NY Radio: Foreign Couple Gets FCC Okay to Buy Station

After several months of dead air, WRGR 102.1 FM may return to the airwaves of Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake thanks to a an FCC waiver which allows a European couple with a love of radio and the Adirondack Mountains to buy the station.

The Federal Communications Commission has agreed to allow Ricki Shorthose and Hanna Kaleta’s Border Media to buy WRGR, Tupper Lake, NY. They filed an $8,000 deal in February to buy the Class A FM from Ted Morgan’s Saranac Lake Radio. WRGR has been mostly off the air since last summer.

Hanna Kaleta & Ricki Lee Shorthose

Shorthose is a British citizen and Kaleta is a Polish citizen. They’ve been living in the U.S. since 2015 but Shorthose is a radio veteran in the U.K. where he worked from 2000-2011 in several roles, including as a programmer for a “Jack FM” in Bristol. He also owned the audio tech company, Aiir, which worked with radio stations on their digital and social media projects.

In a filing with the FCC, Shorthose and Kaleta said they have been “model residents of the United States for the past three years” and their acquisition of WRGR wouldn’t implicate any national security or other threat to the U.S., given the U.K. and Poland “are among our most steadfast allies and share many of our cultural traditions.”

Shorthose and Kaleta also said their taking over WRGR (102.1 FM 140 watts) would strengthen the Tupper Lake broadcast industry, saying additional stations are “desperately needed” in the Adirondack Mountains community. InsideRadio reports the FCC agreed.

Ricki Lee Shorthose, who goes by just Ricki Lee professionally, talked about his 20-year radio career at the office of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in March: from his start at the bottom, writing down soccer scores for free, to programming, running and owning stations in the United Kingdom, his home country. He said the 102.1 station, rebranded as Lake FM, will play hits from the 1960s through the ’90s and feature a morning show, afternoon music show and a locally focused entertainment show for the evening drive.

“For me, there’s nothing better than entertaining people, informing people and seeing their delight,” Lee said.

Since the five stations formerly owned by Ted Morgan’s Mountain Communications fell silent, several radio entrepreneurs have been buying up the stations and bringing music and content back to the air. A group of radio veterans bought 106.3 FM and the WNBZ call letters for $300,000 and are now broadcasting from Plattsburgh. The owners of WSLP of Lake Placid bought the 1240 AM frequency, long associated with WNBZ in Saranac Lake, for $6,000. And now Lee and his wife have bought WRGR for $8,000, under the company name Border Media, according to several broadcast industry media.