• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

AM Frequency of the Week: 850

Status
Not open for further replies.
cyberdad

cyberdad

Crystal Lake, IL....

Days: Conpletely Blank since the local on 850 went silent. 2.5 kw from a figure eight pattern aimed right at me from less than 3 miles away, Most recemt call letters were local heritage WAIT (longtime occupant of 820.)

Nights. Usually KOA with a fair to weak signal. Sometimes WKNR from Cleveland sneaks in.

Other location: At our Gulf location near Pensacola, WXJC from Birmingham, AL rules at night. Day is fairly empty, but sometimes WRUF from Gainesville, FL can be audible (barely).
 
Old location in Oakland, CA - Maybe KOA every once in a while. (Daytimes: adjacent to 860 KTRB, the move-in from Modesto to San Francisco that ultimately was a disaster)

Legacy/Historic - I spent my teenage years near St. Louis. I knew enough about radio to know that KFUO was supposed to be a daytime station. But, evening after evening, they stayed on for about an hour after sunset. I finally learned that KFUO actually had a "limited time" license that allowed it to stay on until Denver's local sunset time. So KFUO got an extra hour compared to the other St. Louis area daytimers. On July 1, 1940 KFUO shifted to the 830 frequency - which became 850 after NARBA in 1941 - to resolve what had become a contentious share-time arrangement with 550 KSD. KFUO's ad in (ironically) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explained, "The new frequency is approximately 1/3 of the distance from KFUO's present frequency toward the other end of the dial." Kind of an odd way of explaining it, but....

Also during the years I lived near St. Louis, I would see quite a few obituaries where memorials were suggested to the KFUO station fund at the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Yes, there were a lot of Lutherans in east-central Missouri!

Present-day - I moved to Denver two weeks ago, so KOA is what I get on 850 all the time. Once I got some of the computers up and running, I started looking at the history cards for the local stations. A detail in the KOA history card caught my eye. Its original location as built by General Electric was 1370 Krameria Street. Hmmm...I think to myself...that's six or seven blocks from my house. So I decided to dig into the history of the site. Under NBC's auspices, KOA increased power to 50 kw and moved to Aurora sometime around 1933. In 1937, the Colorado state highway department bought the building for $25,000 to serve as a laboratory for "testing highway materials", according to an Associated Press dispatch on March 25. That same story cited the original cost of the building as $95,000. The building was sold in 1954.

Sometime between then and now, this happened:

20230924_103131-resized.jpg
Yep, that's what used to be 1370 Krameria. The address is now on East 14th Avenue.

I can find that there was a Safeway store there in 1972, but not sure about earlier years between then and 1954. Hard to imagine there was once a major radio facility there.

About present-day KOA - I find it to be a disappointing station. News coverage is skimpy and often of the rip-and-read variety, even in the morning news block. The rest of the day is worse. Talk programming is a bunch of right-wing talking points, out of touch with what Denver has become. Lots of sports talk and sports coverage, which probably covers up the deficiencies in other times of the day. I wonder what it was like before General Electric sold it. It had to have been an impressive operation.
 
Last edited:
Near north Chicago suburbs: days nothing. Nights mostly KOA with a decent signal. Once in awhile I hear WKNR during critical hours
 
Sunset
WFTL - West Palm Beach - 850 WFTL - News, talk

Nights
WRUF - Gainesville FL -University of Florida - Sports talk- ESPN

kw - Melbourne FL
 
East Tennessee: Our 850 just changed from WKVL to WSMM. As WKVL, it once had 50,000 watts daytime, pointed Southeast, but with stricter critical hours requirements, but allowed to stay on at lower power through Denver sunset as I recall. During critical hours it took interference from WKNR, Cleveland.
WKVL lost it's lease for the directional pattern (as did 670) and was off air for a year. During that time, I caught WKNR in the middle of the day. It returned with 1000 watts, diplexed with WGAP-1400.

During WKVL's absence, I caught a good signal from KOA before sunset at least once.

Retro/other: Ohio: WKNR primarily, with KFUO often during critical hours. Otherwise nights is a mix including KOA.

When I briefly lived in Quincy IL and worked in Hannibal, MO, KFUO was a semi-local.
 
Wilmington Delaware

Days - Nothing

Nights - A mix of weak signals. This evening I heard a faint ESPN broadcast of Sunday Night Baseball so that may have been WKNR. I heard WTAR in Norfolk VA once when they carried Washington Nationals games.
 
Mark Roberts said:
Legacy/Historic - I spent my teenage years near St. Louis. I knew enough about radio to know that KFUO was supposed to be a daytime station.
Click to expand...
Our local 850 operated under the same arrangement Since it signed as WCLR on in 1965. before then, KFUO used to boom in during that hour before sunset. Fast forward a decade, and I was working th ere. Owner Mal Bellairs was a great guy, a great storyteller, and the ultimate on-air ladies man, hence the WIVS call letters. He wasn't the greatest businessman, but his sons Rick and Jerry picked up the slack on that end. I enjoyed working with all three of them.

***
I told the story last week about when I left radio for the parallel business of print. I noted that one of my ex radio bosses for years referred to me as "leaving radio and deciding to "go straight" He meant it in the good natured humorous way, that was his true self both on and off the air.

We lost Mal about a dozen or so years ago after a long, happy, and successful life. I regretted that I was out of town when he passed and missed his funeral, I miss him to this day.

