Questions: I recently received multiple questions regarding outages or interruptions with Greenville area radio stations. Readers said: For a couple of months, FM 90.1(WEPR) transmission has been unreliable. What is the problem? For weeks now the local public broadcasting station FM 90.1 has been off and on the air. Sometimes it’s there, but often not. Do we know why? When will our NPR radio station become reliable again? Has the radio station WPCI AM 1490 gone off the air?
Answers:
The interruptions to WEPR 90.1 FM (NPR Greenville), along with WNTV (PBS Greenville), are due to a Federal Communications Commission-mandated process called “repacking,” according to Landon Masters, public information officer for South Carolina ETV and Public Radio (SCETV/PR).
Repacking involves reorganizing television stations in the broadcast television bands so the stations remaining on the air, after the incentive auction, occupy a smaller portion of the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, thereby freeing up a portion of that band for new wireless services use, Masters said.
ETV Vice President of Technology and Facilities Mark Jahnke on the SCETV/PR website said the repacking process was brought about by the increasing demand for broadband services for digital devices like cell phones.
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“In order to get faster connections through the wireless carriers, more space on the frequency spectrum was needed, and these digital device signals operate on the exact same frequencies as television signals, Jahnke said on the website.
“So, in order to get more room for wireless communications, the FCC required nearly every TV station in the country to move, squeezing them into the lower part of the spectrum to free the upper space for more broadband.”
The repacking process began in 2017. All other SCETV/PR towers have been transitioned.
In the past couple of months, SC ETV/PR has been building a new tower on Paris Mountain. The work involves moving antennas and transmission lines.
“Although we are doing as much as we can to limit outages, we must shut down the transmitters when crews go up the tower or are in the field,” Masters said.
The Paris Mountain tower has had a couple of manufacturing and process delays that have pushed it past completion of the other towers, Masters said. The hope is that the tower will be completed by Winter 2022.
When completed, aside from regular maintenance, there will be no impact on the tower.
Fans of WCPI 1490 FM will also be happy to know that the interruptions are also temporary.
Randy Mathena, the owner of WCPI, said the station has technical shutdowns from time to time, “but we have a game plan to resolve those issues.”
He said plans for the station also include adding new music and for the station to become South Carolina’s first solar-powered station.
“When all of our plans are in place, we will become the AM cafe and we may showcase hand-picked restaurants in Greenville and beyond,” Mathena said. “Then again, we may continue with our current format of non-stop music.”
Mathena, who founded Paper Cutters Inc., in Greenville in the 1980s, described finding what has become WPCI as a dream come true.The plan then, he said, was to keep costs to a minimum and focus on a music-only format.
“We have been running the same, nonstop music format for just over 20 years,” he said.
The station currently broadcasts in AM, high definition AM, and worldwide on Tunein.com.
“It’s all about the music,” he said. “We may lose power and go off the air from time to time, but we will never go away.”
.– Do you have a question you want answered? Send it to me at davisal@gannett.com or via mail to Angelia Davis, 32 E. Broad St., Greenville SC, 29601.
