The on-again, off-again story of Mercer Island High School station KMIH appears to finally have a happy ending. Threatened with expulsion from the airwaves by a commercial station looking to move closer to a metropolitan market, community support rallied local, state, and Congressional officials to seek a compromise involving the FCC and affected stations.
While the attempt to legislate a solution didn’t really go anywhere, some “creative engineering” seems to have saved the day. Another affected high school station will also move to a new FM channel and increase its power to boot.
According to the FCC rules as written, these stations, which hold now-obsolete “Class D” low-power FM station licenses, should have gone dark without a whimper. It’s nice to see that spectrum-occupants are occasionally amenable to accommodating each other, even though their “rights of use” to the airwaves may be disparate.
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