-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Smaller market stations that can be picked up in larger markets.
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
No, but how much does Kjo benefit from KC reception? A lot of small town stations don't have that. Edit: looks like @b-turner already answered my thought, didn't see that reply.
WNKT 107.5. It was part of a massive move that was in order to keep the South Carolina Gamecock sports rights for Citadel at the time (2007). It was a huge signal, 100,000 watts which had its transmitter about 40 or so miles from Charleston but served a much larger land area than most signals (considering most of the Charleston transmitters are close to the ocean). It was top 40 Q107, then after Hurricane Hugo it was sold and became a country station through multiple owners.
Citadel moved their country format in Charleston to 96.9 (the biggest signal in market) where it lasted another decade-plus.
It still is 40kw but it has gotten good ratings as a sports station. It is nearing 20 years in that format and makes Cumulus a load of money with the mostly-local sports format.
We also had WHLZ 92.5 which was based out of Manning SC, served the Florence market but also had a lot of listeners in Charleston, Myrtle Beach and even out to Columbia. It was local country until the early 2000s before Apex moved it into Charleston.
99.7 WHBZ was also a move in to the market from Port Royal (near Beaufort). Apex bought that signal and moved it into Charleston as Star 99.7. 92.5 and 99.7 now are 2 of the top 5 stations in the market.
We still have 2 of those on the FM dial with 98.7 and 106.9 out of Hilton Head serving the Savannah market, but which can be heard 24/7 in the southern half of the Charleston market.
Not sure what it's like now, but, 25 years ago, the majority of radio listening in St. Joe was to KC stations. KKJO and KSJQ were the two most listened to stations in St. Joe, and I believe they ranked 4th and 5th.
97.5 WPCV, a country station licensed to Winter Haven with studios in Lakeland and a tower near Haines City, has a very strong signal over most of the Orlando metro area. One time a couple of years ago, WPCV showed up in the Orlando book with a higher share than 103.1 WOTW (now WFYY) when that station was country.
Digging around the subscription online newspaper archive this morning, I see that KKJO and KSFT were mentioned every so often in the Kansas City papers and, after KKJO moved from 105.1 to 105.5 in 2000, which also brought its antenna height up to the maximum C1 level, KKJO was listed regularly in the Kansas City Star. I mention KSFT because KKJO was the AM station and KSFT on FM until 1989, when the stations swapped places. A St. Joseph News-Press article from 1989 stated the reason for the swap: younger listeners had been deserting KKJO for Kansas City FM stations. A Star* headline from 1979 pretty much tells the story of radio and TV in St. Joseph: Invasion of Audience Snatchers Plagues St. Joseph Radio, TV (January 16, 1979). The article mentioned that the St. Joe stations emphasized local news and events to differentiate themselves from the Kansas City stations.
(* actually the Kansas City Times, in the days when it was essentially the morning edition of the Star, and even said so on the masthead)
Cold Coffee
Banned
I have owned and operated FM stations in small towns that were close to larger cities. The small towns were my bread and butter. The bigger towns were my extra income. Other operators who turned their back on their small towns went broke.
So does WQMX and WAKR (the AM feed) from Akron. They both also show up in Cleveland.
As soon as I posted that I knew I had missed out on those. Those Rubber City stations do a great job and deserve their spot in the Cleveland book. I know this is happening in markets all over the country and this is why I wish if a station subscribed with Nielsen you could see where they show up in any market rather than just the home market. Rubber City clearly buys the Cleveland book, but they seem to be the exception.
The 105.5 signal was a major boost and covers KC much better than 105.1 ever did. I actually got KOSP from Springfield on 105.1 a handful of times before KKJO moved despite being just about an hour from St. Joe. Once it moved to 105.5, I never got any out of market stations on that frequency ever again.
Seems like I'd heard a couple of KC broadcasters have approached Eagle about buying KKJO and using it to rimshot KC, but Eagle hasn't been interested in selling. There were also proposals in the late 80's/early 90's to move KKJO (then on 105.1) into KC as a rimshot, including one that would've put its transmitter between Smithville and Plattsburg near Smithville Lake and would've put a citygrade signal over the area of the KC metro from about the Plaza and north, but none of them ever ended up happening.
The tower height went from 570 feet to 981 feet, the max for a C1.
The experience of KFIX-KSAS-KKCI-etc. at 106.5 should have been instructive. That one did start out as a rimshot, with an 830-foot tower at Liberty, but with substantial reception problems in the metro south of the river and in Kansas. That's why they paid KLZR to move west so that they could move to a Blue Summit location, which gave it much better coverage of the entire metro. There were quite a few jokes in the 70s about KFIX needing to "fix" its signal.
