K223CW Has Returned to the Air

[b-turner]

As I understand it, they will repeat KCOH but at this point are still testing. I haven't heard anything since. There seems to be some confusion over what that KCOH is, but we have to go with merely call letters here, not programming.

 

[davideduardo]

> Quality had something to do with it, but mostly it was the availability of new formats as a product of the FCC's severe limits on further simulcasting; AM operators did not want their AM cash cow to be hurt by a separate FM so they picked formats very different from the "big" formats on AM.

By that logic, HD radio should be a resounding success. It is not.

HD offers very little that is not available today on terrestrial radio or via streaming. Those looking for alternatives can find many without buying a new radio.

> Add in the fact that in the first years of FM growth beginning in 1967 the commercial loads were very low... generally about half that of that of AM stations... or less.

Again, true of HD radio - but it hasn't elevated HD radio out of microscopic ratings territory. The only reason creative formats exist at all is because stations have nothing to lose.

Again, not enough motivation to buy a new radio. When FM began offering many new and limited-commercial formats, most markets only had a few full coverage, fulltime AMs. With FM becoming competitive, the average market rapidly had several times the number of full, competitive signals. The advantages were enormous.

> You exaggerate. At the time FM began growing, AM clears had not been "broken down" and station count was about the same as it had been through most of the 60's.

Possibly - KOB sure made a mess out of trying to get WABC in Texas. Only Houston had a decent shot at it. I didn't even know about WABC until my cousins in Houston started calling me "cousin Brucie" - then when night came, out came their radio, a simple null, and I understood who Cousin Brucie was!

And there must have been at least a dozen people in all of Texas who actually wanted to hear WABC and would put up with only being able to hear it on clear nights.

KOB was a special situation, dating back well before the FCC decision to allow duplication of the 1-A clears.

> Yes, stations wanted shorter songs but they made lots of exceptions.

McArthur Park by professor Dumbledore, Hey Jude, Bye Bye American Pie. Occasionally somebody would play the full Light My Fire or the full Magic Carpet Ride. Those are the only ones I remember.

There was another consideration... record companies issued "radio versions" of longer songs. So the use of shorter songs was promoted as much by the producers of the music, who thought that shorter songs got better chances at airplay. In the day when stations only played one or two songs between commercials, length did matter.

> Shorter playlists came as a product of competition where the more powerful, shorter list tended to win essentially every time.

Just as it does now (note sarcasm)

And who is to fault a station for having a playlist that gets the most listeners? Hey, man, lets add a few more songs to the list and see if we can make the ratings go down some more. Far out!

> In the 70's callout research was invented to make sure we were playing the right songs.

So - when did it change to research confirming a pre-determined opinion?

1952, when Top 40 was invented at KOWH. Juke Box operators and record retailers were polled to find out the hottest songs. By 1958, there were trade "tip sheets" like The Gavin Report that stations subscribed to where programmers could see what other stations were adding or dropping. And, of course, we had Billboard, Cash Box and Record World which showed us the breakers and the gainers and decliners.

> Yeah, we try not to offend people based on their language, ethnicity, race, gender and so on... as it should be.

Just because somebody is offended doesn't make them right. And creative things like Dr. Demento wouldn't make the cut today.

And the show ended because of low ratings. Of course it would not make the cut today...

> There are a few poor stations, just as not all auto mechanics are good and not all restaurants serve great food.

Bad mechanics and restaurants tend to go out of business. Bad radio gets donations and stays on the air because somebody has an agenda and pours money into their hobby. They get a thrill out of hearing their own voice on the radio. Nobody else does.

Failed stations get sold. Someone always thinks they can take a bad facility or a station in too small a market and make it successful. I know of very few hobby stations; losers are sold, or increasingly with AM, just turned off.

> As FM stations grew, they maxed their facilities while the AMs, mostly licensed decades before, did not even cover their growing markets. AM sounded poor by comparison, and FM had more formats, and less commercials. AM started its rapid decline as a music medium and within 10 to 12 years (depending on the market), only around a third of music listening was on AM any more.

