WUCS 97.9 is currently licensed to Windsor Locks with its antenna atop city place in downtown Hartford. Back in the day they were WPKX licensed to Enfield and served the Springfield Market from an antenna onn Provin Mountain in Feeding Hills, Mass. I was curious. Would someone be able to buy this station from i-Heart Radio and move it back into the Springfield Market? Obviously WARE's translator (97.7) and WHLL's translator (98.1) would have to either change frequencies or shut down.
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Question about WUCS 97.9
- Thread starter MarcB
- Start date
That's not going to happen. WUCS is in a second year of a 10-year contract with UCONN.
A deal that looks worse and worse with each passing year. Should UConn football's experiment with independent status fail and the school scales back the program to FCS from FBS, will WUCS get money back from UConn when advertisers desert the sinking ship?
Why the heck would you want to? I doubt IHeart would sell and to change the city of license youd have to petition the FCC to reallocate 97.9A to another city.. but if you just move the tower site, it is licensed to Windsor locks so you could probably move ti clsoer and not change the COL
Long story short...that station should never have left the Springfield, MA market. It already has to be directional to protect WCTY-FM 97.7 of Norwich and, possibly, WSKQ-FM 97.9 of New York City. The 97.9 signal is lousy once a few miles south or southwest of Hartford (i.e. Kensington section of Berlin, then into Cromwell along CT Route 372). When the Yankees were still alive in the playoffs, I would end up listening to WFAN-AM 660. There was no digital delay either.
The problem is that iHeart (or was it still Clear Channel then?) wanted desperately to get its sports format off WPOP and onto one of its FMs, but couldn't flip a music FM because they were billing too well. Moving 97.9 into Hartford was the only option it had, even though, as you say, the signal has serious issues south of Hartford. Kensington and Meriden are marginal, and the signal is useless in a good part of Wallingford and nearly all of North Haven. All that said, WUCS is still a better nighttime signal for the Yankees than WPOP was, and given UConn's decline into athletic irrelevance (other than the women's basketball team and its grandmotherly fan base), the Yankees might now be the main reason for WUCS to exist.
Now I'm trying to remember what happened first: WMRQ-FM 104.1 being sold off to Full Power Radio (when it became Radio 104.1, starting their second run with modern/alternative rock) or the 97.9 FM move-in to the Hartford/New Britain/Middletown market? In other words, with different timing, could this format have ended up on 104.1 instead?
As for WPOP-AM 1410 of Hartford, what do they air besides Hartford Yard Goats baseball? Do they still carry the Hartford Wolfpack AHL hockey games?
As for WPOP-AM 1410 of Hartford, what do they air besides Hartford Yard Goats baseball? Do they still carry the Hartford Wolfpack AHL hockey games?
CCSU basketball, maybe? No idea, stopped listening to them when they flipped back to right-wing talk.
Full Power Radio bought 104.1 then WURH out of Clear Channel's Aloha Trust in May 2009. 97.9 didn't move into Hartford until January 2012. NewsRadio 1410 and 100.9 FM as WPOP is known is a 4-tier talk station and on the weekend is a clearing house for shows from Premiere Radio Network. Overnights feature FOX Sports Radio. I believe they carry both CCSU Football and Basketball. I'm not 100% sure.
My idea is a hypothetical one. And who's to say WUCS couldn't move to a different frequency?
i highly doubt theres room to make the move easy.. at minimum youd have to reallocate another frequency to the town... and youd likely have to get other stations to move or make changes.. more costly then its worth
I should've made my response clearer. In my original post I asked hypothetically about 97.9 moving back into the Springfield Market. If back in the day 97.9 could serve the Springfield Market while licensed to Enfield and it's antenna in the Springfield Market, I'm certain they could remain licensed to Windsor Locks and be a Springfield Market statioin if they moved their antenna back into that market. And in my response that said "Who's to say that WUCS couldn't change frequencies?" I didn't mean change frequencies as in moving WUCS from 97.9 to say 98.5 (I'm making frequencies up here. I know 98.5 is Bomba-FM), I'm talking moving WUCS's existing format to a different frequency. For lack of a better example in a hypothetical scenario move WUCS's format to 105.9 FM.
Because iHeart wasn't and isn't going to blow up any of its existing music-formatted stations for sports, especially in a market with no major league pro teams and only one big time college, nor would it sell WUCS to someone else and agree to have it swap frequencies (and power, and coverage) with WHCN.
ESPN isn't happy about 97.9's crappy signal. I know a woman who works there there (or at least did when they launched ESPN Radio on 97.9) and she told me ESPN was flooded with complaints about 97.9's crappy signal.
BTW, off topic. The woman I know who works at ESPN told me security is really strict. She told me that if she or someone else wants to or needs to visit a worker in another department they need to show their employee ID badges. Putting this into simpler terms - at one local supermarket the deli department is located next to the bakery department. If that was ESPN an employee in the bakery would need to show their ID before being allowed to visit an employee in the deli and vice versa. *eye roll*
BTW, off topic. The woman I know who works at ESPN told me security is really strict. She told me that if she or someone else wants to or needs to visit a worker in another department they need to show their employee ID badges. Putting this into simpler terms - at one local supermarket the deli department is located next to the bakery department. If that was ESPN an employee in the bakery would need to show their ID before being allowed to visit an employee in the deli and vice versa. *eye roll*
It's a way to ensure that the workers are working, not visiting with friends, on company time. Some companies are tough that way. Even at companies that aren't, you're likely to get a talking-to from a superior if you're seen in another department making small talk when you should be at your desk/work station.
As for ESPN's supposed dissatisfaction with its Hartford-market signal -- based on hearsay from one lower-level employee -- there's little ESPN can do other than find another affiliate when its deal with iHeart expires, and I have no idea when that is, or which of the other FM operators in the market would be eager to drop an existing format on a full-coverage signal for sports, a format whose inherent weaknesses in the market I've detailed already.
I've always wondered why ESPN can't make the local signal a flagship. Can they buy the channel from iHeart?
My guess would be no. In NYC 98.7 is still owned by Emmis, but is LMA'd to ESPN, while 1050-AM, which was ESPN Desportes for a few years before that network was shut down in September is owned by ESPN. 1050-AM had previously been ESPN New York.
1050 is still ESPN Radio.
Why would they want to? Hartford has no major league teams. In fact, it is the largest TV market without one, and the next three in the rankings all have one. The only reasons ESPN is still in Bristol are the sweetheart property tax deal it gets and its relative proximity to New York City. I guarantee that if ESPN had been founded in a minor-league market similar in size to Hartford -- West Palm Beach, Harrisburg, Birmingham -- it would have been long gone to New York or Los Angeles by the turn of the millennium, if not sooner. Coverage of a minor-league market with lukewarm local sports interest is hardly a high enough priority for Disney to even be thinking about buying a radio station from iHeart.
Don't forget how big the campus in Bristol is, even 15 years ago I doubt they could easily move everything out.
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