Within two weeks of the radio station’s floor dropping in Wilder Hall 402 on Aug. 7, 2025, WOBC-FM applied for a Special Temporary Authority, a broadcast law enabling the station to remain off air for six months. This month, WOBC applied for a second STA, which will expire Aug. 7, 2026. Although the station has been essentially operational this academic year, having relocated to Peters Hall (“WOBC Temporarily Moves to New Station in Peters,” The Oberlin Review, Oct. 3, 2025), they have been solely streaming via the internet. That is, the link you click when visiting wobc-fm.org.
“The first STA was easy,” Station Manager and College fourth-year Ilan Kahanov said. “That was like, ‘Hey, construction mishap, no one saw this coming.’ … The second STA, I didn’t do, and [Senior Associate Dean of Students] Thom Julian did. Frankly, I was like, ‘I’m not going to write it,’ because now … the justification is they didn’t fix the floor and we’re stuck in a basement.”
In April 2024, I interviewed Kahanov (“WOBC Encourages Collaboration Between College, Community,” The Oberlin Review, April 26, 2024). Two years ago, the sentiment among the WOBC Board was a resounding “no” toward any possibility of moving WOBC entirely online, given that WOBC is one of the last college radio stations to have a Federal Communications Commission license and physically broadcast on air.
“‘[Moving WOBC online] would suck,” Kahanov told me in 2024. “So much of the value is that you can [broadcast on-air]. When reading the oral history, we’re just getting people driving by on the radio. That’s mostly what [FM radio is] for. And, there [are] still people who are at home — we would lose that.’”
This sentiment remains the same, and although WOBC has proven that they can run effectively in this online but off-air capacity, the larger concern still remains. What happens, come Aug. 7, 2026, if WOBC hasn’t returned to FM?
The answer: Automatic license forfeiture, as written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In short, WOBC would lose its ability to broadcast, potentially permanently.
But if all goes well and WOBC is back on air and fully operational before August, another hurdle arises come 2028, when the station and several others in the region are eligible for renewal. If a radio station is not in good standing with the FCC, the call sign (91.5, in this case) is up for grabs, or rather, purchase. In the current political climate, it is very likely that a right-wing or religious group would pursue it to disseminate their political agenda. If, potentially, such an organization did not purchase WOBC’s call sign, then Oberlin College would have the ability to re-purchase. The catch? This is an endeavor costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s more, this is President Donald Trump’s FCC and this is Oberlin College and community radio.
Tracey Liston, WOBC’s contracted engineer, who has been involved in broadcast engineering since 1989 and with WOBC since 1996, described the broader landscape.
“[Someone like the] Educational Media Foundation puts in a play-to-pray type of format,” he said. “K-Love and the others, they just grab up any available signal, even if it’s just a little 20-watt hole in the spectrum. … Somebody like that would love to program a 1,000-watt station that covers Lorain County.”
The stakes of extended FM silence are high. As a licensed, non-commercial, educational radio station, WOBC is obligated to demonstrate a service to the public interest, which is certainly challenging to prove from what is by and large a glorified — albeit 24-hour — streaming set-up.
“When you have a license, you promise the FCC you’re going to be good to the public and respond to public needs,” Liston said. “If you’ve been off the air for a year … part of the renewal process is demonstrating that you’ve been a good citizen and have served the public interest.”
Kahanov echoed this sentiment.
“[Hypothetically,] whatever entity wants our license can come in and make a case in 2028 [or 2026] and will be correct,” Kahanov said. “They plan to serve the community in a way that we clearly are not. … [Currently,] it’s a terrible paradox. We’re not creating any programming because we don’t have the space and operational capacity. They feed off each other. … How do you advocate for the fact that we could be serving the community better if we’re not provided the tools to do it?”
All of this is to say that the tribulations of WOBC are not unique to this year, but they are in a more fragile place than ever before. In 2021, as result of the Sustainable Infrastructure Project and following Wilder Hall renovations, WOBC’s previous station in Wilder Hall 319 — their space for 60 years — was relocated as a result of a staircase being built through the room. At the time, in fact, there was a grand conception of a “rebuild coordinator,” which never came to fruition.
In a building constructed the same year as the Titanic, the issue of grounding, that is to say the electricity mechanisms in Wilder Hall, recur time and time again. Due to lightning strikes and electrical issues, transmitters have literally blown up before.
“We purchased a new transmitter, but it’s been sitting in the box for over three and a half to four years, because there’s no grounding [in the building],” Liston explained. “We couldn’t install it without the electrical surge suppressor box, which we also purchased, but that box can’t be installed until we get the grounding taken care of. [The transmitter]’s been sitting there not operating and is currently out of warranty.”
In Kahanov’s eyes, the solution is almost insultingly simple, consisting of two types of power connectors and an Ethernet cable. Unfortunately in a world of fiscal years, the reality is never quite so straightforward.
“Renovations are complex, and budget constraints during the work delayed finalization of the WOBC station,” Julian wrote in an email to the Review.
In fact, Julian, WOBC’s faculty advisor since 2024, expressed a lack of knowledge of the required specifications of the station’s FM capabilities, although all teams involved in the process are working to make it possible. It’s no fault of Julian’s — who has been an ally to WOBC’s trials of the last six months — but rather the reality that a faculty advisor is primarily a liaison between the student organization and the College administration. Despite Oberlin College Broadcasting existing as a separate entity to aid WOBC by legally holding their FCC license, there is a tangible lack of support felt from the College.
WOBC, then, as a chartered student organization, operates under the OCB umbrella. To put it cynically, the College owns the radio station and charters a group of students to run it without direct purview of the necessary management beyond programming. In Liston’s view, Oberlin’s administration has historically put the students affiliated in an “awkward position,” where the Board is “expected to run an FCC-compliant radio station” with minimal guidance or oversight.
We get letters from listeners like, ‘Hey, we miss you on FM,’” Kahanov said. “We know we’re actually serving more of a community on FM than we are over internet radio.”
Though an Oberlin College institution for the last 75 years, the community dimension of WOBC’s absence is perhaps the most significant loss, as the frequency reaches residents across Lorain County who have no connection to the College and therefore no reason to seek out internet streaming.
“We have to do something by Aug. 7 or the FCC will say, ‘Hey, WOBC-FM does not exist in Oberlin anymore,’” Liston said. “The license would be made available to any non-profit that has the capability and the finances to run a broadcast FM station — and it’s happened before [at other stations].”
