1150 -- wassup w/those guys??

[therealjm12]

Re: 1150 -- wassup w/those guys?? The Saga continues

Ok, I was there and back from the Mohawk Valley. Friday night I was about 30 -35 east of the transmitter and the signal was strong. That is within their directional pattern. Of course, power lines and neon signs took their toll. It is the same programing I heard 5 months ago. Just an A. C. oldies based format, with the little boy's voice coming in every 3 or 4 songs with the legal I. D. Nothing else. The music consisted of Johnny Rivers -Summer Rain, Culture Club, Lionel Ritchie -All Night Long, Beatles -8 Days a Week, Michael Jackson -Can't Stop Til You Get Enough, Nat & Natale Cole - Unforgettable. I found that people were actually listening to it. No one I talked to knew they had been off the air. It is a pretty good mix of music. It is not Media Player running it. It is too tight.
The signal sounded strong but very flat. I switched over to WTLB and it sounded much brighter
I did drive to Thomas Road on my way back to the Thruway. I took some pictures but I don't think there is any way to post them here. I am not going to put them on my Facebook page. Just too Geeky. The building looked ok. It was surrounded by a wire fence and barbed wire that would make the nearby prison jealous. The catwalk to the towers was, also, blocked by a fence and barbed wire. I walked down the train track as a Amtrack train whizzed by. The towers did look rusted. I'll bet they haven't been painted in over 30 years. I thought the F. C. C. had rules about that.
Bottom line: It does still have a strong AM signal that covers the market same as it did 60 years ago. Problem is, AM is pretty much dead even in Utica-Rome. So the station really has no value at all, unless it can be grouped to one or more FM's. Yes, they could go talk, maybe progressive talk, but unless it can be sold as part of a package it is worthless. Maybe would be a good fit for Roser's stations?

 

[RBW]

It almost appeared they were making strides; updating the liners etc... but now there are days of "dead air"!

My original question (thread title) remains!!

 

[RBW]

As of TODAY, their back ON, after being OFF (or so it appeared) most of this week!

 

[fybush]

They were on the air Tuesday morning when I passed through (and I mean quite literally "through" the site, since I was on the train!)

 

[bw]

not sure where you are listening from, but there have only been a couple of days where the station fell asleep over the past few weeks.... certainly not weeks at a time... Could be that you didnt hear the station because it was on night pattern due to ongoing site work?

 

[therealjm12]

They put a screaming night guy on (Jimmy Dean) who put the kids phone calls on the air.

Mitch Gross -AKA Jimmy Dean. Sorry Mitch. Satisfied?

 

[RBW]

They're still playing the "now you hear `em now you don't" game.

Went through Utica Friday night. Only static.
Came back through Sunday... they were on again.

 

[Savage]

Hi, Utica folks - my first post on your board. I did some support-consulting in the early 90s on WRUN 1150 when it was owned by the Altdoerffers from PA and have some firsthand experience with the system.

The 1150 array is fascinating, and not in a good way. First of all, the array doesn't really consist of "towers" per se - it's five Lingo poles, kind of a tapering hollow flagpole with climbing rungs brazed on the sides. (WOLF 1490 in Syracuse used to have a much taller version, about 300', but long ago replaced it with a conventional tower.) Lingo poles present a lot of problems. The worst is that being hollow, they rust badly from the inside-out. Even as long ago as the 1990s 1150's management couldn't persuade any tower contractor to climb the array any more, since there is no way to inspect the actual condition of the Lingo pole steel. And the brazed rungs tend to bend or break off, so they're very dangerous to climb, especially since the interior condition of the tubular "tower" is unknowable.

The narrow cross-section of the Lingo poles also tends to limit bandwidth and presents weird base impedance/reactance, hence the top-loading "clothesline" cables which run between the poles from top to top.

