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WHGH-AM 840 Thomasville petitioning FCC to have license reinstated

R

radioboy

THOMASVILLE — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being petitioned by a Thomasville business with a request to reinstate a local radio station’s license.

HGN Investments Corp., doing business as WHGH Radio, requests a waiver, which directs that an application for renewal of a license in broadcast radio services be filed “not later than the first day of the fourth full calendar month prior to the expiration date of the license sought to be renewed.”

WHGH also requests that a submitted license renewal application be accepted and processed and that the station be granted special temporary authority to begin operations.

The documents says the 10,000-watt AM station had been on the air more than 25 years before service was terminated in December 2012.


Credit: Thomasville Times-Enterprise 4/15/13

http://timesenterprise.com/news/x437164223/Radio-station-petitions-FCC-for-license
[Link provided as a courtesy by RadioDiscussions.com]
 
"See Tuesday's edition for more information". I see nothing else on the paper's website. What's the story here? Financial hardship?
 
A gentleman from Cairo GA called me on Tuesday and told me about this.

Apparently the owner missed filing the renewal on time and the station ended up deleted. He's trying to get it reinstated. The missed renewal thing seems to have been an oversight.

I don't know the owner, Moses Gross, personally. But his station, which signed on in 1984, has a pretty clean record. It puts a decent signal into Tallahassee as a 10kw daytimer.
 
The FCC will make him pay a fine of between $3000 and $10000 and they will let him back on the air.......at least that is what they have done in several cases in the past 3 or 4 years.

cceng
 
Come on, y'all--you know that allowing this POS back on the air is like allowing your 90-year old grandma to walk across I-10 at rush hour... like allowing your child to learn how to swim in that gator-filled pond out back... like--you get my drift.

It is "allowing" a misguided soul to pour good money after bad.

Even if the SOB was 10kw FULLTIME, it would be dicey. Putting an AM DAYTIMER back on the air in 2013 is... well, dumb.

Or is this all about saving souls? If one soul is saved, it may be worth the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands--millions--he'll be kissing away.

Me? I'd never turn the damn thing on again. And if the FCC insisted on keeping it dark, they'd be doing me a favor.
 
Actually, this one is a locally owned and operated urban-formatted station.
 
Gotta have something to feed that translator someone's got for sale in the Thomasville area... and apparently you need a good 10kw to get "class A FM" coverage from a translator.
 
amfmxm said:
Come on, y'all--you know that allowing this POS back on the air is like allowing your 90-year old grandma to walk across I-10 at rush hour... like allowing your child to learn how to swim in that gator-filled pond out back... like--you get my drift.

It is "allowing" a misguided soul to pour good money after bad.

Even if the SOB was 10kw FULLTIME, it would be dicey. Putting an AM DAYTIMER back on the air in 2013 is... well, dumb.

Or is this all about saving souls? If one soul is saved, it may be worth the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands--millions--he'll be kissing away.

Me? I'd never turn the damn thing on again. And if the FCC insisted on keeping it dark, they'd be doing me a favor.
Click to expand...

Wait.... So, you're going to "save" the owner from himself? And to do that, you would yank his license and make him lose his investment? I'm pretty sure you're not going to be on his Christmas list afterwards. Maybe this little AM station is making a go of it and this is the guy's livelyhood. Locally run stations can be viable even if they are AM daytimers.
 
amfmxm said:
Come on, y'all--you know that allowing this POS back on the air is like allowing your 90-year old grandma to walk across I-10 at rush hour... like allowing your child to learn how to swim in that gator-filled pond out back... like--you get my drift.
It is "allowing" a misguided soul to pour good money after bad.
Even if the SOB was 10kw FULLTIME, it would be dicey. Putting an AM DAYTIMER back on the air in 2013 is... well, dumb.
Or is this all about saving souls? If one soul is saved, it may be worth the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands--millions--he'll be kissing away.
Me? I'd never turn the damn thing on again. And if the FCC insisted on keeping it dark, they'd be doing me a favor.
Click to expand...
DUDE! Maybe you should change your screen name to just fmxm and let this guy go on about his business. :mad:
 
Oh, this is getting interesting. I had to go back and read a-m-f-m-x-m letter by letter to make sure I was reading who I thought I was reading. Coming on strong my man. 30, 40 years ago skin-of-the-teeth labors of love were a bit more practical and even sometimes useful to the community. (They weren't running that far behind the station across town or in the next county that were a bit better run.)

