4-24-98

FCC
Room 222
l9l9 M Street, NW.
Washington, DC 20554

Reference: FCC File No.s RM-9208 and RM-9242

I am writing to voice my concerns over the possible acceptance of Low-Power FM channels. We have experienced interverence [sic] from two pirates. One of those was in Silver City, NM and the other was in Cloud Croft, NM. The Silver City pirate station had our listeners in that market really mad. The Denver office of the FCC looked into that situation. They are now gone from our area. The Cloud Croft situation has not been resolved, to the best of my knowledge. On another matter, one of our stations has been short-spaced to a station in neigboring Texas and we are in the process of moving our station farther away from them in hopes of being able to supply better coverage to our home county.

In regards to Public Service. Our stations have provided local organizations with the following: Children's Miracle Network $14,000+ in on-air announcements in 1997. They raised over $134,000 for the local hospital. And we are going to be providing over $20,000 this year for the same campaign with a goal over over $150,000. We also donated over $7,500 for the Walk America for March of Dimes this year and they raised around $50,000 for research We also donate around 10-15 other Local Public Service announcements per day for local organizations to help them raise money for projects at schools, churches, etc.

From a revenues standpoint, there are already too many stations in many markets for all of use [sic] to make a profit. Now I realize that the issue here is not about making money, but if additional FM's are licensed to broadcast, they will have to sell advertising as a means of support, and the pie is only so big. Additional stations added to the market consisting of now over ten local stations and another dozen radio stations that penetrate our market from El Paso and a few more from Mexico would really make it more difficult for many of us to survive.

The other local stations are involved in similar Public Service work...serving our communities very well. More stations is not the answer...especially stations that will not have much power to cover large areas. In our state, the population is spread out. In fact, it is very difficult for many of our local stations to cover our local county with the signals we have.

l hope you will close this window and not allow additional stations to come in our market. The 8O-90 dockets of a few years ago opened the markets up enough to provide more than enough service for local communities.

Thanks for taking time to read my comments.
 

Bob May
GM
KSNM/KXDA
Sierra Industries, Inc.
Las Cruces, NM 88001

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