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WHKW - WHK
- Thread starter johnbasalla
- Start date
But like WAKS, WARF's studios are physically in downtown Cleveland.
So 1350 The Gambler is based in Cleveland, promoted as serving Cleveland, licensed to Akron, with the tower in Cuyahoga Falls.
1350 had served Akron since it's founding as WADC, heyday as WSLR ("Whistler"), time as an R&B station (WTOU "The Touch"), brief foray into liberal radio ("Radio Free Ohio") and the bulk of it's time as a sports station
But in early 2020 (right before the pandemic hit), it was rechristened as "The Gambler" and readjusted as a Cleveland station, primarily to serve as a flanker to WTAM.
I remember seeing him back in the day helping Dick Goddard host the local segments of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day telethon when it aired on TV 8 for all those years.
When you are of a certain age, you remember when the telethon came on, that meant only one thing..."Oh man, school is about to start."
According to this, signal supposed to cover from Canton to north of Cleveland into Lake Erie
That was probably back in the day when equipment was maintained and operating and maintenance logs had to be kept, etc. I hear stories about stations, especially AMs, that aren't operating with full power because an old or broken antenna system can't handle it and management knows the FCC doesn't care. Aged ground systems are going unrepaired because the cost vs return isn't justified.
Plus see the post about all the interference that has impacted the AM band. Not mentioned there are LED lightbulbs. They interfere with everything near them, even remote controls. Add in that AM car radios are now crap, if the car has one at all, and I know people who no longer even own a table or clock radio. Streaming is the way and outside of the fact that one has to pay to access the internet to get it, why not? Radio is free, but you're going to buy the internet service anyway. It's a real gotcha.
That digital AM thing they had going for while was great from my standpoint. No static, stereo, quality sound. WTAM and Radio Disney had it here. What happened to it?
Plus see the post about all the interference that has impacted the AM band. Not mentioned there are LED lightbulbs. They interfere with everything near them, even remote controls. Add in that AM car radios are now crap, if the car has one at all, and I know people who no longer even own a table or clock radio. Streaming is the way and outside of the fact that one has to pay to access the internet to get it, why not? Radio is free, but you're going to buy the internet service anyway. It's a real gotcha.
That digital AM thing they had going for while was great from my standpoint. No static, stereo, quality sound. WTAM and Radio Disney had it here. What happened to it?
How many people had AM Stereo radios? To save AM, I'd like to see them try it again if what you say is true about no static, stereo and quality sound. Static and so-so to poor quality sound is a couple of AM radios biggest problems. Radios would need to be made with, both, AM and FM stereo. AM radio is still worth it. Look how many stations there are. Advertisers are there. Just listen to WDLW, WEOL, WKNR, WTAM.
For what 1350 is (a flanker to WTAM and home to second tier sports like the Monsters and CSU), the signal serves its purpose.
That inner red contour is, apparently, the 2 mV/m contour. In metro areas, you need at least 10 mV/m to overcome noise and interference. And the signal to the east and west of central Cuyahoga Country falls off rapidly.According to this, signal supposed to cover from Canton to north of Cleveland into Lake Erie
Remember two things:
1) "Nobody" is buying stand alone radios any more.
2) Stations may have ads, but what price is being paid for them? Advertisers pay in proportion to the amount of desirable audience each station has.
That said, there is only one station in the Metro Survey Area that covers the market well both day and night... and that is WTAM. The rest only cover part of the market.
By the time I had access to a HD Radio capable of receiving AM, these stations had already turned off their IBOC carrier. From what I heard, HD Radio on AM was limited to 1 subchannel, that being the main analog broadcast, and the quality was about the same as a MP3 at 56 kbps or a stream over dial-up. The only benefit was stereo and a slightly higher frequency response above 8 kHz (above 5 kHz if the station was already broadcasting an IBOC carrier).
There are many reasons why the vast majority of AM stations turned off their IBOC carrier. In order to shoehorn in the carrier, the station's sidebands had to be used (1090 kHz and 1110 kHz for WTAM). This resulted in increased interference to adjacent stations at night and even interference complaints from affected stations. In addition, about 5 kHz of the station's center frequency had to be cut, which resulted in the analog side sounding dull and muffled, and the IBOC carrier bleeding onto it with most radios, which resulted in a "waterfall" being heard in the background and dead center tuning in order to minimize it. (AM HD Radios had a 5 kHz lowpass, so the "waterfall" wasn't heard, but that reduced the audio on all AM stations to 5 kHz regardless if they had an IBOC carrier or not). Also, the IBOC carrier would only be decodable as long as the listener was able to receive the analog side practically interference free. Minor interference (like a pop) would sometimes be enough to disrupt decoding and cause the HD Radio to fall back to its analog until the IBOC carrier could be decoded again.
Transmitter maintenance and lower than expected HD Radio sales and adoption are likely the reason why most AM stations pulled the plug on HD Radio. Many stations never bothered to upgrade, due to the cost of the equipment and royalties that would probably take years to pay off, or was seen as not financially feasible. WTAM (iHeart) and WWMK (ABC Radio) were the only ones who could afford to upgrade their stations. WARF, I believe, was the 3rd AM station in the market to transmit an IBOC carrier, but it was short lived. WWMK had issues from the very start, and the carrier was off and on for about the first year, along with numinous issues on the analog side that were eventually worked out. All three stations stated backing away from HD Radio in 2013.
There has been talk about allowing AM stations to convert to a pure digital broadcast. Of course, that would mean that an AM capable HD Radio will be required in order to receive such a station, but without the analog broadcast, there would be an added benefit of better frequency response and better error correction to help overcome interference. How feasible this would be in today's streaming world is uncertain, but I highly doubt it would gain any traction.
AM 1490 also tried IBOC. I don't know if they were WERE or WJMO at the time. But that also quickly was dropped.
Yeah, I noticed the east/west sharp drop off. There's a 1350 to the far west in Ohio, one well south of WARF in Southern Ohio, CIRF, in Brampton, Ontario, Canada and one way up in Michigan and in Indiana. All are far enough away so as to not have any interference between each other. I can only assume it must be an adjacent frequency they have to protect.
At some point in the past, there was more than WTAM covering the market day and night. WGAR 1220 comes to mind, WHK also. But as of today, WTAM is the only one I can get that's not unlistenable at night.
I used to [and sometimes] still do] drive up I-77 more or less close enough to go past the tower location for WTAM. When they had their IBOC on, forget about listening to any other station on the AM band. It obliterated not just adjacent but everything from one end of the dial to the other. Started about 2-3 miles before you got near their site and 2-3 mile after you had gone past it. Absolutely atrocious. Glad they turned it off.
I use to drive past the WTAM tower on Snowville Road back in the day. Going up the hill, they would constantly interfere with AM 1260, despite their transmitter being just on the other side of I-77. Once you're within a stone's throw of the clearing that WTAM's transmitter is located on, it will bleed over onto every frequency, vacant or not. There are now neighborhoods immediately adjacent to WTAM's transmitter now, so I hope the residents there don't listen to AM, as WTAM will be the only thing that they will receive across the band loud and clear. I bet at least one resident there may have heard WTAM resonate off of their gutters.
Also, some time ago, probably before the pandemic, the land that the WTAM tower is located on was up for sale. The tower/transmitters would remain, but some small offices would have likely been built on the frontage of the property. Whatever happens, I hope the construction crew that's hired is smart enough not to use a crane that close to a 50,000 kW AM tower.
If you Google Earth it, as of July 2024 it's still showing 12 acres for sale.
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