FCC grants short extension of LPFM filing window until Friday December 15 at 12 noon ET

At the request of members of the LPFM community, prompted by the recent LMS vulerability incident, the FCC has granted a short extension of the LPFM filing window.  

The window will now close on Friday, December 15 at 12 NOON EASTERN TIME.  

The filing freeze for existing LPFM and translator stations will remain in effect throughout the weekend and will be lifted at 12:01 AM on Monday, December 18, 2023.

REC Networks operational response to the LPFM window extension

REC is still at capacity for new requests. Only those with ALL of their information ready and do not require a second-adjacent waiver will be accepted on a stand-by basis with immediate payment required. Such requests will be taken on Tuesday, December 12 only and will have until 2PM on Wednesday to make payment.  Interested parties can email all of their information to lpfm at recnet.com. 

Remaining LPFM clients who are still going through the REC process and already have ticket numbers will have until 2PM ET on Wednesday December 13 to make payment in order to assure filing in the window.  We will not be doing any filings on the last day of the window if it can be avoided.

REC clients needing minor amendments to correct information will also have until 2PM ET on Wednesday to get that information in.  Amendments that cannot be done after the close of the window (such as improving point positions), will have priority.

REC will remain on embargo until December 18.  Live answer will remain unavailable until Monday, December 18.

eLMS services will now be stopped at 11:30 AM ET on Friday, December 15 and will resume in time for open of business on Monday.  This means that real time updates to FCC.today and FCCdata.org will not be available on Friday afternoon. 

If the FCC releases the LPFM applications in the LMS Public View on Friday afternoon, we will perform a manual eLMS run to start ingesting the LPFM applications.  We will not start the manual ingest process until after sometime 5 PM ET on Friday in order to keep a major load off of the FCC systems during business hours.  Once an LPFM application is ingested, it will post to the REC Window Tracking Tool.  We expect the ingest to be completed by Saturday morning.  Once the ingest is completed, we will change the default window in the Tracking Tool from the NCE window to the LPFM window.  

Preliminary determination of MX Groups and other initial evaluation of LPFM applications will likely take place on Saturday morning.  Manual review of MX groups will start after the automated functions take place and will occur over the next few days following, based on the number of MX groups created.