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1330 AM?

johnbasalla said:
On Tuesday, 03/18/2025 between 4:30pm and 5pm, I was driving on E. 152nd Street in Cleveland. I dialed up 1330 AM and only heard off-the-air static.
If WINT was broadcasting, they should be able to be heard there.
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Yep Checked again at around 6pm. No lu. Earlier I did have their web stream
johnbasalla said:
I tuned in to 101.5 while driving on E. 55th street in Cleveland this afternoon (03/19/2025). What I heard may, or may not, be relevant. The signal/sound quality was spotty. I heard a lady talk show host who was Conservative. At the bottom of the hour I heard only, what I think, were national ads. One of them was voiced by Mike Gallagher, a national Salem radio host. When it headed back to her show there was no local ID, just a sweep that blew by so quickly I didn't catch what it said, although the word America was in it. This was followed by a few seconds of no sound, and then the show re-started. At 250 watts, what I heard may, or may not, have been the WINT translator.
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Website says they carry the Dana Loesch show. This may have been her.
 
WINT has an STA to operate with a temporary non-directional antenna and reduced power because severe winds knocked down one of the four towers in their array. They're also experimenting with "an enhanced signal with anti-skywave groundwave technology", whatever that means. (Maybe one of those "crossed field" antennas?)
 
MediaLover said:
Do they have a new engineer working for the station?
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As kids in the 60's would have said, "Yes, Alfred E. Newman".

And that is Alfred E. Newman, P.E. to those who are not his friends.
 
It's kind of sad to see how changing times have impacted once viable and profitable suburban AM stations.
But WELW had a brush with greatness back in the late '60's when WIXY became the only AM Top 40 in the market and a couple of young employees, Ted Alexander and Chris Quinn, persuaded the owner that little WELW could give WIXY a run for their money. Management bought it and WELW went whole hog, with a big PAMS jingle package, reverb and a roster of great DJs. They started making their mark and were breaking national hits by groups like Steam and Andy Kim.
They did so well that WELW then bought WNOB 107.9 and moved the calls and the format to Find Me.
That didn't work out as planned, but that's another saga. WELW 1330 went back to its local news and community focus which did OK up until the turn of the century when tech and changing listener habits really began to have their impact.
A lot of fine talent passed though those WELW doors, which to me looked attached to a regular building, not a trailer. Still, WELW had its Camelot moment.
 
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Santa fe said:
It's kind of sad to see how changing times have impacted once viable and profitable suburban AM stations.
But WELW had a brush with greatness back in the late '60's when WIXY became the only AM Top 40 in the market and a couple of young employees, Ted Alexander and Chris Quinn, persuaded the owner that little WELW could give WIXY a run for their money. Management bought it and WELW went whole hog, with a big PAMS jingle package, reverb and a roster of great DJs. That spring and summer they started making their mark and were breaking national hits by groups like Steam and Andy Kim.
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I did not know that. And not only am I from Cleveland Heights (and went to school in Lyndhurst and Gates Mills), but I used the WIXY weekly charts to program the American hits that my station in Ecuador included. In fact, my mother went to a one-stop each week and bought the new releases and sent them to me by air mail!

Yet on all my visits to Cleveland in that period, I never knew that 1330 had been a top 40 station. Very interesting.
 
I didn't discover 1330 until the late 60s. At the time, Ted Alexander was doing a Saturday night show on WGAR 1220 and he would occasionally plug his weekday show up the dial. So I starting tuning in to 1330. Being a daytimer, sign-off was getting earlier and earlier as the year progressed. I think sign-off was about 5:00 pm during the winter months, thus Ted was only on for a couple hours during that timeframe. I was thrilled when they acquired 107.9 and became 24 hour as well as much easier to tune in to. WELW-FM was my favorite station in the early 70s. Sadly, they switched to a country format about a year later.
 
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Sometimes folks are "pennywise and pound follish". The commission regularly issues 25% STAs non directional. Forget the flea power at night. That would be 125 watts on one tower. I bet a really sharp engineer could get them on 1340 at 250 watts even with the Akron's 1350. They are very close to a null in 1350's pattern. Then you are a one tower operation sell some land and put a little money in your pocket.
 
MediaLover said:
Do they have a new engineer working for the station?
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Likely not, or if they do, that person is spread too thin between multiple stations and cannot give the time needed to fix or construct a solution. Gone are the days of the veteran engineers/announcers like Chris Quinn (RIP) and Ted Alexander.

It's not like we didn't see this coming, as this guest op-ed for Lance in 2016 shows. A standalone AM doesn't have the support that a much larger chain like iHeart or Audacy or Urban One has.
radioinsight.com

The Looming Engineering Age Crisis

Broadcast companies are standing on the train tracks, watching a train from a mile away making its way towards them.
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com
 
secondchoice said:
I bet a really sharp engineer could get them on 1340 at 250 watts even with the Akron's 1350. They are very close to a null in 1350's pattern. Then you are a one tower operation sell some land and put a little money in your pocket.
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Throwing the signal onto a graveyard channel like 1340, which likely wouldn't even be a full 1kW due to multiple adjacent signals including 1340 Ashland, is much more trouble than it is worth.
 
Nathan Obral said:
Likely not, or if they do, that person is spread too thin between multiple stations and cannot give the time needed to fix or construct a solution. Gone are the days of the veteran engineers/announcers like Chris Quinn (RIP) and Ted Alexander.

It's not like we didn't see this coming, as this guest op-ed for Lance in 2016 shows. A standalone AM doesn't have the support that a much larger chain like iHeart or Audacy or Urban One has.
radioinsight.com

The Looming Engineering Age Crisis

Broadcast companies are standing on the train tracks, watching a train from a mile away making its way towards them.
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com
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Even Urban One doesn't really care about certain AMs. They certainly don't really support WERE, especially after it moved from 1300 to 1490 in 2007. It has been slowly dwindling since.
 
Nathan Obral said:
Throwing the signal onto a graveyard channel like 1340, which likely wouldn't even be a full 1kW due to multiple adjacent signals including 1340 Ashland, is much more trouble than it is worth.
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Exactly most likely 250 watts. Lower power bill. One tower. Much simpler operation. That most likely would be the cheapest way to continue in the future LEGALLY. Put up a fiberglass antenna, sell most of land without ever worring about the FCC playing hardball and not extending the STA then having to put the 4 tower directional back on to legally run the FM.
 
During the few years that WELW went Oldies, bringing over Ravenna Micelli and Scott Howitt from Majic 105, I could hear their signal decently as far south as Northern Medina and Summit County. But even then, WELW was finding ways to be frugal with their finances. On Saturdays, they would "rerun" some of the rebroadcasts from earlier in the week, complete with the now-dated weather reports and out-of-sync time checks.

I had won a giveaway from them once or twice, and had to go to their station to pick up the prize, and I remember the station in a non-descript single-level building at the edge of a residential sub-division.
 


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