As for TV, KQTV (channel 2) tried to move to a 2,000-foot tower in Kansas 26 miles southwest of St. Joseph in the early 1980s, which would have given it coverage much if not all the Kansas City metro, presumably as an independent since I doubt KMBC would have tolerated KQTV's retention of ABC affiliation in that kind of configuration. But the FCC rejected that application in 1983, with an appeal denied in 1984, because it would have meant several counties in north Missouri would have no over-the-air television service as a result of such a move. As it was, I knew people in the Northland who put up antennas so they could pick up "Nightline" from channel 2 live from ABC; KMBC channel 9 delayed Nighttime to way past midnight so it could air Cosby Show reruns, a source of bitter local complaints for years. (I couldn't reliably do that from my location south of the Plaza.) So, to this day, KQTV continues as a St. Joe ABC affiliate, with the top of its self-supporting tower on Faraon chopped off to accommodate the newer digital antenna. It looks really weird now.
Last edited:
It still would likely have been better off as a KC rimshot than a St. Joe station. Plus, by the mid-90's, the stick value would've gone up enough someone would likely have dropped tens of millions for it. I understand Eagle has other businesses than just radio. If it offers those services in St. Joe, keeping the stations in St. Joe might make for better business for the other services it offers. I suppose also, with Eagle being employee-owned, some people might prefer keeping it where it is to keep their co-workers employed.
By the time I got to KC, KMBC was running reruns of Roseanne after the 10:00 PM news. I remember a few people complaining about that, too. When I lived in Parkville, I couldn't get KQ2, even though I was in the fringes of its signal contour. I didn't have the option of an outdoor antenna since I was in an apartment at the time. However, I saw it occasionally on visits to Belt Brewing Company in St. Joe, which always seemed to have it on at least one of its TV's. I remember seeing a few of the promotions it aired and thinking they looked like ones my friends used to do in high school on the community access channel. I hope they've gotten better at those. NPG's LPTV stations have their newscasts on Zeam and NewsON, but I haven't tried watching them yet. I just remember how bad KQ2 used to look, and that keeps me from wanting to watch the rest of the area's stations. KMIZ also seemed to hire a lot of former KQ2 anchors and reporters, and I remember a few of them going to KOLR 10 when Nexstar owned both. Today, a good antenna should be able to get it in the bulk of KC, though I suspect terrain and just figuring out how to decode a distant high-VHF signal are challenges. Amen 16, ironically, moved its tower into the heart of KC and only puts a citygrade signal over about half of St. Joe today. I believe it has slightly different coverage requirements since it's a noncommercial station, though.
Wow, I actually have vague memories of that station from passing through Kansas way back in the summer of 1980. If I recall right, they were calling themselves "Laser 106" at the time.
But to the subject of this discussion thread, as others have mentioned the question could apply to two different types of stations -- one would be rimshots that are targeting the major market audience from a transmitter site on the edge of that market, and the other is small market stations that have enough of a signal in a nearby larger market to somehow get an audience in that larger market.
For the first category, there are definitely markets where rimshots can grab some of the major market audience. Here in Dallas/Fort Worth, the highest rated rimshot station is in 11th place with a 3.7 share (that's Urban AC KRNB-FM), and several others managed at least a 2.0 share in the latest ratings. I think that Atlanta also has several rimshots that are pulling significant audiences. On the other hand, there are markets (like Seattle/Tacoma) where the rimshots just seem to be market afterthoughts with niche formats attracting tiny audiences. So it varies all over the place, with factors involved being whether the core market is under-radiod (which is the case in Atlanta) as well as matters of geography and terrain.
For the second category, I personally used to listen to nearby small market stations that I could receive in the larger markets that I lived in. When I lived in Tacoma, for example, I listened to automated Top 40 KNWR out of Bellingham. When I moved to Dallas, I listened to KIKM(AM) out of Sherman because my car only had an AM radio and KIKM was the closest AM station that played current pop music. Later, I listened to a couple of other out-of-town stations. I imagine that many people here have also done so. I also imagine that not many people who were radio geeks did so -- most people just aren't going to be bothered to even find a station that wasn't promoted where they live and that wasn't listened to by anyone else they know. One rare exception that I'm aware of to that is that back when Rush Limbaugh was starting to become popular, his program was carried live by KDSX(AM) in Sherman/Denison and on a delay by WBAP(AM) in Fort Worth/Dallas. Apparently, a noticeable number of dittoheads in the Dallas area did listen to Limbaugh on KDSX rather than waiting for the delayed broadcast on WBAP. Even so, while it was enough listeners for the management at KDSX to be aware of, I don't think it was enough for KDSX to actually show up in DFW ratings.
- Status