beginning of 2009, I had no inkling that I would be living with my in-laws in my hometown running a (largely) one-man news and info site on December 11th of the same year. That’s not to say I don’t want to be here. Since I graduated high school (“The best class alive is the class of ’95!”), I’ve wanted to come back. Thanks to the Internet (go Rural iNet!), that is now possible. Jeane and I have been back since August, and we moved here for purely family reasons, which is as it should be. We’re thrilled to be back home, with our two sets of parents half a block apart, running our eight-year-old publicity business from Welch’s main street.

One of my previous schemes to get us back here had to do with radio. Some of you may have seen the public notice in the Vinita Daily Journal back in 2007. I’ve never had an opportunity to explain that publicly, so I’ll tell you a bit about it.

I fell in love with radio when I was 16 years old. Mike McClure, who never was my coach but was my drivers’ ed teacher, told me on one of our many jaunts to Miami—with a driving partner we both thought would kill us all, incidentally—that he thought I would be good in radio and asked if I was interested. I was, and long story short, Dave Boyd hired me to work at KITO in Vinita. (I kid you not, the very first question Dave Boyd asked me when I went to my interview was, “Can you read?” I replied, “Yes,” and Dave said, “Well, then, come on back.”) So, all of a sudden, I’m in radio. Live radio. Alone at the station for six hours at a stretch with no end to the disasters I could cause. I am still thankful I never initiated wide-spread panic and mayhem. But I was pretty awful when I started, but I guess everyone is in the beginning. I worked Sunday nights 6 p.m. to midnight until I graduated. And I got better as time went on. After graduation, they asked if I would like to cover the newly vacant midnight-6 a.m. over the summer until I left for OSU. I jumped at the chance, and it both allowed me to get pretty good at radio and screwed up my internal clock forever (which is why I am writing this at 1:12 a.m., though you won’t see it until 9 a.m.) In college, I worked for KOSU and, just for fun, I also did a nonsense cable radio show. I eventually ended up transitioning to Educational Television Services at OSU, then left to join Jeane full-time in Wynn-Wynn Media. But wherever I have been and whatever I have done, I have always maintained a love for the medium of radio, especially a type of radio that is rarely done these days: truly local radio that is not merely a relay of some satellite feed or a 24/7 computer automated jukebox designed to make you think there’s a real person on the air when the station house is empty as my plate after supper. And I love radio partly because of the experience I have had with it.

That summer at KITO was a blast. I got into radio just as CDs were beginning to revolutionize the industry, and I am glad I got there when I did because I have actually spun vinyl and cut and spliced tape manually, which no one does anymore. When I was at KITO, they still played original 45 rpm singles in main rotation (and they still had turntables with a 78 rpm setting—heck, I even found a couple old 78 records that I played a few times). And there were actual people on the radio. The program director never once gave me a list of the music I would play. I was put in a control room filled with music, given some basic rules, and allowed to be a disc jockey. Those days are gone. And that’s a shame.

And that leads me to my great radio pursuit. It is dang near impossible to get a new radio station licensed, especially close to large metro areas. And on top of that, you can’t even apply for a non-commercial station until the FCC opens a filing window. (If I ever have a station, it will have to be non-commercial because I’ll never be rich enough to buy an existing commercial station or have a new commercial frequency licensed). We lived in Claremore for several years, and I started pursuing radio opportunities there. Being that Claremore is about as close as you can get to a large metro, our opportunities were slim, but we still wanted to try. My radio consultants and engineers were confident that the FCC would soon be opening a filing window and determined that a non-commercial frequency was available if I licensed it for Pryor. It would have been a nice-sized station at 11,000 watts. So, we had them do all the engineering work and get our application ready for when the filing window came. And they were right, the FCC announced that a filing window would be opened for five days in October 2007. We were ahead of the game and had everything ready to go early. When the window was opened, all my consultants had to do was push “send,” and I had to write a few checks along the way.

Things were rosy until I got an email from my consultants about two weeks before the filing window was scheduled to open. Another radio station in Missouri had applied for a power increase. As an existing station, their application would be granted as a matter of course, and once granted, their expanded signal made all of our engineering work moot. My application turned into garbage in about 1.8 seconds. We were pretty crushed. My consultants looked for any other opportunities and said we just lived too close to Tulsa for anything to work. That’s when a light went off for me. I said I knew a place that wasn’t anywhere near a large metro area, my hometown. They started looking at the engineering data for Welch, Oklahoma, and said that it looked great. They even identified the cell tower that sits on Paula Goodwin’s property as ideal for our antenna. We had them work up the new application in record time, and what resulted was an even more powerful station, operating at 91.1 FM at 13,000 watts, centered in Welch, America. They were also fairly confident that, given our rural location, our application would be what is called a “singleton.” That simply means that once all the applications were received in the filing window, ours would have no competing applications. As a high schooler working at KITO, I had dreamed of having my own Welch radio station someday, and now it looked like it was a strong possibility.

Non-commercial radio stations must be owned by a non-profit organization, most of the members of which must reside in close proximity to the city of license, so I set about to retool the non-profit I had created to apply for the Pryor station to work for the Welch station. The primary need was for new board members fairly local to Welch. I’m thankful that Jana Chenoweth, Shelley Earp, Delbert Lovelace, and Jerry Spaulding agreed to serve on my board. One of the other FCC requirements is that public notice must be run in a county newspaper, and that was what some of you saw at the time.

We had to work quick, but we got everything done we had to do, and our application was duly filed within the filing window. Then, you wait. Had we been a singleton, the granting of a construction permit would have been automatic and relatively quick, and we then would have had three years to get the station operational.

A more technical coverage map (click to expand)

We were far from a singleton. In fact, we had 16 competing applications, which ranged from the Cherokee Nation, which applied for a 100,000-watt monster in Tahlequah to the Miami Indian Foundation, which applied for a 5,000-watt station between here and Miami to do Indian language programming, to the Knights of Columbus of Fort Scott, Kansas, which would have done mainly Catholic programming. The FCC places all competing applications in what they call “mutually exclusive groups” or “MX groups,” then they start looking at the engineering data to make the determination of which application will win, and they start with the smaller MX groups and work to the larger ones. There are all kinds of complicated data they consider and put into formulas to decide who will win. And there is only one winner. One application will be selected to receive the construction permit, and everyone else ties for last place. As part of a large, 16-member MX group, we knew it would be a while before the FCC reached a determination on us. But, my consultants were able to do the number crunching using the FCC’s formulas and determine who would end up winning in our MX group. I had them do the math, and they determined that we would not win our group. They estimated that the FCC would eventually select a monastery applying for a license for Oaks, Oklahoma, as our MX group’s winner. We were crushed again. There was nothing left to do but wait to get the official word and pay some more consulting bills.

Fast forward to just a couple months ago, and we got the official word from the FCC that the monastery in Oaks has been selected as the winner of our MX group, just as my consultants had predicted. And I do want to say that my consultants are awesome. They do phenomenal work, and they have a heart for the kind of radio I want to do. We were fortunate to have them working for us. But no matter how good they are, they cannot bend the laws of physics and make radio waves do what radio waves can’t do. And so, for now, we’ll have no radio station in Welch. But we do have a Web site for local news and info. I’ll do my best to make a go of it, and I hope you’ll help me. So far, we’ve been live for four days, and the response has been all positive. All I can ask is please read us, please tell your friends, and please send us news and info to share (and, if you have a product or service to share, you can always buy an ad!).

It ain’t radio, but it ain’t bad for now.

T. Wynn

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