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WFLI-1070 Chattanooga to sign off March 31
- Thread starter gr8oldies
- Start date
I remember DXing this one on its original equipment tests prior to sign on in, IIRC, the very early 60's. The Community of License, Lookout Mountain, made it sound somehow exotic.
Of course, it was built by members of the same family that gave us WVOK, WBAM and WAPE, all 50 kw daytimers at the time.
I was just at Lookout Mountain last week with my wife. They have a Civil War memorial park.
Any particular reason for signing off and not selling it? I don't seem to understand this. If it was a 500 Watt Daytimer, totally get it...but 50K in a somewhat large city sounds really odd to me.
Some stations have managed to be mostly silent for years and still keep their licenses
I think I read somewhere they are selling the property on which the directional antenna is located. I believe it can only get 50KW with a pattern that goes east of Chattanooga so it requires land to the west which is most likely priced too high. The 2500 watts at night also require a directional pattern.
A sad fact is many AM directionals are located on property worth far more than the license. Note Cumulus has sold the old WMAL property in Washington DC for a small fortune...north of $100M...more than the license is worth!
The history of the Brennan-Benns families and WVOK/WBAM/WAPE/WFLI is fascinating! These two families literally designed and built almost every component of the station's technical operations. They designed, and built, the transmitters, boards, and even the towers! The transmitter designs are legendary for their positive peak performance and were only matched when Harris brought the DX series of AM transmitters to the market in the early 90s.
The facility for WAPE in Jacksonville was simply astounding and would even be considered impressive by today's standards . I would give anything to have part of any of those operations back in their heyday...
The facility for WAPE in Jacksonville was simply astounding and would even be considered impressive by today's standards . I would give anything to have part of any of those operations back in their heyday...
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Wavo is correct. The transmitter sits on prime land just west of Chattanooga, and the land is worth more than the license.
I'm sure you could get the license for a song if you acted soon enough, but you'd either need to buy a ton of land for the facility, or you'd have to cut its power to next-to-nothing if you intended to operate it.
That's one I have not thought of. There's quite a few AM stations, mostly directional, where the land the towers occupy is worth more than the station ever could be. It would seem to apply to be non-directional or move to a 'cheap land' area and retool the pattern are the options. A station I knew up moved about 30-40 miles out of town to the cheap land, got a nice power increase and improved their signal over the city. The land at the original site was worth about what the cost of the land, engineering and building the new facility cost. The new land had better ground conductivity as well.
I have heard of several AM stations selling the land and running a fire sale price on the station in hopes they cash out both. If you see 'new tower site required', that's your hint.
I have heard of several AM stations selling the land and running a fire sale price on the station in hopes they cash out both. If you see 'new tower site required', that's your hint.
Chattanooga is market 87, so not a high revenue one. In the last three books, AM listening has been under a 3% share of total listening, so the usefulness and viability of any AM is limited.
The highest billing AM in the market is doing about $27,000 a month in revenue and it has a translator. It's ranked 15th in total revenue; compared with the top biller which does $400 thousand a month, it is insignificant.
Were the Benns family to get a good offer for the land, it would not take much for it to beat the net profit they were getting on the reported $5 thousand a month WFLI was billing. Just put the money in bonds or a mutual fund and live off the income.
Wow, $60,000 a year! Tennessee and many other southern states have below the norm spot rates and many little town stations don't bill much of anything. At one station I visited, I was asked what they pay was like in my market. I told them what I made and the guy said that was more than the station billed each year.
I checked in to one station. The hopeful seller projected they would do $43,000 in that year (as of April of that year). He was pretty proud of that, almost a third or more than his competitors.
I checked in to one station. The hopeful seller projected they would do $43,000 in that year (as of April of that year). He was pretty proud of that, almost a third or more than his competitors.
Every once in a while you'll hear about an AM station that has downgraded from Class B to class D, to operate from a single tower with minuscule night power. But if the economics are as David listed, even cheap land wouldn't have made WFLI a viable business.
Yeah, wife and I were there just a couple of years ago. It is right down the street from the upper end of the Incline Railway, which I like to ride every time that we are there.
At $60,000 a year in revenue for a 50 kw., the question is not what they're making but what they're losing. A 25 kw. I worked for could some months hit $3,000 a month on the electric bill at the tower site alone (then again the dual AC systems have to work pretty hard in months of mostly 100 degree weather).
It's amazing the number of people posting elsewhere on the internet claiming that the right owner could turn WFLI back into what it was in its glory days, and taking the Benns family to task for wanting to cash out. After all, an AM can never go off the air! There is apparently no translator available, and limited options for moving to a single tower and still maintaining all the protections. (Maybe 500 watts day, 25 night). Still want to build an oldies format and beat the streets trying to sell it? Even though official sign off was last night, they did fire it up for a little bit today, maybe for a potential buyer (or tire kicker-of which I imagine there will be a few who don't have the money).
Have seen pictures of some of the Brennan stations. The only station that used a Brennan built console was WAPE, which had what is believed to be the first slide fader console in the industry. Brennan did custom build a 1 kW transmitter for WFLI, but the day rig was a Western Electric 407, later replaced with a Harris DX-50 and a Continental 10 kW for night service. WFLI's original console was a tube Gateway which was moved to production sometime after 1973. They were running a Harris Executive the day they signed off.
Have heard that WFLI may have a buyer and will return to the air-IF they can get a translator. I'm not holding my breath waiting on their return.
I presume it returned under an LMA, as the sale was not filed with the FCC until sometime in May.
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