It seems the City of License has changed for several big Mexican AM stations. 690 XEXX and 1090 XEPRS are no longer licensed to Tijuana. XEXX is now licensed to Rosarita. XEPRS's city of license is Rancho del Mar. Google maps doesn't even list a Rancho del Mar. It's a very small community in the Tijuana suburbs.
In Monterrey, 50,000 watt XEG and XEMR are out. XEG is now licensed to Guadalupe, XEMR to Apodaca.
In the U.S. some stations, usually FM, change their city of license to get a favor from the FCC. We'll move the city of license to a previously unserved community if you let us increase the power or move the tower to our advantage. But these Mexican AMs have been around since the 1940s. Do they need favors? In the U.S. the big AM stations don't change their city of license. WGN is not changing its COL to some suburb of Chicago. KFI is still in LA, not Encino or Anaheim.
Do Mexicans even care what city their station is licensed to?
The answer is...nope. There's also *no concept of community of license* to tether stations down.
This is because:
Transmitter sites sometimes have stations from several different "cities". A good example is in Michoacán, where there is a mountain called Cerro Burro. This is an important mountain for broadcasting in the region. On Cerro Burro are four TV stations — XHBG, licensed to Uruapan but with studios in Morelia; XHMOW, licensed to Morelia; XHURT, licensed to Uruapan (these form a Televisa pair); and XHCBM Pátzcuaro.
The reason this happens is because our mountain is halfway between between Morelia (the state capital) and Uruapan (another sizable community) and located in the municipality of Pátzcuaro (municipalities are basically counties named after their largest and dominant city). It also occurs because the stations, especially the first three, are powerful. XHMOW was the most powerful UHF analog station in the country at 3,800 kW; in Mexico, 338 kW digital is still nothing to sneeze at.
A general coverage area may be stipulated. When Imagen Televisión was built — just this year — Imagen was given 123 stations and told it had to build a station to serve people in each circular coverage area. In three cases, the city in which the transmitter was built was not the city at the center of the coverage area: XHCTCY Querétaro, Querétaro (Celaya, Guanajuato), XHCTLV Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz (La Venta, Tabasco), and XHCTIX Pachuca, Hidalgo (Ixmiquilpan).
There are stations licensed to mountains (such as XHCMM-FM and XHPTP-TDT).
Regulatory impact related to location tends to be electoral. It's no accident that the National Electoral Institute (INE) maintains an annual catalog of radio and TV stations and their coverage areas.
To your examples...
-XERB/XEPRS has
never been listed in Tijuana. Reading the most recent concession renewal, you don't even see the word Tijuana, mostly Rosarito which is its own municipality. A more appropriate comparison is Puerto Nuevo, which is a small community in a massive municipality.
-Guadalupe and Apodaca are suburbs of Monterrey — one of few metros that sprawls over multiple municipalities. For both XEG and XEMR, the switch from Monterrey to Guadalupe occurred with the 2004 concession renewal.
-In some cases, it's just the character of the lists. Take XEGNAY Tepic, Nayarit — the table puts it at Puerta de la Laguna,
which happens to be in Tepic. (It's also not a new station, but merely an old station that had to get a new concession. When it was XETNC it was listed as Tepic.)
There are others:
-Guadalajara is an example of "not all stations say Guadalajara". A bunch say Tlaquepaque, which is particularly important because the municipality of Tlaquepaque is home to Cerro del Cuatro, the primary FM and TV tower site for the metro. In other cases, it's a listing of where the actual stick is. (Variation in transmitter location from COL occurs in the US, too — Phoenix's South Mountain contains stations nominally licensed to Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe and Tolleson.)
