Looking Back on 10 Years of En Frecuencia
The most impactful stories from a decade of reporting
You could have easily missed it as another thread on the WTFDA Forums on the afternoon of July 26, 2014.
“OPMA is changing…” I wrote, reporting on the impending rename to the Sistema Público de Radiodifusión del Estado Mexicano.
But I never stopped writing. I spent five years on a forum and another four and a half on Medium. In that time, I’ve brought to the fore new kinds of stories; kept DXers informed on topics ranging from the analog television shutdown to the rise of new FM stations in two commercial auctions; and occasionally had startling results.
For the tenth anniversary of En Frecuencia, I wanted to highlight a story from each year (that’s actually 11 years) that I thought was particularly impactful or prescient. This is tough in the early years because EF had a different focus in its early years.
2014
En Frecuencia came into existence just twelve days after the promulgation of the Ley Federal de Telecomunicaciones y Radiodifusión. The law got the digital television transition in the country back on track, and late 2014 and early 2015 were extremely busy months for broadcasters as digital television transmitters went into service all across the country ahead of the first new shutoff dates in 2015.
It was also a year when a lot of Mexican television history turned up in the newly added Registro Público de Concesiones. In the early years, EF fixed lots of errors in DXers’ understanding of Mexican television. The new documents demystified sites like Cerro Burro in Michoacán, revealed histories of many of the more obscure local repeaters, and started to unravel the real stories of shadows (equipos complementarios).
2015
This year was more of the same. My content focused nearly exclusively on television in the early years of En Frecuencia. There was also the IFT-1 television station auction, which in the long run was something of a bust (Imagen Televisión is still building transmitters years later, Grupo Radio Centro wound up with a millstone around its neck that hurt its finances for years with nothing to show, and Organización Editorial Mexicana never made it to the bid because of its owner’s death).
This was a fun time. Transmitter test loops from different manufacturers were signs of impending new launches. The diver, used by Rohde & Schwarz, was a common sight for some networks. The Harris/GatesAir transmitter in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, used an extract from a newscast from U.S. station WRAL-TV (a pioneer in digital broadcasting) for video. State networks struggled to make the expensive and complicated leap to digital transmissions. The SPR began to lay the groundwork for expansion with a request for 20 new transmitters, only a handful of which came to fruition.
I also did this historical feature on the days when Canal 5 was not only secondary but not even full-time, with Telesecundaria programming tying up its transmitters — but not everywhere.
I slowly ramped up radio coverage with the news that XEDA-AM 1290 Mexico City called it quits, its owner Radio S.A. having declared that there was no market for AM and thus for the long-running Radio Trece. That year, I also awarded some “Mexxies” including “Foolish Business Decision”, “Most Endangered Species”, and “Best Reception of a Spanish-Language Television Station”.
At the end of the year, the leap was made for almost all stations.
2016
On May 31, 2016, I created the first version of a valuable interim guide to Mexican broadcast radio station locations. At the time, exact coordinates for stations were not readily available, and Google Street View and other landmarks allowed me to compile sites for more than 200 stations.
Imagen Televisión was born with its initial wave of a few dozen transmitters, which EF was first to report the technical parameters for and for which a Google custom map is still maintained; virtual channels were changed to a national assignment scheme; the groundwork for second-wave AM-FM migration was laid; the first indigenous radio concessions were authorized; and I began reporting on noncommercial radio, such as the Veracruz social wolfpack (XHPAPA/XHALAM/XHTLAC) with its connections to disgraced governor Javier Duarte.
I think the biggest story was TV Azteca’s master move of going to channel 1, which stunned me at the time:
There also is a major change that will assign channel 1 nationwide to Azteca Trece. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Among the exclusives I had this year were 52MX (now MVS TV)’s subchannel authorization for Multimedios transmitters, a historic event given MVS’s long (and ultimately canceled) fight to enter broadcasting on its own concession.
2017
In February 2017, I tackled the question of the 39 ghost stations of 2000, none of which were ever awarded, and wondered why they had sat. This later turned into a full En Frecuencia special report in 2019, which was first to reveal that there had been nearly 600 applications for them!
