It was just a contest for a free calendar, and we're already halfway through January. I don't know why you're trying to deny
@kevtronics his well-earned win.
If kevtronics will DM me with a mailing address, I'll gladly send out the calendar.
But the WRCR saga in many ways proves out exactly the point I'm trying to make, because the unwritten piece to my challenge was "spent all that money AND succeeded as a result," and WRCR has been anything but a success.
Let's go to the videotape:
The old WRCR 1300 signal was awful. It was one of the last AMs squeezed in to the AM dial around NYC in the 1960s, protecting 1280 NYC, 1290 on LI and Binghamton, 1300 in New Haven and Hazleton and Albany, 1310 in Mount Kisco and so on. 500 watts aimed away from anywhere you'd have wanted it to go.
Alex started trying to move it to the X-band back in 2003, then spent a decade (and presumably a bunch of $) lobbying politicians to open a special window to get WRCR off 1300. He got what he wanted, in the worst possible way: the FCC opened a special auction window for the frequency, and in 2014 he paid $409,000 (!) to outbid WRKL.
By then, one of the three 1300 towers had fallen in a storm and the other two were close to collapse, and 1300 was running on STA at 125 watts. So, yes, he spent money on a new tower and transmitter - but there's an argument to be made that whether he was staying on 1300 or going to 1700, this wasn't so much "invest in a new facility" as "make up for decades of deferred maintenance in order to stay on the air at all." Either way, we're now probably at something like $700,000 down the hole.
So, after all of that, WRCR was a success, right?
Fast forward to 2017: Alex had spent more money to move the studios out of a dead shopping mall before it was torn down, relocating it to a visible (but expensive) spot at the local minor-league ballpark. But he was also in a dispute with the owner of the tower land, which he was leasing. Things went downhill fast: the local talk format from those new studios went streaming-only, replaced by an Indian-language leased time format, which in turn was replaced by silence when the lease deal went south.
WRCR was then off the air for a year and a half (returning briefly in the summer of 2018 just to keep the license alive). Then came another money drain to get the thing back on the air in 2019 from a STA site with 250 watts into a wire antenna. The ballpark studios also went away, so add more $ to relocate to a new leased studio site.
And then it took another two years (because everything with AM moves takes a lot of time) to locate and buy a new permanent site and get it approved and built out, except the new site is on a hilltop with much worse soil than the old one was and it's located too far north to reach the population centers of southern Rockland County where most of the people and money are. Even with 10 kW it's a semi-fringe signal at my "home base" at my cousin's place in Montebello, right off the busy Route 59 corridor that used to be local to WRCR. There was a GoFundMe campaign along the way seeking $35,000 to pay for the move, which raised... $7,000.
I'm not privy to WRCR's financials, but there's no way that all of this - new tower that was in use for barely two years, transmitter, umpteen zillion FCC filings, building out at an STA site and then at a new site - cost anything less than a million-plus dollars, maybe closer to two. And I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to speak for Alex, who's a good guy with a real love for radio, but I wonder if he'd do all that again if he knew how it would turn out. (On the other hand, as a doctor, maybe he's needed a tax loss all these years?)
Anyway, if the idea here is to show that there's some kind of active interest in making an improvement to existing AMs on their existing frequencies (which is, let's remember, the proposition Albert David is making), this doesn't really make the case at all. It squeaks in as "within the last decade" only because it started 20 years ago and took almost a decade to make it through the regulatory process. It was really a last-gasp X-band move, a relic of that now-dead process from the 1990s.
And most of all: if you were in Alex's shoes, is this what you would have spent seven figures on over the years?
