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DuckBlue
Guest
I was in Abbeville back in May and I thought WABV sounded like it was on its last leg. The air signal was distorted and I am at a loss to describe the music format I heard. Is this station still on the air?
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The station was dark for a while. The licensee has/had a contract to sell the station CONTINGENT on getting a Construction Permit to move it out near Las Vegas, Nevada. Remember when they had the application window for AM, maybe 2002? There were several unusual applications like that.
The station apparently needed to get back on the air to keep from forfeiting the license. A young man by the name of Paul Walker was there for a year, maybe two. I don't know if he was an employee, had a lease or what. A few months ago Paul left for Nebraska. He hinted that someone else would be coming in from N.C. or somewhere to see what they could do with it.
Abbeville is one of those markets where you could get 4 or 6 broadcasters on a debate panel and have a good time arguing if the town needs that station, and can the station survive. It's jammed up against Greenwood, and Abbeville has an F.M. station that probably spends more time focusing on Greenwood than it does Abbeville.
My guess is that if the FCC says no to the Nevada move, the station will be taken off life support and die rather quickly.
The station apparently needed to get back on the air to keep from forfeiting the license. A young man by the name of Paul Walker was there for a year, maybe two. I don't know if he was an employee, had a lease or what. A few months ago Paul left for Nebraska. He hinted that someone else would be coming in from N.C. or somewhere to see what they could do with it.
Abbeville is one of those markets where you could get 4 or 6 broadcasters on a debate panel and have a good time arguing if the town needs that station, and can the station survive. It's jammed up against Greenwood, and Abbeville has an F.M. station that probably spends more time focusing on Greenwood than it does Abbeville.
My guess is that if the FCC says no to the Nevada move, the station will be taken off life support and die rather quickly.
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footballgoatdog
Guest
Probaby right. Doesn't the owner of the Abbeville FM also have some interest in a restaurant there too?
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DuckBlue
Guest
Thanks for the responses. I am a native Abbevillian and I was a kid there when it went on the air. I remember it being run by George Settles, who made it a wonderful community station.
DuckBlue said:
I haven't been to Abbeville. Meant to take a day and go meet Paul Walker when he was there, but life is just busy, busy, busy.
Times were different when that station was built. I assume it a station that the people of Abbeville could be proud of at the time.
Could another George Settles kind of guy make it work again? I've done one of those "bean counter" kind of studies where you look at geography, population, retail sales and who else has signal in the air that could steal the listeners you want to own. Doesn't look too promising.
Some friends of mine mentioned they went there recently because it is one of those towns that is quaint, a tourist magnet. I've given some thought to another market that has that trademark and I am still trying to figure out how you evaluate the potential for harvesting advertising dollars from a "tourist boutique" kind of village.
If radio would work there 25 or 30 years ago, why not today? The change has been gradual enough we have trouble identifying change and measuring change.
Forty years ago industry was coming South. Chamber of commerce types gave us all these magic formulas: If you could get a factory with 100 jobs in your town, you have really created 400 or 500 jobs. It was assumed people would move in to take those 100 jobs. The formula worked because when locals took the factory job, somebody come move to the community to fill that vacancy. 100 new jobs meant about 400 new people. (Spouse and two kids.) That meant the town had room for additional hair dressers, barbers, car mechanics school teachers, dentists, and even a new preacher or two.
Now there are changes, almost invisible, going the other way. We can all see that when Walmart comes to town, a lot of retail businesses are displaced. We can have a long debate whether Walmart hires as many people as those who lose their retail jobs at the closed businesses. Maybe it is a net wash.
But in towns like Abbeville, here is the other change. There used to be a power company office where you could go down to order service, pay your bill, request a change in service. Today you may be calling an 800 number answer who knows where. Ditto for the gas company and the phone company. Your hometown bank may now be a branch of a regional bank and now has only a skeleton staff. Your school may have consolidated with the next school over. You may have lost the administration and maintenance staff. Using that old C of C formula, if we loose 100 of these career positions in the community, then we actually lose maybe 400, 500 jobs. (hairdressers, barbers, etc. etc. and two preachers.)
We live in a wonderful world with high speed Internet, HD TV, Interstate highways, and MRI and other wonderful medical services.... probably at a regional hospital up to an hour away. There are thousands of Abbevilles across the nation that are like Samson after that haircut the Bible tells us about. These towns have been robbed of their vigor, and some of them can never support a radio station.......... as we have known radio!!! Maybe we need a new business model, and a new technical model.
There is some guy running it. After a Paul Walker left a friend of mine who was an aquaintance of Paul's called the station for giggles after Paul left and he had a conversation with the guy who is running it now. Just not sure what his name is.
My friend and I were supposed to drive down to Abbeville from CT this summer to meet Paul, but he left town before we could do that. And we sure as heck aren't gonna drive from CT to Nebraska.