The "towers" are only one of many serious problems. The array sits in a wetland which at some times of the year can be covered with several feet of water, so the feed, sampling and control lines run on a rickety A-frame type catwalk that rambles out over the water. The catwalk bridges have been in terrible shape for years, and as you walk on the narrow deck it seesaws back and forth, mostly rotted off at ground level. Because the catwalk supports carry (at least did in '92) the old hot 230-ohm open-wire feeders, you're in constant danger of being dumped onto the hot feed lines at shoulder level as the catwalk wobbles. The feeders had broken in many spots and were simply crimped back together. The sampling system had numerous breaks and repairs with CATV inline connectors, but the bad condition of the cables didn't matter since the phase monitor was "inop." It was actually powered off during my day there. Flipping the power switch produced only a pilot light and no indications.

The phasor, located at the base of the center pole in a shack, was a horror. The station GM advised me to unlock and open the door slowly - a good suggestion. The interior of the phasor shack was a Mexico City of stinging insects, with gray-paper and mud nests hanging from every rafter, and even attached to inductor frames (WRUN's phasor was the old open-rack type.) There was also plenty of apparent rodent activity. The interior was alive with hovering yellowjackets and wasps.

Rebuilding and maintaining the array is problematic since it's built over water and is landlocked by the CSX grade cutting the antenna system off from the building. There's no practical way to get equipment back in there to replace the ground system, since even if you could get machines over the railroad you're still blocked from tower access by the catwalk and feed system. Plus you'd have to drain the wetlands, and I'm sure the DEC would have plenty to say about that.

Basically it would cost far more to rebuild the array than the station is worth...it's truly the AM DA from hell. In the late 80s the owners commissioned a consulting engineering study which recommended rebuilding WRUN at a new site using a 4-tower parallelogram. IIRC it would have given 1150 5kw DA-2, but the owners rejected the projected cost (then) of $400,000, so that was that. (And I'd bet today's costs would top twice that.)

 

[JustPastBuffalo]

Savage's description of WRUN's directional array was an eye-opener and made me recall my days in Utica (jokingly refered to as my "exile on Corsica" period) and the time the Mohawk River crested above flood stage. It was The Mighty 1550 WBVM [/sarcasm], a 1kw daytimer with no PSA. The tower was in the same flood plane, east of the WRUN array. The base of the WBVM tower was under approximately 10 feet of water. But being the young, reckless, radio turks (read "knuckleheads") that we were, we rowed out to the tower in an aluminum 10 foot rowboat and canter-levered the SS Utica Minnow over the top of the wooden fence, whereupon our midday guy, Dr. Don LaMarca (WHTT's Brian J. Walker) climbed halfway up the rickety tower to attach a longwire which we then excited using the old blue GE-250 aux transmitter. We were oblivious to the dangers at hand. The tower was adjacent to a slaughter house. The water was full of all kinds of animal excrement and parts. The current was quite swift. We did not wear life jackets. Had either of us fallen in the river and survived, we no doubt would have come down with a myriad of infections that would have been written up in medical journals far and wide, no doubt spending weeks recovering at St. Lukes while main-lining an assortment of anti-biotics. I look back at that escapade and think "WTF! We must have been out of our minds." But we did get the longwire fired up and damned if that puppy didn't "get out" with an amazing bandwidth as well. BTW, Savage's description of WRUN's array makes the debacle that is the AM 1590 array in Brockport, NY look high tech. Syracuse-Utica readers can find more about that particular mess by doing a search on the Buffalo-Rochester board.

 

[Savage]

Hoo Boy - Jimbo Pastrick completes the WNY invasion of the Utica board. Fun story about Blessed Virgin Mary Radio, Jim - I also knew the PD of BVM back around 1974-ish when it was in gargoyle-festooned robber-baron era digs known as the "Kag Building" or some such name. It resembled the Dakota on Central Park West or a squat version of the high-rise apartments in Ghostbusters - truly a creepy dark pile of stone.

