radioinsight.com
Call letters? Who needs stinkin' call letters any more? KYOT has been The Mountain for years.. While KOOL has been rebranded as BIG 94~Five, Audacy would be nuts to jettison the KOOL call letters as there are plenty of takers. Same reason the KFRC calls were kept, but the station rebranded as KCBS All News.
That's only part of the reason. They're using the KCBS calls in Los Angeles.
What takers would those be? The west-of-the-river equivalent of stations like WNTY in Connecticut or WFYX in New Hampshire that are still playing 50-year-old songs and calling themselves "Kool" on-air? More likely they finally flip to something more advertiser-friendly than snap up a call that practically screams, "Groovy, man!"
If they change calls, they will park KOOL somewhere else. The calls are too valuable to give up, and they certainly would not give them up and allow another local station to have them.
The cool KOOL calls being placed somewhere other than Phoenix would be sacrilegious. At one time the KOOL branding and calls were on AM, FM, and TV at the same time. Only KTAR was able to pull off the trifecta other than KOOL.
KTYL was a trifecta for a few years in the mid 1950s. AM 1310, FM 104.7, and Channel 12 were all shown as operational in the 1954 Broadcasting Yearbook. Channel 12 was sold to KTAR later that year but didn't become KTAR-TV until 1959.
Wow! I didn't know about KTYL, thanks for the info I stand corrected, so three then. Do you happen to know what year 1310/104.7 became KBUZ?
Of course, 1310 was never a true full Phoenix signal, although it was indeed a trifecta in its day.
Well, KFOG is now in Little Rock, and WRQX is in Youngstown, Ohio...
1000 (later 5000) watts from what is now west or central Mesa probably would have covered most, if not all of the Phoenix metro as it existed in 1954, as well as the northern half of Pinal County (mostly farms then). That's going as far west as about 75th Ave. as Maryvale was on the verge of being built. They would have had a problem in the far west side including Luke AFB.
When I lived in Scottsdale in the earlier 70's, the signal was pretty dead before getting to downtown. And that is in a car radio. In home, it was not even very good in Scottsdale... comparable in coverage to the equally dreadful 1440 signal.
I agree. There is really no need to change, as ratings don't care and you can say the calls really fast in the legal ID. It would be interesting to know how they do that ID, by the way.
Just heard it at TOH, not rapid fire, at an upbeat pace done by the guy who does the imaging now "Live from the Hayes Heating and Air Conditioning studio in downtown Phoenix, this is the new Big 94.5, KOOL HD1 Phoenix, now with more of the 70's, 80's, and 90's, this is Big 94.5". They are not trying to hide the KOOL calls.
Nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about with those call letters. Interesting that they dropped the FM after KOOL. Decades after KOOL-AM was sold, they kept ID-ing the station as KOOL-FM when there was no reason to.
