No. Would require an Act of Congress, just like the analog TV shutoff did. And Congress should have higher priorities than killing off Ancient Modulation.
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KLIS surrenders license
- Thread starter KilowattKat
- Start date
Ancient Modulation, aka Medium Wave broadcasting, is a worldwide allocation. Nothing will be replacing it even if 100% of all broadcasters shut down. It has no use in the digital world. Digital modes that broadcasting can use only work on UHF and above (VHF is also a failure).
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I just remembered something, and did a quick search to fill in the details that I don't remember.
We are talking about the St. Louis market, which was where we got our first real hint that AM was on its way out ...
2020: FCC revokes the licenses for KFTK (1490), KZQZ (1430), KQQZ (1190), and WQQW (1510) after it concluded former owner Entertainment Media Trust committed “serious violations” of the Commission’s rules.
2021: In preparing for Auction 109, not only does the Media Bureau include those four vacated frequencies, it dismissed any AM minor change application filed between the cancellation and the close of the auction that did not protect the most recently licensed facilities of those four stations. It also rejected requests to include any other deleted AM facilities in the auction.
Auction 109 takes 36 rounds over eight days, with 114 qualified bidders and 67 winners. The gross bids totaled only a couple thousand dollars under $14 million.
None of the AMs attracted even one bid.
And yet, in another thread, one of our armchair quarterbacks thinks AM can still attract an audience ... by subscription.
We are talking about the St. Louis market, which was where we got our first real hint that AM was on its way out ...
2020: FCC revokes the licenses for KFTK (1490), KZQZ (1430), KQQZ (1190), and WQQW (1510) after it concluded former owner Entertainment Media Trust committed “serious violations” of the Commission’s rules.
2021: In preparing for Auction 109, not only does the Media Bureau include those four vacated frequencies, it dismissed any AM minor change application filed between the cancellation and the close of the auction that did not protect the most recently licensed facilities of those four stations. It also rejected requests to include any other deleted AM facilities in the auction.
Auction 109 takes 36 rounds over eight days, with 114 qualified bidders and 67 winners. The gross bids totaled only a couple thousand dollars under $14 million.
None of the AMs attracted even one bid.
And yet, in another thread, one of our armchair quarterbacks thinks AM can still attract an audience ... by subscription.
Any future use of mediumwave following such a shutdown would be for purposes other than what we would consider broadcasting, such as low bitrate “one to many” data distribution, or perhaps various sorts of over the horizon radar.
I suppose pirate operafors, or lightly regulated low power community stations would be a possibility, though anyone’s guess whether there would be any audience other than radio geeks.
I suspect Big Toe Media knew the land the station was on would likely fetch at least what they paid for it. Land on the Illinois side doesn’t necessarily get the premium prices land in West County and St. Charles County fetch, but it’s on the edge of a fast growing area that’s far enough from East St. Louis that people would be interested in it.
I can’t imagine it got many takers when trying to broker the station, and the owners probably decided to cut their losses and cash in on the land.
Remember, this was always a "rimshot" AM that was nudged in well after the good facilities on the regional channels had been taken. It benefited from a low dial position, but was not really a full market signal in the whole MSA.
One of the investors, Conrad Thompson, is Ric Flair's son-in-law. So, if anyone has insight into trying to stay relevant well past your expiration date, it should have been Conrad.
If Ric had cut the promo for KLIS' demise, it would have ended like this: "WOOO-Ooo-oo-cough--cough--thud!".
If Ric had cut the promo for KLIS' demise, it would have ended like this: "WOOO-Ooo-oo-cough--cough--thud!".
The last I heard 750 still has about 8 to10% of WBS listenership. They do split sometimes for Congressional hearings and occasionally if a ball game runs long. 9% of 7.8 (6+) around .7 the same as WBZY 105.7.
If 750 became available someone would take it. Especially one of the AM operators in Atlanta. One tower no direction equipment to deal with. And no directional antenna field land costs.
640, 680, 1010 and Salem would be foolish not to consider it.
It started out as WBBY, a daytimer, in 1962. It added nighttime service in 1965, becoming WRTH. The signal might have fizzled in the far southern reaches of the St. Louis metro but it would have been fine in the city, most of the county, on the Illinois side, and definitely in St. Charles County, which, by 1970, was a rapidly expanding suburban area. The expansion was so rapid that, for my first year of high school, we had split shifts, with classes from 6:30 am to 12:30 pm. That continued until construction of a new school was completed. The growth continued, too. A district that had just one high school when I lived there now has five.
When WRTH unveilled its "Radio 59" good-music format in 1965, it explicitly advertised that it was between KSD and KXOK on the dial. So it probably benefited from being nestled between those two powerhouses (at the time).
The site is in Bethalto, which I'm not familiar with. Nearby Wood River is where the oil refineries are. I think it's likely that any land value for the 590 site would be based on industrial uses.
AM in St. Louis was dying long before that. The state of AM in the market was obscured in large extent by KMOX's huge success. But there was little left over for everyone else, and FM was on the rise. (I like to say that KSHE was the KMOX of my generation. What that portends for KSHE in the future could be a whole other discussion.) Bartell's KSLQ decimated KXOK in the early 1970s. KSD had a strong position as a full-service adult-contemporary station, but suddenly started shedding listeners around 1977. Pulitzer pivoted to news/talk, backed up by a strong news department at KSD-TV; when Gannett acquired the radio station, it tried to maintain the momentum, but frequent programming, format, and management changes undermined the effort. KSD's last good chance was 1979-80 as it pivoted to all-news (anecdote: my dad, a bigtime KMOX listener, even started sampling KSD around that time) but Gannett gave up, and went to country music. It had some success with it, but at the expense of WIL. And that success didn't even last into the 1990s.
Aside: Those not acquainted with St. Louis may not realize that WIL had really lousy coverage, especially in St. Charles County...which was where the metro was growing. So that 1430 signal that went up for auction in 2021 wasn't such a great prize to begin with.
So stations that once had been viable competitors to KMOX...KSD and KXOK...declined significantly. KWK came back in 1978 (after going broke five years earlier) but its FM simulcast partner quickly became the driver of the combo's success. KATZ had the Black audience, but also saw the need for an FM outlet, acquiring an Alton, Illinois station in 1978. WEW and WGNU had their niches. And so on. When KMOX started declining in the 1990s, it started from a strong base, so it took a long time for its performance to reach current levels, but given enough time, it was going to happen.
So let them propose it. It's fun to watch the resulting immune response.
KCSJ covers the I-25 corridor in its market just fine, which is where the listeners are; I also can pick up a smidgen of it in Denver day and night. Why would iHeart spend money to improve coverage in a direction that doesn't have many additional potential listeners?
I live in Kirkwood, which is pretty far to the southwest from its transmitter, and I always got a strong signal, day or night.
I don't really mourn the loss of KLIS, because it never seemed to answer the question, "why am I listening to this?" but I mourn the loss of a really strong signal anywhere.
D
Deleted member 108832
Guest
Appears this may be a cursed set of calls, now. For over 30 years, KLIS (94.3) served a town in East Texas called Palestine. It, too, met its demise due to cancellation, and the channel is now occupied by a 2012 sign-on in KZWL, licensed to Bullard.