Recently found two documents of interest related to the impact of translator station proliferation on the potential for LPFM station expansion. The first two are contained as appendices to late-filed reply comments tendered by the Prometheus Radio Project in the FCC’s still-open LPFM proceeding last September.
One is a REC Networks listing of more than three dozen markets done shortly after the Great Translator Invasion of 2003. In a nutshell, whereas REC identified 279 open channels for LPFM stations in 2000, only four would survive the GTI.
The other is a specific analysis of the Portland, Oregon radio market by Michael Brown in 2004. Where Brown identified as many as 11 potential LPFM frequencies in the Portland metropolitan area, including suburbs, the proliferation of translators would cut that to one.