Once I moved to Ohio from Saint Pete, I did my best to DX 620 [WSUN] at night along with other Tampa Bay stations. I thought Ohio radio sucked but that was just my unfamiliarity with it. Sometimes, very faintly, I could hear it as it phased in and out with WTMJ. Then WRJZ in Knoxville, TN bumped up to 5000 watts nights from 500 [if I remember correctly] and even with the nightime null to the northeast it knocked any chance of me hearing 620 from Saint Pete. outta the sky. All I could pick up anymore was WTMJ and WRJZ faintly. I remember going by those two towers straddling W. Gandy Blvd so many times as a kid.
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Cumulus Surrenders Suburban New York Digital AM(WFAS) - Radio Insight
- Thread starter speer360
- Start date
Knoxville or Chattanooga only have Class 4 AM service at night also Dallas & Fort Worth would only had 820 or Class 4's @250 watts at night if it was not for directional arrays.
Granted, my reference is what people from New York would refer to as "Flyover Country" as that was where I grew up, but there are wide swaths of country that would have had no coverage at all during the daytime without daytimers. If you drive I-70 between Kansas City and St. Louis, you will only pass through one county that had anything but daytimers on the AM. Dallas/Ft. Worth to Austin is a similar distance, and only two counties had full-time AM service. Northwest Arkansas is a population hub and one of the fastest growing areas of the country today, but it only had one 24-hour AM station until the early 1980's. Even today, no licensed AM covers both Washington and Benton Counties 24/7. The AM radio landscape is truly desolate even in some decently populated areas.
While Group W obviously accepted the license and did well with it, I'm not sure it would totally agree. It complained for almost a decade about interference in New Jersey from a station over 1,000 miles away. It ultimately spent several million to buy the station in the mid-90's so it could shut it down. If it could've had a non-directional signal on 1010, I'm sure Group W would've much preferred that. I'm aware that, having as much land as we have in this country, covering everyone who needed service without directional antennas would've likely required more daytimers and/or more AM's that would've gone on to struggle to cover their respective markets due to lower nighttime powers. We have challenges with covering a wide area that stations in Europe don't generally have while Canada tended to deal with its coverage problem by just leaving sparsely populated areas uncovered during the daytime. Directional AM may have been the least bad of a series of bad options, but it left many stations unable to cover their markets and made much of the band almost unlistenable in some areas after dark.
WINS didn't actually buy KSYG (ex-KLRA); they paid its owner to turn in the license. I don't think the amount was ever publicly disclosed. From the info I can find, the station was failing in its later years anyway, jumping from format to format, with an antenna system whose pattern they couldn't keep in tolerance, and a 50 kW daytime / 500 W nighttime station on 1010 in St. Louis (KXEN) causing a lot of interference to them during early morning and late afternoon.
Speaking of which, I don't know if it was because of WINS also paying them to downgrade, but KXEN is now a paltry 160 watts during the daytime and 14 watts at night!
KXEN has a FM Translator that, at least on paper, looks like it has pretty good coverage.
I looked it up and KXEN sold their transmitter site in 2012, and that's when they downgraded from 50 kW daytime to flea power. A pretty good deal if you still get a 250-watt FM translator, just like powerhouse KMOX.
It was originally announced as a sale, but, yes, you are correct. It looks like Group W just paid Signal Media to turn in the license, and nobody bothered to actually transfer the license.
I was in Little Rock for a few months between the announcement of the deal and the license actually going away. I heard the amount but can't remember what it was. I remember it being above market rates at the time, though.
Signal continued to invest in the station after the deal was originally announced. The original announcement came in the summer of 1993, and it changed call letters and made programming adjustments about a year later. Signal killed off one of its FM's to put 1010's call letters and programming there. Closing the deal took roughly two years. Without the Westinghouse money, it wasn't going anywhere.
