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Following a lengthy investigation, the Audio Division concluded that two NCE licensees under the control of a single individual – Great Lakes Community Broadcasting, Inc. and Great Lakes Broadcast Academy, Inc. (we’ll refer to them collectively as “Great Lakes”) – had lied to the Commission. In at least nine license applications – five for full-power NCE stations and four for translators – Great Lakes had certified, falsely, that CP-specified facilities had been constructed when they hadn't.

Various complaints and petitions from broadcasters (including some I authored for WYCE, Wyoming, Michigan) brought some of Great Lakes's shenanigans to the Commission's attention. With that start, the FCC pursued Great Lakes through a combination of Enforcement Bureau on-site inspections, an Audio Division letter of inquiry and, as described in an earlier post, even some cyber-sleuthing. In instance after instance the Division found that Great Lakes's claims that it had constructed the facilities specified in CPs issued to it just weren’t true. In one case, no facilities had been constructed at all, notwithstanding a certification in the license application to the contrary. In other cases, facilities of some sort apparently had been built, but they were at the wrong site, the wrong height and/or the wrong power.

The Division ruled it was not good enough for Great Lakes to just throw something up in the general vicinity of the CP sites. (The horseshoes/hand grenades axiom is fully applicable here.) CPs for four full-power stations and two translators were automatically forfeited because the facilities authorized had not been constructed before the CPs expired. Great Lakes did escape cancellation of one CP because grant of the license application had already become final, but that escape may be temporary: the Audio Division concluded the facilities specified in the CP and license application were never constructed, so that station will be the subject of a forthcoming hearing designation order.

That hearing designation order will also examine the character qualification of the Great Lakes entities, their owner and Great Lakes's engineering consultant David C. Shaberg to hold other FCC authorizations.  

Great Lakes' varied and sometimes contradictory proffered reasons for its false certifications had, in my admittedly biased view, the persuasive power of a sixth-grader's excuses for not doing his home work. 

For example, Great Lakes argued that the facilities it constructed complied with its authorizations because they did not exceed the antenna heights and power levels set in the CPs and therefore would not cause interference to other stations. Without breaking a sweat, the Audio Division swatted that down: except in very specific instances covered in the FCC's rules, the Division observed, "we do not allow permittees to self-approve modifications to their construction permits."  The Audio Division continued that parties like Great Lakes cause "substantial harm when they hoard spectrum by holding authorizations for full-service FM stations but operate minimal facilities" that might not have been approved had they actually been presented to the FCC.

Great Lakes also claimed that problems getting accurate readings from its GPS unit led to construction of facilities at considerable distance from the FCC-authorized sites. In that regard Great Lakes seems to have been oddly unperturbed when it kept getting different readings, as if it were to be expected that a particular site really ought to have at least a couple of different sets of geographical coordinates. In any case, the Division was unconvinced.

The vigor with which the Audio Division is going after Great Lakes may be a harbinger of a "get tough" policy with respect to spectrum warehousing and false construction certifications. If you’ve found yourself blocked by an operation akin to Great Lakes, that should be good news – the Federales may be on the way to help you out. But on the other hand, if you hold a CP for unbuilt facilities, you are well advised to "get 'er done" within the time provided. If you don’t get finished in time, you are equally well advised to fess up and suffer the consequences. While it may not might nice to try to fool Mother Nature, it's downright dangerous to try to fool the FCC.

[Blogmeister Note: This post was revised in January, 2012.]

In a recent decision, the Audio Division pulled the curtain back, at least a tad, on the information available to the FCC from the back-end of CDBS. 

The case involved a couple of entities (we’ll refer to them collectively as “Great Lakes”) which had acquired CPs and licenses for a bunch of NCE FM full-power stations and translators in Michigan. Complaints and petitions had raised questions about whether Great Lakes had been honest in many of its applications. In one instance, for example, Great Lakes had filed a license application claiming that the station in question had been constructed and was up and running – even though an Enforcement Bureau inspection of the site three days after the application was filed turned up no station at all. 

The license application in question had not been “signed” by a Great Lakes officer; rather, it had been “signed” by Great Lakes’s engineering consultant. That opened the door for the Division to write to Great Lakes advising it of that particular deficiency. (While the FCC’s decision does not say so, it sure looks like, in so notifying Great Lakes, the Commission was setting a trap by giving Great Lakes yet another opportunity to mess up.) Sure enough, a week later an amendment to the license application was filed, this time bearing an appropriate name in the “signature” block. The Commission then sprung the trap, notifying Great Lakes of the results of the Enforcement Bureau’s inspection and asking for an explanation for why Great Lakes claimed, in its application and amendment, that the station was up and running when it, er, wasn’t.

Not surprisingly, Great Lakes had an explanation. The original license application had been placed in the CDBS queue “to have the information readily available for our internal review”, or maybe “as an internal reminder that this was a priority”. In any event, it had been filed by mistake. Who knew? It could happen to anybody! And when the deficiency letter rolled in, well, the Great Lakes principal merely supplied his “signature” without realizing the application which he was amending should not have been filed in the first place.

This is where things get interesting. After receiving that response, the FCC staff – apparently acting on its own initiative – checked its CDBS logs. It determined that the license application had been started on a particular date at a particular time (down to the minute) from a particular Internet address (i.e., a 12-digit IP address).    The Commission then found that that IP address was registered to a company listing a particular street address. (The decision doesn’t say how it did this, but it’s not that hard with, e.g., a simple WHOIS search.) It then found that that street address was the same as the address listed in the driver’s license and voter registration of Great Lakes’s consulting engineer. (Ditto.)

The staff then reviewed the CDBS logs relative to the amendment in which the corrected “signature” was submitted. While Great Lakes’s response certainly seemed to indicate that the Great Lakes principal had prepared and filed that amendment by himself, the logs seemed to tell a different story.  That amendment was started, completed and filed all within a six-minute period from the IP address associated with Great Lakes’s consulting engineer.

The FCC decision indicates that Great Lakes will soon be placed in a hearing to delve into this instance and a series of others, all of which strongly suggest misrepresentation or lack of candor. It’s always possible that some innocent explanation really does exist here, but it’s hard to imagine what that explanation might be. We shall see.

For the rest of us, though, it bears noting that the Commission does have considerable ability to ferret out information, both from its own internal records and from the same Internet resources we all have. And this case demonstrates that the Audio Division, at least, is not shy about digging for facts when investigation seems warranted. It is always a good policy to be completely honest with the Commission; it’s also unwisely short-sighted to think that you might be able to get away with anything less.