Following up on Bill Finn's FM station posting, yesterday while in
northeast PA (Kingston, near Wilkes-Barre) I drove past a
Seventh-Day-Adventist church with a crude sign nailed to its ADA
wheelchair ramp that says "WHMN 107.9." So I tuned it in on the Sony
car radio and found a not-full-quieting unmodulated FM
carrier. Christian pirate? I looked around for an antenna, but it
was dark and I couldn't see one.
Later I looked up WHMN online and found it's actually a licensed 10W
LPFM station of Abundant Life Ministry that transmits from a
mountainside a couple three miles away from that church. A web
search for Abundant Life Ministry directed me to RADIO 74
INTERNATIONALE which reportedly has its broadcast studio in southeast
France--which may explain why I heard a bilingual sermon with
sentences alternating between English and
French. http://www.radio74.net/ Strange, since the French-speaking
demographic in this part of Pennsylvania is practically nil.
So, today I tried tracking down the WHMN 107.9 transmitter/antenna
site on a mountainside without success (no RDF or GPS gear with me;
just a car radio) and failed to locate it with a tight schedule, but
the daytime audio sounds like they accept sponsored programming from
various Christian sects. Their 10W signal covers much of the
so-called Wyoming Valley including Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, and
smaller nearby
towns. http://www.angelfire.com/nj2/piratejim/LPFM5/whmnlp.html
Will go back with a GPS when I have more time to find the
transmitter/antenna site using FCC tower data.
For a short while I was hopeful I'd found another(!) Christian
pirate. About a decade ago I tracked one down in Corona, Queens
probably running at least 100W from a Latino storefront church that
was interfering with WUSB 90.1 MHz (SUNY Stony Brook, NY) on the same
frequency (a friend with a show on WUSB told me he needed help with
an interference problem.) The day after locating the pirate I called
the pastor at the phone number on the sign out front and asked if he
could move to a different frequency to avoid interference
complaints--which could bring in the FCC--and he promptly did! Very
neighborly of him--or perhaps his motivation came from concern about
U.S. Federales raiding his packed Latino church. Problem solved.
-Ed Cummings
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