My friend and I were supposed to drive down to Abbeville from CT this summer to meet Paul, but he left town before we could do that. And we sure as heck aren't gonna drive from CT to Nebraska.
My wife had a cousin who worked there MANY YEARS ago. We went through there a few years back and man, that place looked ROUGH! I think it was off the air then. It looked like the grass hadn't been cut in years and the building looked like it was going to fall down. I am surprised anyone would put any money in that place. It would have been cheaper to move a trailer on the property and broadcast from that. I came across Paul's blog and it tells of big transmitter problems. I think Paul said in the blog the transmitter was over 50 years old (the one and only the station has ever had?) and it was fried and they were getting another one from another station. Guess it never make it to the station. It hasn't had a entry about WABV for several months but gave no indication of the stations status or that he had left.
WOW That is too bad... I met Paul about a year ago and he was so gung ho about the station... He was talking about all the things he wanted to try and wanted to do, but from the sounds of it things did not work out... I am sure if Powell can chime in from time to time he could give us an update as well... CC1
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DuckBlue
Guest
On 9/25/2008, Paul posted his experiences with WABV on his blog. Here is a link:
http://www.onairdj.com/blog.html
http://www.onairdj.com/blog.html
WOW! Looks like Paul got snookered on WABV. Hellinger (appropriate name) got his cut and Paul got to eat dirt. Instead of buying paint for the studio, they should have got that new transmitter first thing. It is hard to broadcast when the transmitter isn't operating. There is an owner more concerned about getting his money than having a business that can sustain itself. Let me guess, Hellinger is real estate guy and other than turning on his Benz radio, he has no clue what radio is. The biz is so full of those guys.
I know Hellinger. I could probably say a few critical things about his broadcasitng philosophy but you might also be critical of my broadcasting philosophy.
The best I can tell he has been a life long broadcaster. No, he is not a "real estate" guy. Frugal. Maybe stingy. Maybe a bit self centered.
So. I guess he was BORN to be a broadcaster.
WABV has been "paperwork in process" for over four years now for a possible move to Nevada. What incentive does Hellinger have to fluff up the pillows in Abbeville? If that move fails to get approval, cue the bulldozers.
The best I can tell he has been a life long broadcaster. No, he is not a "real estate" guy. Frugal. Maybe stingy. Maybe a bit self centered.
So. I guess he was BORN to be a broadcaster.
WABV has been "paperwork in process" for over four years now for a possible move to Nevada. What incentive does Hellinger have to fluff up the pillows in Abbeville? If that move fails to get approval, cue the bulldozers.
rf_chaser said:
Such a move might be "smart." It would not be legal - there has to be some sort of "management presence" on site at the main studio to meet the FCC's rules. The arrangement Paul described - a quasi-LMA to someone who's still designated as a Hellinger employee - is about the least expensive way for Hellinger to do that; whether it makes sense for the employee/manager is another matter entirely, of course.
(I suspect, from what Paul and others have told us, that an FCC inspection of WABV would be most interesting.)
rf_chaser said:
1. Nowhere in my message is an indication that I accused Hellenger of being "smart". In love with the business, yes. Very thrifty with a dollar, yes. Very tenacious, yes. Smart? I would be hard pressed to be polite enough to describe him as "smart". Intelligent? yes. Dumb? No.
2. How is going on the satellite any cheaper than going on computer based automation using no-cost public domain software? You don't usually find a used dish and receiver at the local pawn shop. The only staff he had was Paul. And as Scott Fybush pointed out, with satellite or on-site automation, you can't legally staff with much less than one.
3.This station was already dark when the A.M. window came along 4 or 5 years ago with this unique policy in place about possibly moving daytime licenses inter-state to overcome the prohibition about granting any new daytime only Construction Permits. When this thing has dragged on for more than four years you have to have a bit of niggling doubt in the back of your mind that the chances of it happening are getting slimmer by the day. If you own a license that you have been trying to rejuvinate and/or sell for 8 or 10 years and nobody in the industry thinks they can "put lipstick on this pig" and make it fly, a "smart" man would not be plowing a lot of fresh money into the project.
What is tough is to come to the point where your ego can live with the fact that the market, the station is not viable and that you are not tough enough, not smart enough, not creative enough to take the turkey and make it work.
Now, to go out and offer some kind of a deal to a rather traditional broadcasting guy with a wife and kids to move to your market and then not give that person any tools or capital to work with would be "stringing someone along". Since we don't know how Hellinger and Paul presented themselves to each other, We don't know what they promised each other, and the fact that we do know that Paul is a very unique individual who knows he has some flexibility that many people in the industry do not have, and that Paul is willing to walk into some situations that many of the rest of us would walk away from, I don't feel that we know enough about the situation to use a perjorative term like "string someone along" in this case.
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