Memphis has a 100,000 watt FM doing a country format with about 8 hours live each weekday. Guthrie is not really much of a town. I think most of the homes are still owned by the ranch that takes up much of the county of less than 300 people.
Many of the applications that get filed are by people who have never been to the place. The engineering firm has you find a tower site and get a letter saying they will let you go on the existing tower if you get a Construction Permit and decide to build it out based on the Construction Permit. For most, if they are going to build, visit, find a place to erect a tower and make the arrangements.
Some get construction permits and simply hope they block another station from moving and upgrading. If that is the case, the CP holder may be able to get a nice deal.
Keep in mind these frequencies are sold at auction conducted by the FCC. It is so complicated you almost need legal advice just to stay in the bidding. To get the construction permit you pay to prove the station can work where you say it will and you pay the winning bid. In other words, you have plenty of money tied up in just getting a piece of paper.
Sometimes bidder have no clue about the place they bid on. When somebody is in Washington State or maybe South Carolina, chances are they think of Texas as more like their locale than the barren landscapes and few people. I've seen people big $150,000 to bid an auction for a 50,000 watt FM in a county of 2,000 people and only 30 businesses. To build it out, you'd be at around $500,000 pretty easily or face a few thousand a month in leases in a county that might give you $30,000 a year in billing. In this instance, the station was never built.
So, with Memphis, a station might work but in reality there probably is not enough there to allow 2 stations to make it. Guthrie would simply be a place you'd never bill a dollar and even if you reached other communities the equipment and operating costs would be so high you still couldn't make it working hard. It would be extremely rare for a broadcaster to run a station that will never even cover the operating expenses.
Like the AM station 250 watt CP for Langtry, Texas, about 30 people and retail sales of under $100,000 a year, never got built. The little non-comm FM in Marathon, Texas downgraded because there was no community support. In fact they gifted it to another non-commercial group that has several stations and can take on the minimal expenses involved in reaching the 800 (and that's a stretch) in and around Marathon.
I noticed someone finally applied for Sanderson, Texas too. Sanderson is about 800 and so economically viable the past three commercial newspaper ventures have gone belly up. They need radio there but man is that a remote place...maybe 950 in the nearly 2,500 square mile county.
Newcastle, Texas is not much of a town today with most businesses boarded up. I suppose the emphasis would be on any of the larger communities that might be nearby.
The likely scenario for all of these stations is a main studio waiver and some format piped in from elsewhere. That is the cheapest way to do it, if the station are to be built in the first place.