Fun fact: you can catch a glimpse of mal (and son Rick) as extras in the film "Groundhog Day", which was filmed in Woodstock, IL. 7 miles northwest of Crystal Lake where we live, and where Mal made his home. He recognized My wife, Nary Ann on the set and hung out with her during some of the downtime.

I wasn't around to defend myself!
 
Last edited:
850 here days used to be WEEU Reading. Years ago they moved to 830 and a different tower site. Nowadays there's nothing days there.
So 850 became a SSS, Nighttime and SRS channel.
WYLF in upstate NY and WRBZ Raleigh were sundown catches.
WEEI Boston and WRMR Cleveland were nighttime logs.
For a few overnigts this past January, WTAR Norfolk was atop 850. Some of you folks probably caught them at the time ; I had posted about that. One of those overnight session, for example (truth), they were the loudest thing on the dial !
* * * * *
A definite fly in the 850 soup (maybe a fly as tall as Jeff Goldblum) is the inscrutable Johnstown PA on 850. Unheard here, and unheard back in Queens. A few of us kids motored out that wayaround 1972 .... Altoona, Johnstown .... to see the Horseshoe Curve and a Long Island radio buddy. Two (click) two (click) two trips in one. The local radio word was that 850 Johnstown, 'WJAC' back then, had a signal that was a thousand miles long and 15 feet wide. Here's their 24/7 pattern. A guess suggests that they've had this same U3 / 10000 watt pattern since at least the mid-60's.
Scroll to the bottom to see their pattern. Nine towers -- no waiting.

FCCInfo Results

FCC Info is a Radio and Television Station Search Engine provided by Cavell, Mertz & Associates, Inc.
fccinfo.com
 
Last edited:
Boise Idaho
Sunset KOA & KHHO Tacoma fighting it out.
All KOA at night.
Seem to recollect there used to be a Canadian on 850 out west?
 
@boiseengineer

An old National Radio Club logbook here lists a CKRD Red Deer, Alta, 10000 omni day and 1000 directioal night,
and a CJJC Langley B.C., 1000 day and night, different directional patterns.
Maybe these will be of help ?
 
cyberdad said:
Our local 850 operated under the same arrangement Since it signed as WCLR on in 1965. before then, KFUO used to boom in during that hour before sunset. Fast forward a decade, and I was working th ere. Mal was a great guy, a great storyteller, and the ultimate on-air ladies man, hence the WIVS call letters. He wasn't the greatest businessman, but his sons Rick and Jerry picked up the slack on that end. I enjoyed working with all three of them.

***
I told the story last week about when I left radio for the parallel business of print. I noted that one of my ex radio bosses for years referred to me as "leaving radio and deciding to "go straight" He meant it in the good natured humorous way, that was his true self both on and off the air.

We lost Mal about a dozen or so years ago after a long, happy, and successful life. I regretted that I was out of town when he passed and missed his funeral, I miss him to this day.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing you're talking about Mal Bellairs. Folks who never spent time in Chicago might not know the name.
 
DFW, Texas

Daytime: Local KJON Carrollton, TX.
Nights: KOA with a consistently good signal. I have heard WKNR Cleveland, OH with sports a few times when nulling KOA.
Sunrise: KFUO Clayton, MO and WJXC Birmingham, AL have been heard clearly at times.
 
Chicago by the lakeshore:

Daytime: Nothing usually. On Lake Shore Drive itself you can get a glimpse of WSMZ Muskegon, MI at times.

Critical Hours / Nighttime: KOA Denver dominates at night. I've gotten several other stations, usually around sunset. I've heard KFUO in Clayton, MO, WPTK Raleigh, WQRM Duluth, WKNR Cleveland (which can come in quite well briefly around sunset), and KJON in Carrollton, TX.
 
From Pickerington, Ohio ... a strong WKNR by day, 6-7 on a 1-to-10 scale. They push a huge lobe to the southwest daytime.
It completely disappears in a flash at pattern change, and if anything replaces it it's a weak KOA. Seems to come in better this far east during the winter, at least in my experience.
 
@Battenkill50

Some good, serendipitous memories there from your mention of WRUF.
The Folks retired to The Villages, FL, and I spent several vacations there. Oe of the treats was WRUF, circa 1997 or so, playing some mild form of cabaret jazz in the afternoon.
And their great singing station ID jingle.
Virtually the same as the terrific singing station ID from previous AMFOTW's 840, WHAS Louisville.
Since an LPFM some of us ran for a few years had the city-of-license 'Girardville', we did a casual search for the jingle company. With air names like Richie Hall, Carol Laing, The Late Steve Green and Allie Kaye, The logo sting would've worked fine as a jingle / jock shout for us, too. But other factors of priority got in the way,
I'd post those WRUF and 'Eighty-fourrrrrr' WHAS jingles here but don't know how.

In any case, the memories are appreciated! Thanks!
 
KeithE4 said:
I'm guessing you're talking about Mal Bellairs. Folks who never spent time in Chicago might not know the name.
Click to expand...
Yes, Mal Bellairs.
Just fixed it. Thx for the heads up. Not sure how his last name deleted, but I've been having save problems with my browserMal-Bellairs.jpg
 
Last edited:
Nutley, NJ. Daytime WAXB Ridgefield, CT (weak but audible)

Nighttime: Usually a mix of WEEI Boston and WKNR Cleveland. I used to always try for KOA but I never had luck
 
Status
Not open for further replies.


Back
Top Bottom