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Other Off-The-Airs

L

Laurence Glavin

Guest
Also vacant from the ether this morning (Sunday, 10/30) were WCCM-AM 1110, Salem, NH; septuagenarian WPKZ AM&FM Fitchburg; WWDJ-AM 1150 and WAZN-AM 1470, Boston and Watertown respectively but transmitting from the same array in Lexington; WGAM 1250-AM, Manchester, NH and WDER-AM 1320 in Derry, NH. Re: WCCM-AM 1110...that station was off-the-air for a couple of weeks after last year's ice storm because its transmitter site is off the beaten path (so much so that Scott Fybush once mentioned on LTAR that he has NEVER visited it) so it took the electric company a while to access the transmitter building. But this even was less dire damagewise.
 
What happened to the beautiful huge Cummins generator located in the garage basement, I spent a fortune maintaining it for years?
 
If you mean the generator in Lexington - my understanding is that Salem
chose not to maintain it ($$$), and it is now unusable...
 
WLYNgm said:
If you mean the generator in Lexington - my understanding is that Salem
chose not to maintain it ($$$), and it is now unusable...
Click to expand...

When a station is LMAed 100% of the time, as WWDJ is, does the LMAing orgnaization (Radio Luz, in this case) get a rebate for the time the station was unavailable for technical reasons? If so, how much lost air time would it take in the course of a year for the cost of of the lost air time to exceed the cost of the routine preventive maintenance? IOW, although Salem is pretty well run financially, did they shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to maintain the generator?
 
The question is, will that station licensee even ALERT the LMA source that the station was inoperative for several hours on a Sunday morning? As was posted here a couple of years ago, Salem allowed the former right-wing talk show format on 1150 to run its daytime pattern 24/7. They probably thought the risk of an FCC fine was worth taking if they could get away with it. At Allaccess.com, a "religious" outlet of the Roman Catholic persuasion was just fined royally for daytime power at night.
 
Laurence Glavin said:
As was posted here a couple of years ago, Salem allowed the former right-wing talk show format on 1150 to run its daytime pattern 24/7. They probably thought the risk of an FCC fine was worth taking if they could get away with it.
Click to expand...

The risk there is not just a fine, but loss of the license. If this is true, Salem not only relinquished de facto control of the station, they violated a material term of the station license. No matter how the LMA is drawn, it is the licensee's responsibility to ensure proper station operation and compliance with the terms of the license, and such things cannot be lawfully delegated to another party.
 
Concerning rebates for LMA customers - I can only speak for our
company's stations. If a customer is off the air due to something
wrong on the station's end, we credit their account. Power failures at
either the studio end or the transmitter end would qualify as our responsibility.
As far as backup generators, for us, it is a matter of what is cost-effective.
WLYN has been on the air almost 9 years with this ownership, WAZN approx. 5 years.
The total amount of paid hours lost, for whatever the reason, have been minimal,
and, therefore, the added expense of emergency generators is not warranted here...
 
As of yesterday afternoon, WNEB-AM in Worcester was off the air, too. I didn't check this morning so I don't know their current status.
 
Laurence Glavin said:
The question is, will that station licensee even ALERT the LMA source that the station was inoperative for several hours on a Sunday morning? As was posted here a couple of years ago, Salem allowed the former right-wing talk show format on 1150 to run its daytime pattern 24/7. They probably thought the risk of an FCC fine was worth taking if they could get away with it. At Allaccess.com, a "religious" outlet of the Roman Catholic persuasion was just fined royally for daytime power at night.
Click to expand...

Stations have, in the past, gotten in SERIOUS FCC trouble for billing clients for material that didn't air.

I'm not so sure that, today, the FCC wouldn't leave the issue up to the state courts...
 
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