I doubt 102.7 in Sanderson will ever be built to be 100,000 watts unless it moves. The beauty of a 100,000 watt FM is the big city grade signal. You have to put a city grade signal over your city of license. Moving north toward Fort Stockton or west toward Alpine might work but even then, you are not talking big cities. You could not move close enough to reach any other community. Fort Stockton is, I think, about 60 miles from Sanderson. Alpine is about 90 miles, I think (about an hour to Marathon and another half hour to Alpine by car). Del Rio is 120 miles away.
Each community has longtime successful local stations that have decades-long relationships with local advertisers.
A 100,000 watt FM requires a nice outlay of cash and then much more of a monthly operating cost to make it.
Terrell County, of which Sanderson is the county seat, is almost 2,400 square miles and per the 2015 population figure, there are 837 people in the county, almost 90% in Sanderson alone. The only other town is Dryden, perhaps 10 people. Sanderson has always been pretty 'newspaper' strong. The longtime publisher quit publishing after a rival paper started. (at one point there was a shopper and two weekly papers when the population was about 50% more than today). The rival paper sold a couple of times and went under after a few years. Today a non-profit 4 page weekly newspaper fills the void, coming about a year after the last for profit paper shut down.
In my opinion a Low Power FM, 100 watt station, could work in Sanderson. Even a Class A, 6,000 watter, would likely run at a loss. To imagine the investment in a full Class C 100,000 watt station and monthly operating costs would be akin to opening a WalMart size store and the only inventory is in a small mall size kiosk. That is a pretty accurate picture of the investment versus return off of Terrell County.
If it is a religious broadcaster that is well funded, maybe they can have the support from elsewhere to build and sustain it. I see one of the TWO Construction Permits for Sanderson involves a religious broadcaster that has been red flagged by the FCC. You can bet they'll feed the station via internet and will request a waiver on local presence.
There's a 'game' played in primarily religious that usually involves non-commercial stations. The game goes like this: Get every CP you can no matter where it is. As time goes by, you can trade and negotiate with other entities to get the stations good for one group but not the other into the right hands. I have seem stations in areas with zero Spanish speakers go to a Spanish language religious broadcaster and then get traded by an English speaking religious broadcaster for a station in a 90% plus Hispanic community where Spanish is more widely spoken than English. So, you might say the game is sorting out portfolios to get stations in the hands of those that are better entities to run a station in a given community.
The second station assigned to Sanderson belongs to an applicant that has experience in Spanish Language radio and has other stations on the air. So, lets ponder this. If the other station will build, he could likely move the station from Sanderson to a much better location where it can easily be economically viable. With commercial stations being auctioned to the highest bidder, that might be the plan. You can bet the bidding for Sanderson was not very intense. I gather this guy has more than his arm up his sleeve. For example one owner I worked for opted to sign on at a lower power (making me say the poor guy would lose his shirt) but all along he had done the engineering to increase the power 6 fold to create a viable station. Those of us on the outside had no clue of his plan. I suspect this guy is building a network of stations to create a nice venue for ad agency dollars by creating a better mousetrap. Simply put, in some areas there is so little on the dial, hitting a 50 share would be pretty easy, so number of listeners versus total population makes an attractive station.
Not too long ago, there was an AM Construction Permit for Langtry, Texas. It was granted 250 watts. Langtry has about 30 people. I am not underestimating that at 250 watts, a station there would be hard pressed to reach 150 people. The ranches are huge out there, many calculated by number of square miles. It was always thought they'd move to Del Rio, but the CP has long since expired. A non-commercial FM KDKY, went in at Marathon, a bit over 400 people. They asked the FCC to downgrade to 100 watts. After sustaining a loss, they donated it to Radio Marfa, that owns it today. While the radio dial is essentially blank in these areas, there's not enough people in any given spot to generate the income for a station. It would almost always have to be a labor of love or you'd work like crazy going to distant towns to sell anything you could.
A really nice guy I worked with was in such a situation, driving up to 90 miles to sell in distant towns every day. He took an attitude of 'try to get something, anything, from each business he visited. If that was $20 for 50 cent spots, fine. If it was $100 at $2 a spot, great. He had to generate at least $5,000 a month and it wasn't going to come to him locally. He always came close...his worst $4,500 a month. He'd hit the road early and sell all day. Once back at the station, he'd write spots, produce them, tend to station business, do the program logs and try to be home by 10 pm. His take home was about $1,500 to $2,000 a month but he wasn't reimbursed for mileage or any other expenses he had selling out of town. He said his taxes always had itemized deductions higher than his income. He joked he was in a town so small, they were big enough to have local news. After a few years he was worn out and he felt his wife could use a break from being the major breadwinner.