Back to the Infamous 1150 - I may not have given a full impression of the fun-filled catwalk. The access to the catwalk was a decrepit aluminum garden gate held in place only by twisted hookup wire (you got to it by carefully checking for approaching trains, sprinting over the CSX roadbed and climbing back down the tower side of the grade.) Once you yanked off the wire (a padlock would have been pointless) you climbed a rotten built-in stepladder up onto the swaying catwalk. This thing wasn't a foot or two above grade. You were really up there, IIRC 6 or 8 feet in the air, over green stagnant water that could have been 18" or 6 feet deep in spots. You had to walk carefully because most sections of the catwalk had rotted boards, so the M-O was to test each section carefully before putting your weight on it. And as I mentioned, you braced yourself to prevent the swaying structure from throwing you against the feedwires. The Lingo poles and the phasor shack were built on pilings to keep them out of the water.

At the time, the huge RCA BTA-5F was inop, with 1150 operating on its 1kw night transmitter. Nobody could find any recent monitor point measurements. The station hadn't been changing pattern for months.

 

[therealjm12]

In reference to Barrister Savage.....
It (WBVM)was in the CAG Building named for a local contractor Charles A. Getano. The building was originally St. Lukes Hospital. Getano bought the building and turned it into apartments and offices. WBVM moved there after their studios burned in King Cole Plaza in South Utica. Too bad about the fire. The studios in the King Cole Plaza were quite nice, with some pretty decent equipment. I figured the Fusco Brothers either didn't have insurance or were underinsured because the CAG building studios sure didn't have decent equipment -at least while I was working there in the mid 70's.

I was originally hired at WRUN AM/FM as an engineer in 1972. Some of the "old timers" were still there when I was hired. Among them was George "Woody" Woods. Woody was the original chief engineer and put both stations on the air in the 1940's. If there is a bad guy in this story it would be the second owner of the stations - John Woods -no relation to Woody. John Woods bought the stations from the Rome Sentinal Company. He immediately started cutting costs. He moved the studios from Commercial Drive to the AM transmitter in the Oriskany swamp. He added on the the transmitter building as cheaply as possible using thumb tacks and duct tape. Then he demoted Woody to just an staff engineer. I know it is hard to believe now days but Woody was somewhat of a perfectionist. He got the top loaded AM array to work, and work well. He put WRUN FM (now WFRG) on the air at 100 kw and 33kw horizontal. The WRUN -FM transmitter / studio on College Hill behind Hamilton College was a showplace. To the best of my knowledge, although the building was built to be studio it was never used as such. They put an apartment there. Alex Haley was living there, while teaching at Hamilton College, and was writing ROOTS .
Back to Woody, He was an excellent old school RF engineer. Very well respected by his peers. He kept that RCA transmitter and towers humming. He built a lot of the station's equipment himself. He built boards, racks, and a lot of other of the studios equipment himself. There was a lot of homemade stuff in that station but it was good stuff. WRUN was one of the first stations to have cart machines, OK he bought those.
When I was first hired my shift was putting both stations on the air Saturday & Sunday mornings @ 5 and shutting down at midnight. Since the AM was full time directional, there had to be a first ticket on duty all the time. I slept there on the bunk beds. There was a kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. In between sign on and sign offs I ran the semi automated beautiful music FM. I ,also had to make the trek on that catwalk out to the towers to take antenna base currents twice a day. Three towers in the morning and five towers at sunset. Some interesting stories out there at 0 degrees, blinding snowstorms, thunderstorms and an occasional UFO. I believe the five tower walk was a mile & half. I, also did news on the AM and weather on the FM. I eventually became on jock on the reformatted top 40 WRUN but remained an engineer to a certain degree. I even found myself the chief engineer for a very brief period when everyone quit in protest. Mostly I just signed logs but did actually keep the station on the air during one of the major floods out in the swamp. Got a lot of atta boys for that. Then I taught the new chief on how the 1940's monitoring system worked.

When I did visit the site this past spring, as mentioned above, I did see that WAMC had done a lot of clean up work to the building and had done repair work on the catwalk. Everything had been fenced off. It looked like a prison. I really don't know what could be done with the station. What a shame. Sad outcome to all the history and the talented people that worked there.