The big story of the year was the IFT-4 auction and its arguable mishandling, with Tecnoradio driving up bids and causing overpayment and the withdrawal of other bidders, even leading to the loss of otherwise likely stations. EF was first to cover the identities of the leaders and the construction of the many new stations that followed (and, in some cases, didn’t follow). It was first to report the court-ordered grant of XHMRT-FM 102.5 in Tampico after station spacing restrictions were relaxed, the first Article 90 clear authorized (XHACA-FM Acapulco, which took years to slide down from 106.3 to 96.1), and Multimedios Radio’s plans for its new IFT-4 stations based on social media accounts.
2018
If you could mark a turning point for En Frecuencia, it was this story on April 24, 2018, when my intensive searching for the fates of IFT-4 radio stations landed me a whopper of a story: the name, Aire Libre, for the impending migration-relaunch of Mexico City’s XHINFO-FM 105.3. It would not be the last time that Aire Libre — whose three-year operational history was full of twists and turns — made news at En Frecuencia.
This was the point when I realized I was starting to serve not just a DXer audience but a general audience with content nobody else was bothering to cover. I also had some other stories that stuck with me, including this one from Cancún:
It was also the first year where EF began regular transparency requests for new noncommercial (public and social) radio station applications, which have become an annual staple even as the number of them has declined considerably.
2019
There really is no contest from this transitional year that saw the Mexico Beat become En Frecuencia and move to Medium: it’s the story that launched concesiones vencidas into the lexicon, using an IFT internal letter that was uploaded in apparent error and only available for a handful of hours, and was picked up by other outlets including El Economista.
The vencidas crisis has triggered dozens of lawsuits, whose success has been limited to saying “the IFT Pleno must do this, not the Director General of Broadcast Concessions”, but very few stations have actually left the air with their concession, creating a class of “zombies” that has persisted in the last five years. You can still listen to most of the 17 “original” vencidas today, plus dozens of others.
If one story challenges, it might actually be this one:
Elsa Cuéllar was an interesting woman, often in unsavory ways. You can actually read about her non-broadcast criminal activities in a recently published book.
2020
No event seems to have done more to change the course of Mexican public broadcasting — transmission, not content — than the COVID-19 shutdowns and the Aprende en Casa program. This guide was one of the most-viewed posts in EF history:
It exposed the massive gaps in public broadcasting infrastructure and led to dozens of new station applications in the years that followed. The first version required Televisa to step in to serve areas that had no noncommercial broadcaster, and learning where they did took a month!
2021
In terms of news stories, EF got a big one to break in ’21: the acquisition of ABC Radio by NTR, which is still rippling through the industry three years later.
A group of stories that went together was the XHINFO crisis, in which EF was first to piece together that the “new” transmitter was in fact a site move and eviction of the indebted Aire Libre by goading the IFT to update its publicly available records.
And yes, this belongs in 2021 too, though its consequences and follow-up played out in 2022 and subsequent years. On December 17, nearly two months before local outlets, En Frecuencia was first to break news of the Hidalgo state network’s concession crisis, which has led to a criminal arrest and permanent loss of service:
2022
Two of En Frecuencia’s three most-viewed stories ever were published in early 2022. One explained something nobody else would, affecting Televisa in Morelia as it unhooked from its last local partner:
The other was EF’s first report of the historic shutdown of XHTRES-TDT Mexico City, an exclusive and far and away the most-viewed post in the history of this blog:
2023
Why does En Frecuencia exist? Because sometimes stories are so technical that the national media can’t handle them correctly. When Hurricane Otis slammed into Acapulco, it wiped out many, but not all, broadcast towers. And EF was there to report what exactly was lost for good and what was just silent in one of the single most devastating disasters in Mexican broadcasting history. Some outlets said Televisa’s tower, locally famous for its Christmas light assembly, had fallen. But it didn’t.
EF also followed the recovery of Acapulco broadcasters in the wake of Otis.
2024
I’d have to give the nod to a piece from earlier this year. The story of XHCSAP-FM, a Christian-aligned social station, had been En Frecuencia fodder for the whole decade, but it attained new heights just this month when the station, in its second incarnation, made a decision that has cost it its W Radio affiliation:
En Frecuencia exists because of the confidence that you, my readers — radio fans, TV viewers, industry employees and regulators — have placed in me over the last ten years. I know that what I do matters because you’ve told me and because of the impact I’ve seen my own stories have.
