In Watertown there was a radio station 100.5 WCNY anyone know the history?

[ELL383]

This is what I Know 100.5 WCNY Watertown ,NY went on the air around 1955-56 and I don't know when it went silent. It's sister station was WNCY TV-7 now WWNY and 790 WCNY-AM now WTNY. If you know anything about 100.5 please post?

Thanks

 

[spunker88]

It was before my time but you can find some information in old newspapers which have been scanned and are text searchable on this site. They have a lot of old CNY and upstate NY newspapers:
http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html

By 1950 it was known as WWNY and had become a Rural Radio affiliate, relaying 105.1 from Deryter. This article also mentions transmitter power of 14kw:
http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%208/Niagara%20Falls%20NY%20Gazette/Niagara%20Falls%20NY%20Gazette%201950%20May-Jun%20Grayscale/Niagara%20Falls%20NY%20Gazette%201950%20May-Jun%20Grayscale%20-%201119.pdf#xml=http://fultonhistory.com/dtSearch/dtisapi6.dll?cmd=getpdfhits&u=2d7b4bc6&DocId=2312146&Index=Z%3a\Index%20O-G-T&HitCount=6&hits=19a+19b+3cc+3cd+829+82a+&SearchForm=C%3a\inetpub\wwwroot\Fulton_New_form.html&.pdf

I can't find much about what happened to it. There are many newspaper articles from the early 50s on it and then it disappears. I'm guessing that when the Rural Radio network ended the station went off the air, the same fate as 107.7 in Turin.

 

[ELL383]

That's great info Thanks

 

[BobRoss]

Interesting how that scanned newspaper article mentions the Watertown station, but no mention of the 107.7 station in Turin.

Looks like the "Rural Radio Network" article on Wikipedia could use some updating, based on the info in that newspaper article.

 

[spunker88]

I did a search in for newspaper articles mentioning WVBN in Turin and found a Feb 1950 article saying that it was being shut down. Its possible this was around the same time 100.5 was planning on becoming an affiliate, so they saw no need to operate both transmitter sites.

Something else I found interesting about FMs that never lasted in upstate NY was that there was once a 106.1 WSLB-FM in Ogdensburg and 105.3 WMSA-FM in Massena. There are AM stations with these calls still around in the same towns, but both of these FM signals are long gone. The frequencies are both being used in Ottawa today by CISS and CHEZ.

 

[Tincap]

This is what I Know 100.5 WCNY Watertown ,NY went on the air around 1955-56 and I don't know when it went silent. It's sister station was WNCY TV-7 now WWNY and 790 WCNY-AM now WTNY. If you know anything about 100.5 please post?

Thanks

Interesting as ever, Scott Fybush makes a mention of WWNY 100.5 in this linked article from 2004 ~> http://www.fybush.com/sites/2004/site-040514.html

Of interest to you should be the "soon-to-be-defunct WWNY-FM (100.5)" line, meaning it was still up and running in 2004.

~BG

 

[ELL383]

This is what I Know 100.5 WCNY Watertown ,NY went on the air around 1955-56 and I don't know when it went silent. It's sister station was WNCY TV-7 now WWNY and 790 WCNY-AM now WTNY. If you know anything about 100.5 please post?

Thanks

Interesting as ever, Scott Fybush makes a mention of WWNY 100.5 in this linked article from 2004 ~> http://www.fybush.com/sites/2004/site-040514.html

Of interest to you should be the "soon-to-be-defunct WWNY-FM (100.5)" line, meaning it was still up and running in 2004.

~BG

I remember reading that but at the time I thought maybe it was 50 watts or something that I could not receive in Kingston.
I did find out some info from a 76 year old DXer who worked in radio and TV. 100.5 WWNY went dark in the late 50's He thinks 1958 & WWNY-FM at the time was a re broadcaster of a Classical music station from New York and he Thinks they lost there link
and gave up on the FM because FM was not popular in the 50's. He also said they had a great signal .

 

[therealjm12]

It would make sense about the classical music on WWNY-FM. I believe that WQXR and the N. Y. Times did have a network back in the 50's.

 

[fybush]

It would make sense about the classical music on WWNY-FM. I believe that WQXR and the N. Y. Times did have a network back in the 50's.

They did indeed, all handled by over-the-air pickups from station to station, just as the Rural Radio Network did. The "QXR Network" and RRN were not the same thing, though at times they shared affiliates.

There were high hopes for FM in those early days, and lots of stations came and went in that era, especially in small communities like Watertown. The 100.5 story is not at all unusual: an owner investing in FM in the late 1940s, only to abandon that investment to chase the bigger riches of TV a few years later.

And in that 2004 article, when I referred to the "soon-to-be-defunct" WWNY-FM, it was in the context of being nearly defunct in 1954 when channel 7 signed on, not in 2004 when it had already been gone for almost half a century.

 

[spunker88]

Interesting as ever, Scott Fybush makes a mention of WWNY 100.5 in this linked article from 2004 ~> http://www.fybush.com/sites/2004/site-040514.html

Of interest to you should be the "soon-to-be-defunct WWNY-FM (100.5)" line, meaning it was still up and running in 2004.

~BG

Its definitely been off the air since I've been in the area which has been the last 15 years. Also, we have a nearby station on 100.7, WEFX thats been on since the early 90s.

I imagine the station just wasn't profitable in the early days of FM. From what I can tell it was the only FM in Watertown in the 50s. But there would have been other stations people could have recieved in the area as Kingston had at least 2 FM signals on the air in the 50s (98.3 singed on in 1953 and 96.3 signed on in 1947). Syracuse stations would have also been easier to receive back then as well. I'm guessing it was the high cost of receivers at the time that kept people away and the fact that everything was on AM.

 

[Bob1370]

Re: In Watertown there was a radio station 100.5/Ghost stations

Fascinating how many "Ghost" FMs once existed.

In addition to the ones already mentioned in this topic, Upstate NY was once home to a bunch of others. In Rochester in 1948 WHEC had a sister station, WHEF, which ran 65.5 kW ERP on 96.5, a frequency which became home to WCMF a dozen years later. (Gannett put all its surplus local resources, including a lot of the profits from WHEC-AM 1460, into a TV application--which became WHEC-TV channel 10.) Over in Syracuse there was a WAGE-FM 98.5 which simulcast WAGE-AM 620 in 1947 and 1948, but was soon after shut down. WFBL also had an FM in the late '40s running 8.5 kW on 93.1, which went dark soon after...although 93.1 has been the home of 100 kW blowtorch 93Q (WNTQ) cranking out the hits for years now.