For the past six months the FCC licensed two stations on the same band with the same set of call letters.
Educational Media Foundation had acquired the rights to the KLUV calls and its Dallas market “K-Love” trademark rights as part of its acquisition of Audacy’s stations in Buffalo and Memphis last year. Following 98.7 KLUV Dallas’ rebranding as “98.7 The Spot” KSPF in June, the call letters were parked on the Construction Permit for 89.7 KLHU Huron SD, which was granted by the FCC on June 26.
The following month, Dick Witkovski’s North Texas Radio Group LP applied to change 94.5 KDNT Oakwood TX to KLUV and was granted permission by the FCC to take effect on July 19. At the time we were told that the grant happened due to a since-patched bug in the FCC’s LMS filing system due to the EMF swap being filed as a multi-station call letter exchange with KSPF.
And then nothing happened until the end of December when Witkovski filed to exchange the KLUV call letters with his 1540 KAMM University Park/Dallas. Following an EMF Petition to Revoke in which they laid out how the FCC erred and said that if the commission granted the exchange it would reserve its right to sue NTRG for damages and injunctive relief for its unauthorized use, NTRG filed last Friday to withdraw its exchange. That was followed by an application granted this morning to change the call letters of 94.5 KLUV Oakwood to KEEI effective February 5 leaving the Huron SD construction permit as the only holder of the KLUV call letters.
I suspect that EMF is trying to figure out where to move those calls for best effect. I can’t see them leaving KLUV in South Dakota.
Bet they’d love to use them on 100.3 in Los Angeles, where they had to hammer out an agreement with Univision over the “K-Love” branding, which has been 107.5’s branding for some 50 years now.