 

[Savage]

realjim, I concur: obviously a ton of work and love had gone into both WRUN and WKGW up on the hill behind Hamilton. I visited the FM site as an outsider many times in the mid-60s when my brother went to undergrad school at Hamilton. When I finally got a look inside KG104's Tx site 30 years later my jaw dropped. Now THERE was a transmitter site unlike almost any other I've seen in 43 years of radio. Even by the 1990s, when the FM site had been allowed to go to seed, anyone could have lived up there comfortably. It was built for comfort and accomodation, a far cry from the usual cinderblock transmitter bunker.

The core of the 1150 site, the original brick Tx facility, was fine. You're right, the problems were the jerry-built studios and offices. Poring through the historic facility, one would make startling discoveries - like a cache of NOS vacuum tubes that would comprise a hamfest all in itself. The recordkeeping was phenomenal going all the way back to the late 1940s. WRUN's manager pointed to a tall stack of flat, unlabelled small boxes. "Need any #47 indicator lamps?" he asked. He handed me a souvenir - a box of ONE HUNDRED surplus 47s, to take home. There must have been two dozen boxes. There was stuff like that everywhere.

It was obvious that the original Tx plant was designed with great care and skill. Unfortunately, though, it rapidly became an artifact - in that it was conceived as a place which would always be manned and maintained 24-7 by trained engineers. That all ended with the licensing of lesser-grade operators in 1963. The 1150 site would have been fine with the required maintenance, but it needed too much, and gradually succumbed to the temptation of management to cut and cut to meet budgets and rising expenses.

It's easy to quarterback 1940s engineering decisions, but some of the choices have to be viewed in historical context. What might appear as a questionable selection of Lingo poles instead of
actual towers is understandable, when you know that the proximity of Griffiss Air Base would probably have nixed a proposal to build 5 towers in Oriskany (WRUN's poles are only about 145' high, quite short for the frequency, hence the top-loading.) Lingos were popular in the late 40s because they were viewed as windstorm-proof. Building in a swamp might appear counterintuitive unless you appreciate that it's always great for an AM array to have "wet feet," since ground conductivity is all-important. I point out realjim's observation that, even with a screwed-up array and likely very little ground system left, that 1150 had a pretty good signal recently. I'd thank the swamp for that.

1150's site is analogous to the ornate movie palaces of the 1920s which once dominated downtown moviegoing in all major American cities. The complex AM sites of the 1940s and the Tivolis and Palaces are glimpses into the priorities and passions of the past. I knew many talented, inventive quiet local geniuses like George Woods in my decades of radio, and I'm glad to have met and worked with them. They exemplified the love for the profession you read all over these message boards today.

 

[Savage]

Hey realjim, if you're still on the channel:

Your tale about the trek out among the WRUN five-stick array being a mile-and-a-half on the catwalk reminded me to ask a question. Since you had an extensive history at 1150, I've always wondered - if you know...

What was the reason why the catwalk went out from the array side of the railroad grade in such a big wide arc? Why didn't Woody just build it in a straight line out to the center Lingo pole with a couple of side docks to the other 4 towers? The whole catwalk system would have been half the length, with less maintenance, shorter RF lines, etc.

Maybe the swamp gets really deep in the middle? It seemed curious to me. Thanks!

 

[therealjm12]

Wow, this thread is getting a lot of life for a pretty much dead AM station in Utica. Maybe it will catch up to: And the stiffs just keep on coming thread on the Buffalo, N. F. Rochester site.

What was the reason why the catwalk went out from the array side of the railroad grade in such a big wide arc? Why didn't Woody just build it in a straight line out to the center Lingo pole with a couple of side docks to the other 4 towers? The whole catwalk system would have been half the length, with less maintenance, shorter RF lines, etc.

