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wptx catch

Spanish 1680 was off the air late yesterday which allowed WPTX 1690 to boom in, not a bad standards format. Why doesn't one of the vacant 1610 plus frequencies in this area put a format like that OTA, instead of what they are doing now which is nothing...
 
Well, money. Who is gonna cough up the amount of money it would take to sustain a format like that on AM?
 
Well, money. Who is gonna cough up the amount of money it would take to sustain a format like that on AM?

Not much, you can run it on a shoestring budget with either automated standards or classic 50's 60's early 70's oldies or country. 10kw day would cover a nice chunk Philly, Wilm, Trenton and shore points, over 20 million. Looks like WPTX grabs two big cities plus populated shore areas with older demos so they are surviving. Its nice to see an owner putting music on the high end instead of public service, foreign, spoken word or emergency formats. If my memory serves me correctly wasn't WPEN pulling over a 4.5 when they went away, not too shabby for a so called dying AM music station. Skin radio WHAT was doing well with that poor signal before WRFF blew them away.
 
Spanish 1680 was off the air late yesterday which allowed WPTX 1690 to boom in, not a bad standards format. Why doesn't one of the vacant 1610 plus frequencies in this area put a format like that OTA, instead of what they are doing now which is nothing...


why don't they? !610 is reserved for those 10 watt non commercial highway advisory/traffic information stations.. they can't run music or commercial content. no commercial stations are allowed on 1610 anymore
 
Not much, you can run it on a shoestring budget with either automated standards or classic 50's 60's early 70's oldies or country. 10kw day would cover a nice chunk Philly, Wilm, Trenton and shore points, over 20 million. Looks like WPTX grabs two big cities plus populated shore areas with older demos so they are surviving. Its nice to see an owner putting music on the high end instead of public service, foreign, spoken word or emergency formats. If my memory serves me correctly wasn't WPEN pulling over a 4.5 when they went away, not too shabby for a so called dying AM music station. Skin radio WHAT was doing well with that poor signal before WRFF blew them away.

You seem to be referring to WPTX, but that station has no coverage at all of a major metro.

WPTX is licenced to Lexington Park. It can't serve any of the nearer metros as it does not have a big enough signal due to the terrible frequency and lower night power.

It's daytime 10 mv/m coverage is pretty much within Calvert County, and covers less than 100,000 persons with a usable signal. Nights, the groundwave is even more limited (and the skywave covers less, reliably, with it's tiny 1 kw on the worst frequency on the AM band).

As SomeRadioGuy already said, 1610 is limited to "flashlight battery power" and can't even cover a neighborhood very well.

WPEN was getting that share a long time ago in the pre-PPM era, and almost all of it was in 55+, which is pretty much not salable to most advertisers. It's listenership could not be duplicated today since we now have the PPM in all the big area markets like Philadelphia, Baltimore and DC. All the low-cume high-TSL stations that "worked" in the diary are dead stations in the PPM, with the best example being smooth jazz.
 
Revenue. Revenue. Revenue.

WPEN was getting the nursing home to dead audience.

And that was in the pre-PPM era. Now, that kind of narrow cume, high TSL stations are dead. The best example was Smooth Jazz.
 
And that was in the pre-PPM era. Now, that kind of narrow cume, high TSL stations are dead. The best example was Smooth Jazz.

Makes me think of my father back in the day. If he'd had a diary, his TSL on WJJZ would have been off the charts without any exaggeration. Long drives, at home--it was on the radio constantly. It filled the void once WIP had abandoned music some time before.

But we see where that wound up with PPMs.
 
The station owners and listeners of these so called dead formats would beg to differ. My on line favorites, WPON, WKCE, KFXM, KVPI-A and KJAA to name just a few of hundreds scattered throughout the country, why doesn't one pop up here. SMMFH makes no sense.
 
The station owners and listeners of these so called dead formats would beg to differ. My on line favorites, WPON, WKCE, KFXM, KVPI-A and KJAA to name just a few of hundreds scattered throughout the country, why doesn't one pop up here. SMMFH makes no sense.

You named one hobby station and a bunch of enormously low billing other stations. Several look so distressed that any programming you hear, if local, is an accident.
 
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