I have a friend from Mexico wanting to buy a station in the US and I remember the FCC has allowed some non-citizens to purchase some stations recently. can they own 100% of it and what is the process? anyone know?
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- Thread starter radioislife2020
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KFNC? We have a buyer!!!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
He could afford it for sure..
Yes, the FCC now allows up to 100% foreign ownership. The approval process requires State Department clearance and takes a while, but it can be done. I know several station owners who've done it.
The State Department knows reciprocity is a factor, and of course the US government also owns radio stations in many countries.
Very few other nations allow full foreign ownership of stations. Some won't even allow non-nationals to be in upper management:
When I was offered a manager job at a group in Mexico, I was told that as a U.S. citizen I could not be manager, but a birth certificate from a town in NW Mexico where the city hall had burnt down a few decades before could be made to appear.
Where permitted, the cap is usually 50%.
The VOA transmitters in other nations are "dropping like flies". Very few remain, as shortwave, the use of most of them, is nearly dead as a radio service. That leaves only a couple of remaining such installations and they are being phased out.
VOA tries, instead, to get local stations to carry some of their programming or to lease time on minor stations. When I was in Ecuador, I even got called by the U. S. Ambassador to try to get any of my stations to carry VOA programs. I became "blacklisted" when I told them that there was no way I would want to carry any of that material.
There are also the AFRTS stations run by the military around the world.
The biggest one being the 50kw AM on 810 in Tokyo...... the smallest being an FM on Diego Garcia.
In most cases, those are relatively low power and intended not to "leave the base".
Typical in the 60's as the AFRTS station at Ramey AFB near Aguadilla, PR. It ran 50 watts into a roughly 60 foot tall tower on the base, and had enough signal to reach a few homes just outside the base. And I heard it one Monday morning in 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio. Yet many times that I drove on the "old" highway towards Mayagüez and tried to hear it there was nothing... just 5 or 6 miles away.
There was a base station at Buchanan in Metro San Juan on 1040, with about 30 watts. There was a great pizzeria right at the gate to the base where I used to go and they would often have the AFRTS station on as most of the customers were soldiers. But when WOSO 1030 in San Juan was licensed in 1975, they shut down and then reappeared as a very low power FM.
These are illustrations of how limited those stations generally are.
The highest power one I ever heard was on the Canal Zone, and I believe it ran 5 kw to cover the whole territory from the Caribbean to the Pacific side. Of course, at that time the Zone was U.S. territory and and could "license" or "permit" anything they wanted. The biggest, historically, have been in Japan, South Viet Nam, the Philippines.
And U.S. military bases are, technically, "domestic" territory due to the terms of the base authorization if within foreign soil.
Speaking of our taxpayer dollars at work: USAGM/VOA pays "affiliates" to carry VOA programming certain hours of the day. Of course, there's nobody checking, so chances are pretty good that many of these stations are taking the money and erasing the VOA file out of their automation folder.
Until very recently, VOA provided such audio on physical media. Long ago, it was on disks. Later on tape, then CDs. I guess they could use flash drives today.
Back when they used tape, I know of many stations that would say they would run the shows just so they could get free reels of nearly virgin tape.
“Most” is an important qualifier here because there was AFN Frankfurt, in what was the American zone after WWII, and which endured well after the Federal Republic of Germany, I.e. West Germany, was established. If I recall correctly, it had 150 kilowatts on 873 kHz. I was able to hear it - well - in the Noord-Brabant province of the Netherlands in 2000 during my first visit to my in-laws. It stood out because of the American English programming. The announcing had a decidedly amateur feel, along with PSAs aimed at the military audience. Wikipedia says that the station at 873 was discontinued in 2004, and that sounds right to me.
In 2000, I also picked up some FM stations that were located at bases around North Rhine-Westphalia airing NPR programming for the troops. It was kind of fun being on the second floor of the in-laws’ house and listening to All Things Considered.
Several years ago while tuning the WebSDR at the University of Tuente in the Netherlands I tuned across NPR programming on what I believe was an old either VOA or AFN frequency in the 1100s. This apparently was NPR Berlin, but I never heard it again, and read it was on FM. Just now checked and apparently it signed off for good in 2017.
NPR Berlin became KCRW Berlin (an off-shoot of the LA station) on 104.1 FM in Berlin. That station closed in late 2020 amid COVID-19. 104.1 was then occupied by "LULU FM", an LGBT+ focused local station, but it's now an empty frequency.
I don't remember NPR Berlin ever being on an AM frequency, as far as I know it was always on that 104.1.
Doesn't Aiir's Ricki Lee (a British citizen) own a few stations in New York and Tennessee?
Of course, I don't think there's any national security implication of a citizen of a strong ally like the UK owning radio stations.
I heard it just that once. Weird
Correct.. and he has/had part in leasing/programming 2 stations in CO.. now down to just one
and hes part of Aiir, that offer web/digital/app/streaming services to broadcasters, including playout one automation
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