Since the station was built before I was born and everyone involved are long gone, I can just speculate. Yes, I was there in May and did walk around the building and up & down the train tracks from tower one to tower five. The area where the ladder to the catwalk is directly behind the building. So you walked directly across the tracks from the transmitter building to the catwalk. I would imagine the New York Central Railroad had something to do with the location since we had to cross their tracks and they must of owned a certain amount of right-away. They probably did not want people walking up and down the tracks any more than necessary. Now I just checked with a friend of mine who is a railroad expert. He said that up to 1964 there were actually four tracks there (maybe six) instead of the two that are there now. So it certainly must have been a sport, at times, to get across the tracks. As you walk east down the tracks towards tower three I did notice it was quite a drop off from the tracks to the swamp. So that probably had something to do with it, too. Where the catwalk is, it is pretty level with the tracks. I have never seen that area flooded. Now that brings up another question on how it got that way. Is it natural or man made when they put in the towers? Maybe Thomas Road continued on at one time past the railroad tracks. It might have been an access road a hundred years ago when they were building the Barge Canal. I never walked much further down past the ladder. Too many bugs etc. However, hunters, in the fall would park their cars in the station's parking lot and walk back there. They would go quite a ways back, out of sight. So the strip of higher ground must have gone on a ways in a northern direction.

I did take some pictures of the towers. They now appear to be a chocolate color. I am sure that is just rust. When I worked there they were white & red. They had stopped lighting the towers by that time but the lights did work. Once a year, we would test the tower lights (by F.C.C. regulations). It was quite a sight seeing those towers lights in that otherwise black abyss of the Oriskany Swamp.

Now I know WAMC had a construction permit to build a new system with slightly less power. The new city of license would be New Hartford - ironic since WTLB is actually in New Hartford and is licensed to Utica. Who knows what the new owners will do if anything. Maybe they'll just let the towers sink into the swamp and that's it, end of story.

 

[Kevin Twomey]

To therealjim12...worked with you when I was a senior at V.V.S. I did the Sunday morning gig on the AM...I remember how hot it got in the AM control room...had to open the doors on both sides...clang clang from the news wires...insulated boxes didn't help much...it was amazing how you spun those 10 inch reels to que the FM...and even more to be able to hit the ABC FM news on the button @:45...the Marquesia (?) gave me Italian lessons on the air during her show...sponsored by "International Travel Agency:. She told me she was in the origional Ben Hur in the silent film days.
Not so sure I didn't come down one Saturday night to be able to sign on the AM on one snowy Sunday morning. Thomas Rioad was one messy and muddy ride in. more thoughts at another time. Best..Kevin T.

 

[useddj]

I heard Jim Johnson owns them... that means he owns WSEN FM/AM- WFBL- WMCR FM/AM and now WUTI (WRUN) ?????

 

[gary adams]

Ok everybody on this thread, can someone explain to me how wfrg can be a super b in this part of cny, isnt wyyy grandfathered in as the only super b. every thing that I read about frg says its 100kw, but an engineer at wcny told their aprox. 47kw

 

[BobRoss]

Well, if memory serves me right, I believe I had read somewhere that 104.3 was actually on the air (as WRUN-FM) two years before 1150 was (as WRUN). The FM in 1946 and the AM in 1948. That's about the same time WYYY signed on. So yes, it is possible both stations got grandfathered in at 100,000 watts.

Some people like to downplay (or exaggerate) the power of a signal by calculating how the antenna height and other factors play into the signal's coverage area. I'm not too knowledgeable in that stuff (kinda like how a good salesperson can dice up ratings in any number of ways to make a station look good to a client in certain demos, even if the simple P12+ rating is low) so I won't really go there. But I had also heard 104.3 was 100,000 watts. Even 47, if true, is powerful compared to other stations in the market.

 

[Adman4120]

If I recall, when the station was WRUN-FM and early into the WKGW days, the power output was strange. I remember the days before many stations went to 24-hours. WRUN-FM and WKGW at one time did sign off at midnight, then sign on again at 5-AM. When they signed off, their description of the station said they operate at 104.3 with 100,000 watts horizontal and 33,000 vertical. I also remember a lot of noise in the quality of the signal. Probably because of the imbalance of the horizontal and vertical power. I am not an engineer, so I am not sure of this.

I do free lance at Townsquare, owners of WFRG, and also do business with them and I can tell you they are running currently at 100,000 watts. I am sure if anyone has any other questions on their current situation I can find out for you.

 

[gary adams]

Ok then weather its horizontal or vertacel is it an erp at 100kw, and are they classified as a super b? And are they considered grandfathered