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Weather radio stations independent from NOAA weather radio
- Thread starter Thisi
- Start date
There was a short-lived AM daytimer in the Austin, Texas market that promoted itself as a weather station. Owned by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), the station operated 8am to 4pm. The automated format did use the audio from NOAA Weather Radio in Austin with 5 minutes of audio at :00, :15, :30 and :45. The other 10 minutes in each quarter hour was filled with daily short features and promos for other features. The station operated non-commercially. After a couple of years the station sold. I doubt few listened to the station especially with it's minimal 8am to 4pm schedule. The automated programming was pretty tightly programmed and actually sounded pretty good.
I heard of a station in New England running a weather format as the result of awaiting approval of the sale of the station. The station actually showed up in the ratings.
It looks like WLLX's subcarrier is more than just audio weather.
I heard of a station in New England running a weather format as the result of awaiting approval of the sale of the station. The station actually showed up in the ratings.
It looks like WLLX's subcarrier is more than just audio weather.
I wonder if KGJN-LP out of Grand Junction. At one time, it Rebroadcast NOAA, but I think now it's ran by the state of Colorado.
That was WLVX 93.7 Hartford, CT.. that broadcast lasted quite awhile, I think. .and no one at NOAA knew, i dont think.
Interesting..... I wonder what slow-scan TV format they use.
Thisi, could you perhaps please record about half an hour or (preferrably) an hour of the SCA and upload it to archive.org? (44100 Hz 16-bit mono PCM/WAV) May be interesting to analyse.
WLLX is owned by the same people who own this... a 24-hour local streaming weather channel for the Tennessee Valley so weather has always been important to the company.
WLVH.
Another Connecticut station, WATX Hamden (1220), ran NOAA at intervals to keep its CP from expiring not long ago. It's now on the air at flea power running oldies with poor quality, muffled audio while ownership searches for a permanent transmitter site.
Does NOAA have to be notified, and grant permission, for broadcast stations to use its audio in this manner? Do the stations have to pay NOAA anything?
Many radio stations play NOAA Weather Radio to get something on the air to preserve the license. There's no cost involved in running NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts but a courtesy letter from the station is expected to notify the local NOAA Weather Office. Technically it is illegal to rebroadcast a station without permission to do so. Last place I saw it done, it was Weather Radio audio and a CD player with a legal ID on a 60 minute single track. The CD audio was intentionally louder than NOAA audio.
Some stations never notify NOAA but the FCC likely doesn't care because you'd be running a government funded radio broadcast intended to be heard by the public.
Some stations never notify NOAA but the FCC likely doesn't care because you'd be running a government funded radio broadcast intended to be heard by the public.
I used to work at an office that had cancelled their Muzak subscription shortly after I started, which they only had for on-hold tapes. After they took the player out of the PABX somebody brought in a scanner with a line-out and parked it there in its place, pumping KIG98 into the holding trunks. Reception inside the switchroom was terrible to nonexistant. They had gotten on-hold Muzak via SCA decades earlier, and since the vintage 1970s log-periodic was still on the roof (a little mangled and weather-bitten but still serviceable), pulling a new RG6 from it down to the switchroom was a trivial job.
I have heard rumblings that one particular worker used to go down to the switchroom at Saturdays and change the frequency to 469.7625 (PL 192.8), go back to his/her/their/its desk and put themself on hold (s/he/they/it may or may not have had a speakerphone) so they could monitor the local Jack-in-the-Crack drive-through repeater output remotely. But that's just what I've been told, anyways. 😉
I have heard rumblings that one particular worker used to go down to the switchroom at Saturdays and change the frequency to 469.7625 (PL 192.8), go back to his/her/their/its desk and put themself on hold (s/he/they/it may or may not have had a speakerphone) so they could monitor the local Jack-in-the-Crack drive-through repeater output remotely. But that's just what I've been told, anyways. 😉
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WCTA 810 in Alamo, TN used NOAA weather radio as their main programming along with generic filler music for about 8 years, from 2012 after being silent for several years until they went off permanently in 2020. We discussed this in a thread on the Tennessee board on and off for most of that period here: https://www.radiodiscussions.com/threads/wcta-810am-alamo-tn-dark.545938/, and I also posted a You Tube video of about 2 hours of their "format":
Works produced by the U.S. government are in the public domain, so wouldn't that include NOAA Weather Radio?
On the cable system in Myrtle Beach SC back in the late 70s Channels 2-8 were actual TV stations, Channels 10-12 were "FM music" (I never did hear what station) and Channel 9 had audio from NOAA and a camera moving back and forth in front of dials showing the various weather information such as temperature, humidity, barometer, and so on. On each end was an ad.
There was a station in the 80s in Minneapolis, WWTC, a format of the month station for years that always did something different. it was actually the flagship of the Radio AAHS children's radio format in the 90s. Anyway, this station was all-weather radio in 1985 and part of 1986. It sounded very automated, but I don't know how advanced the technology was to do this format back then - this is part of a page dedicated to the history of 1280/WWTC but here are some samples:
WBBJ ABC 7 in Jackson, TN also ran NOAA weather radio along with weather radar on 7.2 in the first years after the digital conversion. But then when they tarted to carry CBS in 7.3 they changed 7.2 to carrying the same programming as 7.1 with supposedly carrying SAP audio in Spanish, but most of the time it was the same programming in English, which was a total waste.
What kind of radio is that shown in the video and is that the source of the audio recording? It doesn't sound like an over-the-air recording taken from an AM radio, more like a board feed.
Enjoying this thread with airchecks of stations doing weather for a format. I had heard about the Minneapolis station years back. A good 20 years ago I toyed with a traffic & weather format for a daytime AM in Houston. I figured I could sell enough units to smaller businesses to make it go but the idea never got past the first plan. I was thinking of a 5 minute cycle.
In the 90s, one of the Saul Levine-programmed stations in Los Angeles ran an all-traffic format. I believe it was called "K-Traffic" and the calls were KKTR if I recall (just checked Wiki - it was KKTR and was all-traffic/news from 1998 to 1999). Today, such a station exists in Vancouver and it can be streamed - AM 730, which when I was a kid growing up in Central California in the 70s and 80s was the legendary CKLG and boomed in to California at night. Today it's CHMJ - all-traffic, all the time - https://globalnews.ca/radio/am730/?gref=am730 . It has done this format apparently since 2006. I want to say it has a French-language counterpart serving Montreal as well.
And so I don't get accused of going off-topic, the station also devotes time to weather and SOME news.
That was from a recording I did from a DeWalt toolbox radio that I had plugged in to my laptop to record. I live only a mile or two from the tower so it had a good strong signal. The picture is the factory radio in my 2019 Hyundai Elantra. I just used that because it was the only way to show the frequency that I had.
Some PBS TV affiliates used to carry NOAA weather radio on their SAP channel when it wasn't being used for TV programming.
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