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WARM Back On???

In the beginning.....
Gee..great start for a book!!

Having worked at my share of AM stations over the years, one thing I found was that most of the transmitter facilities (when they were originally built) had some very serious money put into them. Transmitter buildings with working bathrooms, & small kitchens..in two places I worked for, a small room had been put in for 2 cots for engineers to sleep on if need be..a paved road to the building and such. When I had gotten around to working for some of these places, they were on into at least the 2nd and often 3rd, 4th or 5th owner. It seemed that with each successive owner, less and less had been done to keep things in good working order. The succeeding owners had done everything they could to get by on the cheap. So Jeff is right..if you are going to do things R-I-G-H-T, there is a serious cost of upkeep. Cable troughs need to be kept up, and painted. The field needs to be mowed. The road needs to be kept in decent repair. And let's not forget the all-important fencing, that needs to be kept in good repair so that it can do it's job. Like any other building, you need to fix the roof, take care of the heating & cooling plant, keep up the plumbing and so forth. Again..this is if you are going to do things R-I-G-H-T. Now if you're going to be a schlock operator, and do what you can to get by on the cheap. if you're willing to put a Band-Aid on a wound that needs major surgery, then you can save that money. But like Jeff pointed out, we'll be right back to this subject inside of 3 years. If you are going to put WARM back in it's correct condition..the kind of condition a good & proud operator would want to have done..then you've either got to have a lot of money you don't mind tossing away and in reality will have no hope of every recovering. But as we go back to the basics, WARM is so badly deteriorated, that if you're going to be a WISE operator, then you will toss sentiment aside, and invest your money in another property.
 
Another thread in this board inquires as to the status of my old 960 and if it was still on the air and such.

I posted that it was rebroadcasting a Stroudsburg AM last I knew, and probably was bypassing the 4 tower directional in favor of one hot stick at about 500 watts. Been like that for years, so I doubt it has changed.

The 960 site suffers from the same ills as WARM and for the same reason: Lack of viability. Back in the day, it was built first class. (I recall that the studio building (separate site) was built a little TOO well. No electrical outlets in the walls of the air studio. That would let noise in! Good lord, you got more noise by switching on the defroster of your car.)

Anyway...

Sure it would be great to replace the coax and fix all the radials. Replumb (which I did once) and repaint (which I did twice), but WHY? Just to throw away money? That's all you would be doing.

As to Nassau, I bet you dimes to dollars that once the banker suits get control of Nassau (following FCC nod), 960 will be gone.

Like WARM, it arguably should have been gone years ago.
 
The first time I saw WARM's tower site it gave me chills. Okay, it was in February. Grin Seriously, it is impressive as hell and I was in awe. It has taken many years to pummel that wonderment out of me and make me focus on the checking account instead.
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Excellent point, and so many of us had the same experience. Sitting here right now, though, the thought just crossed my mind as to how many devoted and dedicated WARM listeners through the decades neither knew nor cared where those Five Towers of Power were physically located. It could be that part of the "awe" in seeing the array is that you had to go out of your way to find the site, it wasn't something you'd look at day after day after day while traveling through the heart of WARMLand in Scranton or Wilkes-Barre.

Oddly enough, I stumbled across the towers within the last couple years while driving through that part of Wyoming County. It was after dark and there they were right in front of me. Was I impressed again? Well, no. I might have been a bit nostalgic in remembering the old days, that was about it. FWIW, the "shack" at the WARM site wasn't exactly exquisite. It had a couple of bunks, as I recall, with a bathroom and little else. Which itself is interesting, because until WARM went auto-logger in the early to mid '80s, there was an engineer on duty 24/7 at the xmitter.

While on the subject of expenses, one I haven't seen mentioned here is how the WARM of the last ten years has been getting its feed from the studio to the xmitter? By the sound of it, they might as well have been using a walkie-talkie. So, please help me here, how do they ship studio feed to towers? Up through the 80s at least, the signal left Avoca on a Bell line, which in turn handed it over to Commonwealth at some point, since the xmitter was in Commonwealth, now Frontier territory.

HOWEVER, this expense will be amortized over a period of many years.
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How many years do you think a WARM has left? If you want my dime's worth, WARM's time ran out years ago. What lender is going to underwrite the amortization of this huge nut while full well knowing that AM is dead? And it is just that, dead. And FM ain't feeling so good, either.

I think a question no one's asking is why? Why dump a ton of money into resurrecting that loser of a radio station? Do you really think you can build an audience from nothing on a scratchy, static-riddled AM signal? Any audience you might attract would be 55+, which is where I am, and I wouldn't consider listening to a resurrected WARM for more than three minutes, and then it would be strictly out of idle curiosity.

WARM is so badly deteriorated, that if you're going to be a WISE operator, then you will toss sentiment aside, and invest your money in another property.
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And that, B-Jack, is at the very core of the matter at hand; many will not put sentiment aside. I grew up with AM, every radio job I worked was in AM. But I have to tell you, even before leaving radio for good I'd given up on AM and never listened to it in either my car or at home, and I'll painfully admit we're talking well over 20 years ago.

Finally, for now, I'm nosy enough to wonder why it is Susquehanna never owned an inch of real estate in this market. They rented studio/office space right from the very beginning and the land beneath the towers still belongs to someone else. Anyone want to speculate as to why the Appell family never invested a nickel in real property here? It almost seems they anticipated a fast getaway at some point.
 
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Finally, for now, I'm nosy enough to wonder why it is Susquehanna never owned an inch of real estate in this market. They rented studio/office space right from the very beginning and the land beneath the towers still belongs to someone else. Anyone want to speculate as to why the Appell family never invested a nickel in real property here? It almost seems they anticipated a fast getaway at some point.
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I'll take a stab at that one.

Susquehanna was a rare operator who actually understood the financials of radio. A radio station should never own real estate. Ever.

Radio is a cash flow business. It's hard to shake off the mentality of 'owing your own land,' simply because home ownership is so ingrained into the minds of everyone. WARM's demise notwithstanding, radio is perpetual. There is no end game such as retirement or change of lifestyle. Radio will simply get a new owner and continue. Most importantly, you will never realize the true value of the real estate when selling it as part of a radio station transaction.

Truthfully, not owning the land also lends a bit of clarity to the situation. The lease payments for office and transmitter site puts and hard and fast yardstick on performance. Gone is the 'thank God we own the land' thought process that will allow a marginal operation to continue. You have a nut to cover. It's purely business and you damn well better do it.

Methinks the current economic state is screaming that from the rafters right now.
 
^^^
The one problem you have with not owning land on which your AM towers stand is what can happen should the land owner & the broadcaster get into a legal arguement, or the lease expires and the land owner wants to do something else with the land (which BTW happened to Route 81's Carlisle AM) or the land owner gets a better offer and manages to pierce the lease in a courtroom. As I have mentioned before, shouting from your studio building with a megaphone is a poor alternative to having a transmitter & towers.
 
It was always Susquehanna's company policy to avoid owning land. They did own the Penobscot site among other transmitter sites. Many transmitter sites in PA are classified 'Clean and Green" by the state, as long as they are still farmed (AM tower sites are often hay fields, for example). This allows for avoidance of taxes. My site for WMTT in NY is like this. NY laws are a little different than PA but the lease is less than the taxes would be if it were business property. This is an FM station but it is still a guyed tower, taking up area. Its a hayfield, just the same. On a huge lot like the WARM lot the lease expense would be less than the taxes if they owned the property as business property.

KF
 
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