I agree that those all Japanese six transistor radios with three IF cans, limited to 3 to 4 kHz response at best, and the standard 2 1/4 inch speaker sounded terrible. But have you listened to your phone playing music lately through its speakers?

When I want to listen on speakers, I use Bluetooth. Most people use the earbuds. You are creating straw man arguements.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Only the phones are thinner than transistor radios were. The problem is, portable radios just added an FM band still playing through that same 2 1/4 inch speaker, or maybe a 3 1/2 in those portable radios that just made transistor radios three times as wide and added a handle. I have a bunch of them on the attic. They have one thing in common - they sound little better than the little transistor radio. And FM is chronically out of alignment, especially on the high end of the dial. So I am not convinced sound quality had anything to do with it. Ironically, today's cheap AM radios are inherently wideband and sound great - if they haven't put in low pass filters on the audio.

I already agreed with you that sound was only a contributing factor. Just as Top 40 was fragmenting into Oldies, Album Rock / Progressive, AC and such we were gifted with an FCC mandate to separate AM/FM combos that were simulcasting. So the splinter formats found homes. And in many markets... and I will take Washington, DC, as an example, a daytime AM country station was replaced with a full-time FM one. Similar things happened with urban and Spanish formats over the following decade or so.

Example: Cleveland was a top 10 market in the 60's. It had 8 stations with measured audience in that decade... one daytimer, one Class IV, and 3 signal deficient regionals on high frequencies (1260, 1300, 1420) that did not fully cover the market. There were three bigger signals, but only one covered all the market day and night, 50 kw 1-A on 1100.

Then came FMs with good programming on improved facilities. From just a few listenable AMs the market added a dozen full signals on commercial channels as the FMs adapted to the reality of being the full coverage mass appeal stations.

It was all about content and coverage.

 

[Night Hawk]

.....and "YES!" there was an AM Radio single version of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" which was
about 2:53 in length. The longer version (for the Underground Hippie-Dippy Free-form format) at
17:05 in length was the "Bathroom-break Record." Oh, what a relief it is......or was??
Perhaps that was "In the Garden of Eden." Oh, well, whatever.....

 

[rbrucecarter5]

.....and "YES!" there was an AM Radio single version of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" which was
about 2:53 in length. The longer version (for the Underground Hippie-Dippy Free-form format) at
17:05 in length was the "Bathroom-break Record." Oh, what a relief it is......or was??
Perhaps that was "In the Garden of Eden." Oh, well, whatever.....

It actually WAS supposed to be "in the Garden of Eden" - the story was that they came into the studio so high they couldn't properly say the words. And I freely admit to playing long versions of songs instead of short versions for bathroom breaks. There was the #1 version, and there was the #2 version of the songs. And in severe cases, there was the "album side feature"! One wonders how many times the long versions of songs were introduced to listeners that way?

There is nothing unique to the 60's about song shortening. There was a horrible shortened version of "Tiny Dancer" that was making the rounds on stations a few years back. But some songs were just better shortened, though. Kraftwerk's Autobahn starts to get monotonous after 7 or 8 minutes. Most stations found different places to fade it - time to move on. Techno is techno, even if it was recorded decades before techno ----

 

[Mrtejano]

Pastor Villareal on the Air preaching!

 

[First Fone 65]

It is repeating the primary KZHO-LD subchannel 9 right now, while it tests the from new coordinates. Once that is complete, Guevara and the brothers Villarreal have apparently made a deal with one another as its going to end up rebroadcasting KCOH.

Edit to add: Not sure why Joe deleted his post explaining the same. This one is a legitimate facility, covered by a CP to operate from his tower.

Joe didn't delete this post or all of his other posts that have now disappeared into the vapor.

 

[First Fone 65]

[ Ironically, today's cheap AM radios are inherently wideband and sound great - if they haven't put in low pass filters on the audio.[/QUOTE]

The tube Car radios from the fifties were wide band and sounded great, I helped restore a 1952 ford replica Houston police car in the 1980s and even with a torn speaker cone it sounded better than most modern AM radios, I cleaned all the rat poop out of it, replaced all the paper caps and replaced the Vibrator, (Vibrator had a different meaning in the fifties) Even Model T fords had vibrators / coils.