3,500 Watts licensed 20 miles south of Boston equates to a full market signal?
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Just a very dumb question - format holes
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Which one is that?
I thought that we were talking about WKAF. Was I incorrect on the above info? If so, then my bad!
From a different thread:
Ok, not 3,500 watts as mentioned, but a much lower 2,050 instead?
Ok, not 3,500 watts as mentioned, but a much lower 2,050 instead?
It has a 60 dbu that covers the Boston HDBA. That makes it a perfect choice for its existing format.From a different thread:
Ok, not 3,500 watts as mentioned, but a much lower 2,050 instead?
A gold based Smooth AC is the right direction to go for 97.7 imo.
That could be a good idea. Is there still a market for it South of Boston?
97.7's COL is Brockton, but that doesn't really make it a "south of Boston" station anymore. It's on Great Blue Hill right where Boston-licensed WGBH is. It puts city-grade over the entire city of Boston and north almost to the north side of 128.
Still doesn't make it a full-market signal, but David is spot on in identifying it as a perfect signal if your goal is to superserve the HDBA.
Still doesn't make it a full-market signal, but David is spot on in identifying it as a perfect signal if your goal is to superserve the HDBA.
The transmitter is less than eight miles from downtown Boston, on 600+ foot Blue Hill. It's also within just a few miles of, and line of sight from many, of Boston's urban neighborhoods. That's why the format it has is probably the most practical one for it.
Did they move their transmitter just before or after the sale of WCAV?
A huge percentage of its primary coverage is ethnic, and that ancient-leaning AC format under-indexes among Blacks and Hispanics. This is in part because the music tends to be mostly for "old white people" and also because the two major ethnic groups are over 10 years younger in average age than the non-Hispanic white part of the market. Sot he format fails on ethnicity and on target age.
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Long after. WCAV went from the Enterprise to KJI Broadcasting in 1997 and from KJI to Radio One in 1999. It was Radio One that flipped to a Black-oriented format (as WBOT, the original "Hot 97") and that moved it to Blue Hill in 2005. It had already moved once before, from the old WBET AM site to a tower in Abington in 1999.
A good example of what Scott is explaining is the combo of KRCD and KRCD in Inglewood and West Covina, CA. Both are conforming Class A stations, and have little signal farther south than Santa Ana, and farther north than Hollywood. But the cover 85% of metro area Spanish dominant Hispanics and have successfully competed with the full Class B station in the market, having beaten every one of them at least in a couple of books over the last 20 years.
Neither station was every particularly successful prior to that move to Spanish in 2000, even when combined as a sumulcast with an Urban AC format... one signal covered an HDBA, the other totally missed the Black population.
It's a question of matching the signal with the audience. 97.7 in Boston is a near-perfect Urban signal.
I wouldn't think so for "Gold-Based Smooth AC", with 50kW WPLM-FM Plymouth ("Easy 99.1") being a "Gold-Based Smooth AC" with strong coverage of all of Southeastern MA and the Boston Metro-South, and 95.9 WATD Marshfield, a good signal along the South Shore coast, being essentially a "Gold-Based AC" during their regular weekday daytime music format.
What's interesting to me about the 97.7 signal is that even from Blue Hill, it does two things well: as you correctly note, it super-serves the ethnic communities in Boston's neighborhoods. But it's also a very good signal over a huge swath of the southern and southwestern suburbs, and it's even pretty respectable these days to the west.
Under other circumstances, I could easily imagine it becoming a valuable asset to someone like Ed Perry - it nicely complements the South Shore coverage he has on WATD-FM, and he knows how to program and sell to the suburbs.
But if you wanted to do something that reached all of Boston's suburban and exurban sprawl, you'd still need to add something up north, like 101.7 or 104.9, and even then you'd have some signal gaps. (No class A signal is very good at penetrating all the RF that surrounds the big FM sites in Newton and Needham, for instance.)
Another important factor is that a high percentage of ethnic group members who work tend to do so in their own geographic area. While by no means an absolute, there is a higher percentage than with non-Hispanic white workers.
This means that the Class A signal serves many both at home and at work and while commuting. Not so with an general market format where commute distances average greater and the signal does not match the distances in many cases.
Thanks!
But do not forget that they used to be Smooth Jazz back during the early to mid 1990s too as "99.1 The One!" This was back when 96.9 was smooth jazz also. I do not recall those calls. Were they WSJZ? By chance?
I think where this thread is going is that Boston has more signals than there are sellable formats. Which is why there are two sports stations, two country stations, two classic rock stations, etc. Just because a particular station is getting low ratings doesn't mean the owner can't combine that audience with a similar group from another co-owned station and package it to a group of advertisers. You're not always selling numbers. Sometimes you're selling demos.
You skipped over Classic Hits.
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