Border blaster
On November 9, 1972, in Washington, D.C., the United States and Mexico signed an "Agreement Concerning Frequency Modulation Broadcasting in the 87.5 to 108 MHz Band".
In contrast to pirate radio stations which broadcast illegally, border blasters are generally licensed by the government upon whose soil they are located.
US and Canadian stations adhere to comparable maximum power levels, and the encroachment is regarded as unintentional and largely unavoidable.
The station airs a mixture of music, news and talk focused on the South Asian communities in Metro Vancouver.
The move has attracted much criticism from the local citizens of Point Roberts and the adjacent densely populated community of Tsawwassen, British Columbia, because it would cause harmful blanketing interference.
American-owned until 1970 as part of the RKO General chain (along with such other top 40 powerhouses as KHJ in Los Angeles and KFRC in San Francisco), it functioned essentially as a Detroit-market station during the 1960s and 1970s.
[citation needed] WLYK is another example of a border blaster, broadcasting from a transmitter in New York State and serving the adjacent Kingston, Ontario, area; its operator Rogers Communications holds an ownership stake in its U.S.-based licensee.
WIVB-TV, prior to the digital television transition, could be seen as a U.S. border blaster into Canada (as Western New York is a smaller market than Southern Ontario, which boasts the major world city of Toronto); it operated with 100,000 watts of power on the VHF low band (channel 4), even after the Federal Communications Commission reduced the maximum allowed power for that band to 80,000 watts.
Likewise, the small market of Burlington, Vermont, and Plattsburgh, New York, found it could reach a larger audience in Montreal.
Canadian regulators put in simultaneous substitution requirements to prevent losing revenue to these American border-blasters (this forced KCND's owners to sell the station to Canadian interests, who transformed the station into modern-day Winnipeg, Manitoba-based CKND-TV; Burlington station WFFF-TV entered into a famous cross-border scheduling feud over the simsub problems, while WKBW, after unsuccessfully suing to bar the CRTC from enforcing it on systems that only operate in one province in 1977, competed mainly by focusing on its unique brand of local news, which could not be simsubbed).
Also in Western New York, radio station WTOR is licensed to the northwesternmost municipality in the region (Youngstown), operates with a directional signal covering Southern Ontario but very little American territory, and is brokered to a Canadian ethnic broadcaster based in Mississauga; it maintains its U.S. license and transmitter site as a legal fiction, with ethnic broadcaster Sima Birach holding the station's license and claiming himself as "operations manager" even as he seldom appears at the station's nominal U.S. studio in person.
At least one border blaster targets the Russian Far East: KICY broadcasts its religious programming on a 50,000-watt clear-channel directional signal pointed due west from the Seward Peninsula, one of the westernmost land masses in North America.
The PSA requirement has produced controversy even amongst officials in Mexico, for reasons including reinforcing negative perceptions of the country, taking up airtime that could be used to promote cross-border tourism and interactions instead, and their poor quality.