Your later post is correct. KXEN sold its tower site. I can't imagine it would have caused any interference to WINS as it was 500 watts after dark and beamed its signal due southwest. That was always an interesting station in terms of the engineering. It had a tower in Illinois, and its COL was about 50 miles to the southwest. St. Louis just happened to be between the two of them. The nighttime pattern had to be tightly to the southwest in order for it to cover the COL with 500 watts. Little Rock was directly in the path of it, but WINS definitely was not. I can't remember what the signal patterns of 1010 Little Rock looked like. I seem to remember it had different day and night patterns, but I couldn't tell you what either looked like.
The daytime pattern was tight as well, basically blasting down Interstate 44. In St. Charles County, it came in as if it were a 500-watt station. Yet it was almost like a local way southwest in Rolla. Considering its genres of programming for most of its life - preaching and southern gospel - it was a fairly reasonable setup for the audience it was aiming to serve.
I could get the old signal in Tulsa occasionally, too. 1010 was usually KIND or spillover from KTOK there, though. Pretty sure I never got it in Columbia or the Jeffro, but, with a pattern that barely put a signal into St. Charles, I wouldn’t expect to.
In Columbia, I think you'd be more likely to pick up 1010 KCHI from Chillicothe, MO, with all of 250 watts. Yet I found a note in one of my old Vane Jones log books, indicating that I was able to pick up KXEN in Columbia in the early 1980s around local sunset on a couple of occasions. So it could be done, but when it was done, it was notable.
KCHI was yet another Cecil Roberts (not a relative) daytimer special, of which there were several in Missouri and adjoining states.
On that same page of the book, I had written a note, "directional antennas are relatively uncommon in Mexico". I'm not sure what led me to write that particular comment in the book; it was on the pages for 970, 980, 990, 1000, and 1010 kHz, where it appears I had received quite a few Mexican stations in Columbia in 1980 and 1981.
Who will buy WFAS??
Would WFAS still be on the air or will it sign off for good??
As the thread says, the license has been returned to the FCC. So it's off the air. It's up to the FCC. They have the license. They could put it up for auction, and someone could bid on it. But all they'd get is a license.
From the FCC’s attempt to auction off St. Louis AMs several months ago, which got no bids, one can surmise that there will be very little interest in picking up an AM at auction because all it gets you is a license, a necessary but not sufficient condition, on a band that’s not attracting sufficient interest to be economically sustainable. AM might have been better than FM for low power stations, as was done in the Netherlands, but the FCC instead lowered its standards for FM to accommodate LPFM (this includes translators) and so, now, it’s not just the AM band that’s drowning in noise and interference , it’s FM, too. The Denver situation at 93.7-93.9-94.1 is a particularly notorious example.
For now, anyone wanting to pick up an AM license at auction is likely to be someone for whom financial viability isn’t a primary objective. It may come to that on FM, too.
I wonder what happened to the equipment and transmitter. It can't be that old to have digital ability.
Likely Cumulus moved whatever was worth moving to one (or more) of their other properties. They are a big operator, and undoubtedly have stations in their portfolio that could use updated equipment for the cost of shipping it in from Westchester.
Funny (to me, anyway) story: When some stations where I was working were sold to Cumulus, they audited all of our expenses. The one area where it concluded we were way out of line was on paper and office supplies. We even spent more than WFAS AM/FM and the rest of the operation it had in Westchester! Seems like WDBY and a couple other properties were based there before the swap with Townsquare. The reason we were so high on expenses for office supplies was because the company Cumulus bought the radio stations from was still in the building and ran a publishing company that Cumulus wasn't acquiring. It was using the same office and office supply closet. Cumulus cut our supply budget to match Westchester, which had the most supply expenses in the company before we came along, and the other company had to start tracking its use of supplies and paying for them.
Good lord, it always seems to come down to office supplies when making performative budget cuts.
At one of Premier’s predecessors, the guy who did traffic and logs also was tasked with counting paper clips used in the station. I’m not making this up.
And that is because it has its FM version and all programming is transmitted simultaneously. But in the 90's these stations were with different programming WFM 96.9 and W Radio 900. By the way, the 30 kW XEQ-AM recently became musical and formed a concept.
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