WPLY (Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania)

WPLY (960 AM) was a radio station licensed to serve Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, United States. The station was owned by Nassau Broadcasting Partners.

WPLY broadcast a news/talk radio format.[2] The station simulcast with WVPO (840 AM) in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

The station was assigned the WPLY call letters by the Federal Communications Commission on March 10, 2005.[1]

WPLY originally signed on in April 1981 as WPCN. The locally-owned community radio station was notably innovative at the time for installing serial #1 of the Continental Model 314R1 PWM transmitter, which ushered in an era of enhanced audio fidelity and efficient, power-saving operation (since replaced with a Harris Gates One). The four towers, employing elevated feeds, are guyed with non-conductive Phillystran cable, also very innovative at the time.

In January 2012, the Federal Communications Commission issued a notice of apparent liability and proposed a $17,000 fine against Nassau Broadcasting II, stating WPLY "willfully and repeatedly violated" FCC regulations. The investigation leading to the notice stemmed from a random inspection conducted at the WPLY facilities in March 2010, during which it was discovered that the station had been transmitting from only one of its four antennas at greatly reduced power (250 watts) without receiving authorization and had been doing so since Nassau purchased the station in 2000. FCC regulations require that stations unable to operate at full power must apply for a temporary authorization to operate at reduced power, which WPLY did only after the 2010 inspection, claiming that the station's antenna array was "severely deteriorated" and in need of extensive repairs.[3]

In addition, the notice states that WPLY did not maintain an FCC-required public file, and that station personnel claimed that they had never kept such a file.[3]

WPLY left the air June 27, 2011 in order to determine if its antenna system needed to be either repaired or replaced.[4] The station never resumed broadcasting, and on March 6, 2014 the station's license was canceled for failure to broadcast for a year.[5]

As of early 2019, the four tower array of WPLY had been dismantled and removed. The tower site at the intersection of Interstates 380 and 80 is now vacant.