[Jeffhs]

One station (WATJ 1560) in the next county south of here (a rural area some 40 miles east of Cleveland) went off the air for good, after going through no fewer than four formats. It first signed on as a daytime-only 1kW station in 1969, had a top-40 format at first; then, about ten years later (!) went to oldies, then talk, then, the last few years of its life, it was running a sports-talk format from Sporting News Radio. It signed off for the last time at 5 p.m. on Memorial Day 2004, IIRC. Hasn't been heard from since. I tried to call their business office a week or so later, but their phone had since been disconnected; this proved to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were off the air for good, never to return.

They couldn't return to the air anyway even if they wanted to, since the frequency they were on, 1560 kHz, is the full-time home of WQEW-AM "Radio Disney" in New York--which is the senior station on that frequency; the smaller station tried to get permission from the FCC to move to 870 kHz and operate full-time, but was turned down because that frequency is too close to a Cleveland station on 850. One other problem WATJ (the Ohio station I've been referring to) had was that, even if they were to stay on 1560, they would run into problems with a station in Toledo (and others in northwestern Ohio) on that frequency; there were other problems as well that eventually forced the station to turn in its license for cancellation, and throw in the towel for good. The FCC no longer issues new daytime-only AM radio licenses either, so WATJ couldn't possibly return as a daytimer today--again, even if it wanted to.

This station had its share of problems, however, in the short time it was on. The towers weren't well anchored into the ground and were on the verge of toppling, the aging transmitter (very likely the same transmitter they had had since they first signed on 35 years before) likely had problems one after another as well, and, if all that was not bad enough, the station, after it switched to the Sporting News Radio format, found itself unable to compete with a Cleveland station (now known as WKNR) that had itself just switched to ESPN Radio and increased its daytime power to 50kW. The signal pattern of the Cleveland station encompassed the area formerly covered by the 1kW daytimer so well that the latter couldn't hope to compete with it anymore--if it ever could have in the first place. One thing led to another and, as they say, the rest is history.