WDIS AM 1170

[Lovemusicalot]

How does this station stay on the air financially? The signal and sound is horrible, as are the shows that air? There can't be any listeners. I know the station is owned by Albert E. Grady and they have had FCC problems in the past and had to show how they lose money year after year to get a fine reduction. Thanks for any information.

 

[raccoonradio]

The calls would be coveted by Radio Disney, you'd think.
Checked out current site: http://www.wdisam.com/shows/

Business/financial talk? I think we have that on 1390 WPLM and then 2 signals in Prov, 550 and 790.
1060 of course went Catholic. It says they have Bill Bennett from Salem Comm. (they used to do
conserv. talk on 1150 here), then Dennis Miller (WRKO runs it on weekends), etc.
I think for awhile they had a show called Fair and Balanced which also ran on WNSH before they went
Spanish (a kind of lib vs. cons debate, late afternoons)

...Jim the Wrestling Goon?

So how do they stay on? Just barely I guess with some low budget operations, some ad sales.
Signal-wise (again not totally accurate) this is their alleged pattern. Daytime only

http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WDIS&service=AM&status=L&hours=D

I don't know if I'd find a reason to listen other than maybe Dennis Miller and for that matter I think I
can pull him in (weekdays) on 970 out of Maine. It comes in across the water, here on the North
Shore. "But that's just my opinion...hey, I could be wrong."

 

[DanStrassberg]

How does this station stay on the air financially? The signal and sound is horrible, as are the shows that air? There can't be any listeners. I know the station is owned by Albert E. Grady and they have had FCC problems in the past and had to show how they lose money year after year to get a fine reduction. Thanks for any information.

I've heard that Grady gets some income from leasing space on the towers to cellular operators. Maybe that's enough to cover his expenses. I've also heard that the changes he made to the AM antenna system to accommodate the cellular antennas are responsible for the lousy signal (not the bad audio quality, though). The story that I heard about the installation of skirt-fed Folded Unipoles to allow grounding of the tower bases, thus making the towers suitable for mounting cellular antennas, is that the Folded Unipoles are made of steel wire to provide the necessary physical strength. Copper-plated steel wire would have been OK; would have been plenty sturdy and, because of the skin effect, essentially all of the RF would travel in the copper coating which has high electrical conductivity. So using copper-plated steel wire would have resulted in antennas that were essentially just as efficient as the old series-fed antennas. The unplated steel wire results in a BIG hit to efficiency. According to the story I heard, Grady hired an engineer to figure out why the coverage was seriously reduced by the conversion to Folded Unipoles. The engineer told him that the wrong kind of wire had been used and that to get back the old coverage, he would have to replace it with more expensive copper-plated wire. He decided not to bother.

 

[Dighton Rockhead]

Has anybody considered the idea that WDIS is meerly a nice little tax write-off for Attorney Grady?

As posted earlier in this thread...if he had CARED about signal coverage for his toy radio station, he would have sprung for the better grade wire at the tower site.