But today?

What can a station like that do for the community? Not enough financial strength to generate truly useful programming.

What can a station like that do for the owner? Not enough financial strength to put your kids through college.

If it can't do anything the community, and it can't do anything for the owner, what do we hope to achieve?
 
amfmxm said:
Come on, y'all--you know that allowing this POS back on the air is like allowing your 90-year old grandma to walk across I-10 at rush hour... like allowing your child to learn how to swim in that gator-filled pond out back... like--you get my drift.

It is "allowing" a misguided soul to pour good money after bad.

Even if the SOB was 10kw FULLTIME, it would be dicey. Putting an AM DAYTIMER back on the air in 2013 is... well, dumb.

Or is this all about saving souls? If one soul is saved, it may be worth the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands--millions--he'll be kissing away.

Me? I'd never turn the damn thing on again. And if the FCC insisted on keeping it dark, they'd be doing me a favor.
Click to expand...

On the flip side, I'd be just crazy enough to want it. I remember unintentionally DX'ing it on a car stereo several years ago when it was playing some hip-hop, and I was like, "You can do that? Hip-Hop on AM radio?"

Far from ideal was WHGH's existence--peeping Radio-Locator, most of the FMs along that GA corridor of U.S. 84 have tried shoehorning themselves into Tallahassee or Valdosta. Still, there's listeners and businesses who need to meet each other in the Thomasville and Cairo communities, just as there are in Florida's capital.

I think amfmxm is only partially wrong--I'd posit that a broadcaster using only a daytime AM station is dumb. Part of the better 2013 radio experience includes streaming AND a mobile web presence on Facebook, Twitter, or a sticky blog/website with your own brand. (I myself have several ideas for an 'after dark' experience for any daytimer I might decide to own.)

If you want to lament about what's lame in 2013, there are still small-town broadcasters out there (some of them rather competent) that can't be bothered to put up simple Facebook pages or free WordPress sites.
 
poledo said:
Gotta have something to feed that translator someone's got for sale in the Thomasville area... and apparently you need a good 10kw to get "class A FM" coverage from a translator.
Click to expand...

This.

Maximize a translator, pair it to a "worthless" AM and you've got a nearly class A signal on FM, which has a much bigger fighting chance than a daytime AM station. Follow the lead of what's going on up in Montgomery, AL — at least one AM has dropped its complex directional array and lowered the AM power as much as possible and riding the success of the translator.

The nice thing about this land rush for translators is that the AM can be anything. Even a daytimer. So this so-called "worthless" station is suddenly worth trying to resurrect.
 
DXAMXMFMLSD doesn't check the boards everyday. He was likely having a little fun with the situation while also giving his honest opinion. Don't rush to jump down his throat based on that post... Dude. I'm sure his next post will clarify his intentions.
 
LOL. Yeah... Jeez. I dunno. Y'all are right, of course. Over the years I've observed this particular station go on and off... And Thomasville seems to be a community well-served by radio... and I guess I've seen so many folks pour so much money down AM rat holes over the past 30 years (for those keeping score at home, FM listening passed AM in 1979).

On the other hand, this is America, damn it! And many people have much more money than I've ever even dreamed of having, and if they want to spend some on the radio business, they have every right.

Not only that, but with a string of 250-watt FM translators spaced about every 20 miles or-so, they could actually make The Big 84 the Flagship of a network serving the Entire Southland...
 
WPAX is still on the air as is WSTT.
 
Nah, they aren't in an industrial park. WPAX is right downtown. Maybe there's something goofy with the database and it's listing the coordinates of the FM translator? I'm on my iPhone right now so it would be a pain to try and look it up. if you are at a real computer try looking up WPAX or WTUF in Google maps and see if you can't find a location downtown on or just a block or two off of US 84. They have a self supporting tower so no guy wires... Maybe you'll get lucky and spot a shadow of the tower depending on what time of day the satellites took the picture or maybe it'll show up in street view?
 
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